warbrain

Stanford, Princeton, Georgia Tech, and Cornell (and probably more schools too) all seemed to use the same application software, like applyweb, so none of them allowed skipping pages. All were equally annoying in that respect. I didn't understand Stanford's 700 character diversity "essay." I wrote maybe 5 sentences. For UC Berkeley, I accidentally started an application to the wrong program - Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, rather than Computer Science and Engineering. They make it so that you have to call to change it. And in general, it was very difficult to find the applications for various schools, though this might just be because I'm not very good at using technology. Chicago was the worst in this respect, since I ended up on the old application website, and it didn't say anywhere that there was a new application to go to.

Judging from the responses for math and physics PhD programs, it seems like more cs departments have responded. Keep in mind that not all schools have the same deadlines. A lot of biology programs had their deadlines on December 1st, for example, so it's understandable that they'd get back earlier.

Does anyone know if the Cornell admit is legit or not?

Just to double check, we can only use 12 point font for our essays? I've looked at some other essays online and they seem to use much smaller fonts. And I'm pretty quickly running out of room on my essays, and would definitely prefer to use a smaller font size.

This last one is the one I'm most worried about I guess. I will be taking another course with this professor next semester, which I should hopefully do better in, and both courses are relevant to my interests. But the problem is that most of the students that take classes or do research with this professor are very smart. I think I ended up in the bottom half of this class actually, even though I feel like I understood most of the material very well. This is a math class, and I'm pretty sure that about 80-90% of the students in this class have gotten at least top 500 in the country on the Putnam, a math contest, just to put things in perspective. Does this type of information make a difference in terms of recommendations? And I'll definitely talk to my professor about what he thinks.

I just took a class I enjoyed a lot, and would like to ask the professor for a recommendation. The only problem is that I'm going to get a B in this class. I'm personally fine with it, since I feel like I did my best, I understood the material really well, and this professor is one I know well. I only got the B because there's so many really smart people taking the class (basically it's a math class full of Putnam HM's), and the professor grades on a harsh curve, so a few stupid mistakes can be a problem. What I'm afraid of is that admissions committees will be confused at why I would ask a professor who gave a B to write a recommendation. I have other professors whose classes I got A's in I could ask, but I don't think they know me or my interests nearly as well as this one.

The number of questions you get right is meaningless (maybe unless you're taking the paper-based GRE) since the GRE is section adaptive.

I guess maybe I should have looked into this before choosing colleges, but I'm currently a sophomore taking two upper-division courses and one graduate level course in my major and am starting to get worried about how I would be able to get letters of recommendations from professors. The problem is that my classes are huge - my upper division classes have a hundred or one-hundred fifty students, and my graduate level class has 70, so my professors will barely be able to recognize me from lectures. I've read that it's a good idea to go to office hours, but I'm not exactly sure what I'm supposed to do, since these classes aren't really giving me trouble (yet); I don't want to waste my professors' time by trying to chat with them when other students might actually need their help. Does anyone have advice on what to do?

So in high school, I took a lot of AP classes, college-level, or at least they're supposed to be college level. Like, I took 2 my sophomore year, 5 my junior year, and 4 my senior year along with multivariable calculus and discrete math at my local university. And I've definitely met a considerable amount of people at my university that took even more demanding course loads in high school (my high school was actually pretty bad). My question is basically, is this type of thing doable as an undergraduate with graduate classes, or is it common? Do serious grad school applicants take a full load of graduate classes when they're in their junior or senior years, or is there a larger gap between undergrad and grad than high school and college that makes this difficult?

Would it help if I transferred to a easier school? I feel like I could easily get a 4.0 at my state school, and have a lot of time left over compared to here.

So I'm a freshman at a top-10 undergraduate school, and this semester, I'm taking Real Analysis, Physics E&M, Organic Chemistry, and two humanities classes, but so far, I'm getting like B's in all my classes. If I want to go to grad school in like theoretical computer science, how much does this hurt? Do I still have a chance to get into a PhD program? Like, my overall GPA would be really low, but none of my classes really have anything to do with Computer Science, unless Real Analysis counts. And also, all my grades first semester were pass/fail, so they won't affect my GPA at all. Also, I'm doing an REU over the summer, and I'm a grader for a couple of math classes now if those mean anything. And sorry if this seems ridiculous, but I don't know anything about applying to grad school. I just looked at Berkeley's website, and they said that they recommend a 3.7, which is kind of worrying me, since I'm so far from that.