Yan Yang

I originally think it's quite possible, since it's CS ranking and overall ranking are both good. Especially, I'm doing Computer Vision and it's pretty good in this area. However, I have checked many universities in the New York and was quite disappointed. I found a lot of faculties with their PhD done in top 50 universities, some faculties in those slightly lower ranked than the prestigious ones like university at Buffalo, and sporadically, I can even find faculties from universities apparently lower ranked than RIT whose name I never knew. I didn't find a single faculty with a PhD degree from RIT. I also checked universities on the west coast. I'm not gonna mention the better ones like UCSD, but even in the lower ranked ones such as University of Nevada, Reno and Santa Clara University, I didn't find a single faculty with a PhD degree from RIT. How is RIT ranked around #65 in CS ranking? (Or it just doesn't have a lot to do with research? I remember RIT is R2 school, but would this single metric matter so much that it cancelled its high ranking both in CS and in Computer Vision?)

It sucks but I had to face the reality that my advisor decided to break our contract and stop my funding only after one semester. Luckily, I'm currently talking with a company regarding an internship opportunity and they probably want me to start immediately on CPT. So I'm here to ask some questions about this. First of all, is there any case that a PhD started their first research project together with the company that they do an internship in? I need this piece of information because I'm gonna talk with their president and CEO in the upcoming final rounds of interviews. Is it possible for me to talk about longer-term cooperation with them, instead of an internship that lasts only until the end of the summer? Second, my department administrative people said without an assistantship, I won't have a tuition waiver and the reduced workload in this way, which means I'll have to pay a larger portion of my salary to the school each semester. Can I ask one of my teachers to provide me an assistantship position for, say, 1 hour per week, and use the rest 19 hours per week to work with the company? If I plan to produce papers while working as an intern, it would be legitimate to say I'm utilizing the work experience in the company to facilitate my research with that teacher.

Sorry for the late reply! I applied only to one single school last year, and then I hurriedly moved to another city starting a job, with no time left to apply to more. After I was accepted, I posted my test scores, GPA, and what recommendation letters I can have to a consultant's forum. It's a paid service and I got the answer that I can try applying CS schools ranking 50-100 at least, and maybe challenging those within 50. My offer is from a school with its computer science ranking 130+ and comprehensive ranking 200+. I still accepted the offer, thinking it's not good to be obsessive in rankings. I wanted to rely more on myself than the school resources. However, later I heard more bad news, for example, many people said it would be almost impossible to get a good offer in academia if I do my PhD in this ranking. It seems it's not even because people who end up in lower ranked schools are all incapable of good research. It's more influenced by networking, etc. I have been hesitating since then, thinking I might be luckier than others sometimes, and doubting it's a good idea to get stuck in this school for the rest of the time. I have already started my first semester one months ago. I feel like there're more reasons than networking. The problem also lies in that I'm not working alone. I had to stay and listen when we spend hours and hours in meetings on things not helpful. I cannot push too hard when my cooperating senior PhD had fundamental misunderstandings on the web framework architecture, but kept switching focus to things like whether I included accessibility feature (it was originally stated as only for a temporal internal demo, and nobody's visually disabled) -- he rejected all my submissions while my supervisor has been complaining I didn't contribute to the team. My supervisor also starts showing attitudes when I ask too many questions, even good questions. He believes digging too deep won't help with a "quick publication" within a semester, saying he won't fund me next semester if I cannot publish. I usually don't get any explain on what instead is useful for "quick publication", either. When I was in master's school, some PhD students wasn't able to have any publications by the end of the first whole year. They were still supported. I found that they got good amount of citations when they approach the end of their PhD program. I found that, in my master school, professors emphasize quality and efficiency. My supervisor here only wants to see immediate result. Unlike my master supervisor who was able to suggest books and other learning resources, correct the wrong way of doing things, he often seems unable to provide proper mentorship, but gets ridiculing and impatient on how to get the result. I'm not saying he has ill intension. He is probably just frustrated himself. I have to admit that I've been trying to overcome my prejudice and be objective in commenting my PhD school. I cannot promise there's no influence of this prejudice at all. I just tried my best. Now I'm waiting for a decision from Tufts University. I'm not very optimistic, because my undergraduate GPA is at the boundary (just a bit lower than 3.0), and Tufts didn't ask for GRE score which is my strength. The web forum consultant also said his suggestion was based on his supposition that my original undergraduate overall score is higher than 80/100.

More accurately, it's only less than a month before I start a PhD program and I have already moved to another state for this. The program hasn't officially started yet, though.

I'm just wondering, is it harder to be admitted if I'm already being supervised by another professor? My manager (in the industry) said few professors would take a student from another professor, because it negatively impact their networking in the academia. How serious is this negativity and is the risk on my side manageable if I wanna find a new PhD school to apply? I've heard lots of instances where transferring from one phd program to another didn't induced a bad result at all.