Hi all, I am an international student at Purdue majoring in computer engineering and I am now currently a freshman. I now have a GPA of 4, which I know is not impressive since I am a freshman, but I am getting ahead of the usual schedule, so there should be more time for me to do some research stuff in sophomore, junior, and senior years than usual students.
So I am doing research this summer in Beijing, China, with a well-known Chinese professor whose h-index is more than 67 (lowered because he has two accounts in Google Scholar with the other one 54) in, hopefully, machine learning from May to August, 2018. By hopefully I mean he told me to prepare the knowledge of machine learning and a new structure of machine learning (I am not going to say which is that), but he also said something I am not sure whether is related to machine learning or not.
Also, there is a professor in the ECE here at Purdue whose research interest is machine learning. I plan to use my 2018 summer research experience to ask him for a research position in his team.what
So assuming I have a shot at the top programs, what do I need to do? When do I take the GRE test? Is there a difference between a GPA of 3.9 or 4.0?