curvature

Congratulations to all the Vanier recipients! AND congratulations to all the finalists who didn't get a Vanier, but will almost certainly pick up a nice $105,000 consolation prize in the form of a CGS-D. For what it's worth, I didn't get it. My application was ranked 70 / 204 for the NSERC competition with a score of 5.63 / 9, whatever that means. Does anyone know how many Vanier awards were handed out? Where was the cutoff? Based on the discussion so far in this thread, it seems like 35 < cutoff < 55. Cheers

Hi joshcs, I would say your situation is highly dependent on how well-regarded the professors writing your letters are. It is difficult to over-state the value of a glowing letter from someone at the top of their field. I believe that their word can count for more than one's publication record. If you have people like this writing your letters, I think you will be able to get into the kind of PhD program you want with no publications. Otherwise, I think you will need either: (1) a master's degree; or (2) a job that will put you in close proximity to a well-regarded professor and let them get to know you and your research potential. For the purposes of this discussion, I believe both count equally as vehicles to get glowing letters from well-regarded professors. For example, here are two relevant job opportunities in top research labs, in case you are interested in computer vision. I suspect there are many more such positions that go unadvertised. http://vision.stanford.edu/jobs.html https://netfiles.uiu.../positions.html For what it's worth, I currently work as a research assistant at an Ivy League school with a good computer science program. I work with a well-regarded professor in my field. I was not admitted to the PhD program at this school during the last admission cycle because I only started working there in the Fall, and my advisor didn't know me well enough when he was making admission decisions. The lesson here is that it takes time to build all professional relationships; your relationships with your advisors are no different. The people that were admitted into my institution via my advisor fell into two categories. They either had: (1) stellar publication records and letters from very well-regarded professors; or (2) below average publication records and letters from very well-regarded professors. It is for this reason that I think letters from well-regarded professors can be more important than your publication record. Indeed, I had a stronger publication record than some of the people in category (2). I believe they were accepted into the PhD program at my institution based on the strength of their letters. I doubt that their GRE scores made a difference. I base this opinion on informal discussions with my advisor, but you can check out the following blog post from Harvard computer science professor Michael Mitzenmacher for some more tangible evidence supporting this view. http://mybiasedcoin....dex-impact.html Finally, I think my comments will be more valuable if I disclose a bit more about my background. I have an undergrad and master's degree from a large (but not especially highly ranked) Canadian research university. My master's research produced a high-quality first-author publication. Unfortunately, my advisors during my master's degree are not especially famous, so I believe their letters (which I know were very strong, detailed, and research-oriented) were somewhat discounted when I was applying to top PhD programs. Anyway, with these credentials, I was able to gain admission to a top-50 American PhD program, and a top-5 European PhD program, but no higher than that. Of course, your mileage may vary

Hi Aladdin, I use the "related work" section in papers to navigate backwards in time (i.e. finding out about the work that occurred before some paper was published), and Google Scholar to navigate forwards in time (i.e. finding out about the work that occurred since some paper was published). This way you can find out basically all the related papers if you know a single paper. Of course it takes a significant amount of time to understand the contributions of all the papers, but at least you can be confident that you're not missing any citations. Cheers, Mike

Today, I contacted the prof who interviewed me at Berkeley and I asked him the same thing. He quickly and politely responded that I got rejected. I sincerely wish you all the best and I hope you have better luck at Berkeley than I did

Hi guys, thanks for the replies My other option right now is a roughly top-50 public research university in the U.S. Fortunately, this school would also be a great fit in terms of research. The only reason I care about reputation here is because I because I believe that it can play an important role in determining where one can become a professor after graduating. There is some experimental data to support this view. “The Small Worlds of Academic Hiring Networks” by Wiggins et al. (2006) looks specifically at the PhD exchange network of computer science departments and finds that top departments only hire from a small number of other top departments. In fact, this study also finds that you can largely predict US News rankings of computer science departments based on centrality measures of the underlying PhD exchange network. Anyway thanks again for the replies

Hello fellow Grad Cafe readers, First of all, congratulations to all the people who got into all the awesome programs over the last few days! Now, here is my situation. I recently applied to do my PhD with a prof in the graphics group at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics. We chatted over the phone for a while, and he has invited me to Germany for an in-person interview and to give a talk. I'm currently living in the U.S. and he agreed to pay for my trip, so I think it's safe to say that he is seriously interested in working together. Of course, I am extremely excited about this opportunity because our research interests overlap significantly and he seemed like a genuinely cool guy. I'm trying to assess the reputation of MPII versus the only other admit I have right now, which is a large public school in the US (roughly in the top 50 according to US News and ARWU). How do you think the international reputation of MPII compares to other universities in Europe and North America? In my opinion, MPII is a bit of a wildcard simply because it doesn't really show up on international university ranking websites. That being said, there always seem to be lots of SIGGRAPH papers that come from MPII, which is a good indicator of the quality of their graphics research. So what do you guys think about MPII?

First of all, congrats on getting into MIT et al. I think you should meet all the other profs you can, wait for a few days, and then politely decline with an enthusiastic email that it was great to chat with them, but you ultimately decided to go elsewhere. I think the potential networking opportunities are too valuable to pass up, and presumably other applicants would be delighted to grab your spot at the other schools, even if the offer is more last-minute.

Oh wait I'm a total idiot. I didn't realize this thread was in a sub-forum specifically for humanities. I just did a search for contacting professors and this was the first thread that came up. Oops.

That's fair

I recently contacted my top 3 professors by email and it went well. One of them replied back enthusiastically and I'm going to UC Davis in a few days to check out his lab. The other one gave me what felt like a canned response along the lines of, "Hi curvature, that's great that you're interested in our work. I encourage you to apply." The last professor didn't email me back. Contacting professors over email can work. For what it's worth I generally followed guidelines you can find online: http://www.cs.virgin...rospective.html http://www.ece.ucdav...s/applying.html Also I tried to give value throughout my whole email and tried not to take value. For example, I briefly mentioned some interesting open problems in our sub-field and some possible ways to tackle these problems because it gives value: who doesn't want ideas for future research directions? I also mentioned that my paper got accepted to a venue that the professor publishes in as well because it gives value: I'm making the professor aware of a good student- that they wouldn't necessarily have known about otherwise- that has what it takes to further their (our) research agenda. Nothing in my emails explicitly required a response. I didn't ask 100 questions because I feel like that would be taking value; I'd be requiring them to respond to 100 questions which takes significantly more effort than reading my email. Instead, the general tone of my email was "Hi. I'd like to quickly make you aware of me because I'm a good student and it would be a win-win for me to do my PhD in your lab. Now that you have my email address, you can get in touch (or not) at your convenience." I didn't actually say any of that, but that was the tone. I hope this helps the OP and hopefully other people too

Hey Nibor6000 and Katzenmusik, Thanks for the suggestions. Deferring the offer for a year would be awesome. I'll definitely try it. Thanks

Hello Grad Cafe Goers, I was hoping to get some quick advice regarding my journey towards a PhD in an engineering-related field. I'm currently sitting on an offer for a funded PhD at TU Vienna, and I'm interviewing later this summer for a funded PhD at ETH Zurich. Anyway the problem is that the offer from TU Vienna expires before my interview at ETH. What is the optimal gambling strategy in this situation? Does anyone have any experiences to share regarding this type of gambling? Did it go well? Did it go horribly wrong and you regretted not taking the first offer? I feel like my chances for acceptance at ETH are high. Originally ETH was going to pay for my flight (from Canada) to interview with them. Now they won't have to pay for it because I'll be in western Europe anyway presenting a recently accepted paper at an internationally competitive conference. This helps my application to ETH in two ways: (1) I'm saving the department money on an international flight; and (2) I'm the first author on a paper from a highly ranked conference in my field. I mention this only to make the point that if ETH was interested in my application before my paper got accepted, they'll definitely be even more interested in my application now that my paper has been accepted. I'm willing to turn down my offer at TU Vienna and hope for an offer from ETH unless someone on here talks me out of it But what about the other American schools to which I haven't applied? My ideal school is Stanford, but the soonest I could apply would be December 2010. This would be long after any offer from ETH (which I don't even have yet) materialized. Should I turn down a potential offer from ETH just so I could apply to Stanford several months later and maybe get an interview? Am I being stupid? Is this like one of those threads where the person is like "should I go into $100k of debt to do my MSc at Harvard or should I take the fully-funded PhD at Princeton?" If I get an offer from ETH for Fall 2010 should I just accept it and not try to get into a better American school for Fall 2011? Here is my background in case it affects the optimal gambling strategy in this situation: Accepted Publications: 1x first-author paper at a top international conference, 1x middle-author journal article in a top journal, 1x first-author poster at an international conference, 5x first-author posters at various regional conferences (one of which won a nationally-sponsored award for best poster). Submitted Publications: 1x first-author American patent, 2x submitted posters at top international conferences. Master's GPA: 3.85/4.00 from a top-200 university. Undergrad GPA: 3.3/4.00 from a top-200 university. GRE: not written yet, although I'm confident I could do well enough not to sink my application.