starmaker

Thank you for your comprehensive reply! This may not be something that you would know about, but, how does the department/the university do for students with families? Is it reasonably supportive for female students who have kids? Is there affordable child care on or near campus? Are there any formal or informal spouses' groups? I know from the department website that there's a programming exam requirement. Do people generally pass that? It's not something that most programs seem to require, so I'm curious. Thanks again!

Hi Waddle. I'm an alum of a school that meets your definition of "Ivy League" (by the way, I am of a mixed-ethnic background and from a state and region that is synonymous in much of the country's minds with backwardness, though my immediate family were middle-to-upper-middle-class as I grew up). I've interacted with people from a variety of different schools, and I've attended schools that aren't "Ivy League". It's important to realize that there's no uniform culture across the schools that you're talking about. Some of them have more underrepresented minorities than others. Some have more students from public schools, low-income backgrounds, etc, than others. And sometimes there are differences between undergrad and grad culture - at my alma mater, they had a lot of similarities, but at the similarly elite university a few miles away, they were quite different. People keep stressing that undergrad and grad culture are not the same thing, but you'll be interacting with undergrads (teaching them, participating in student activities with them, possibly working with them in the lab), so I think it's important to stress that there's nothing inherently broken about the undergrad culture of an elite university, either. The people that I knew at my alma mater were not pretentious people, whatever their background (most of them weren't rich, either, though upper-middle-class was probably overrepresented). In a few cases, I was friends with people for years before finding out that their parents had eight-figure net worth - I would never have guessed just from interacting with them! At the other end of the spectrum, I knew people there who had been homeless before, worked on factory assembly lines, etc. fuzzylogician makes an excellent point - the types of diversity that you'll see at an elite institution may be different than the types that you're used to. There will be a lot fewer people having to work 40 hours/week throughout undergrad to support a family, but there will be people from all over the country and the world. If you have any specific questions, feel free to PM me, though I can only really speak to my alma mater.

If they want your GRE scores - and I have seen a couple of companies, British-based companies, that want test scores - they'll ask for them. Otherwise, it does look weird (I am basing this on nearly four years of industry work) - a lot of people don't even put their GPAs, let alone their test scores. Honestly, the fact that you can do well on a standardized test is not likely to impress the people looking at your resume. They want to see relevant and/or transferable skills, and preferably relevant past experience. Your quantitative skills will look more impressive if your resume and cover letters discuss how you've applied them.

I have liked most of my classes in my MS program. I've liked most of my profs and classmates. I like the boost to job-hunting that the ongoing MS gives me (I'm a part-time grad student who works full-time) and the fact that it will help me get into a better PhD program. I like getting to learn about different things, some in areas that I didn't know anything about before. I like the fact that working full-time and doing a part-time MS is still generally easier and less stressful than undergrad was for me.

Sweet, now I want to know what lab you are in, so that I can keep it in mind for my PhD applications this fall. Imposter syndrome is a common plague of grad students as people have said. In your case, you're right that most students coming into a program like what you're describing are going to be deficient in some area. But, I bet that which area that is depends on the student. Why don't you find a couple of other students from different backgrounds, and do some mutual free tutoring? For instance, you could tutor someone from a CS background in cog psych, in return for their tutoring you in CS.

So ask all your prospective programs about their attrition rates, and use that to filter them. Oh, and also look up their median time-to-completion - you can find this at phds.org. Some programs will have a median of 8 years, or more. Some will have a median of 5. This might be true in some fields, but in biotech they want PhDs (and if you're interested in working for the federal government, they care a lot about credentials). But it doesn't sound like you want to be an adjunct at a community college (neither would I, at least not as my primary source of income). Well, sure. A PhD is training in a specific field. If you're seeking jobs that have nothing to do with that field, you can't expect people to give you special treatment in hiring. They're...not, really. At least around here ("here" being one of the big biotech centers of the US), biotech got whapped pretty hard by the recession, but it seems to be emerging from the gloom, based on what I've seen on job boards. Your interest in entering the private sector makes you better off, really, than people only interested in academic careers. I've received several interview offers from the PhD programs I've applied to, but instead of being thrilled, I'm terrified. To add to my confusion, I will have to sacrifice a wonderful 1-year relationship I currently have in order to pursue a PhD (he has several job offers that he can't pass up that are in different locations from the grad schools I've applied to). A master's is good in some fields (anything engineering, for example), but it's worth little in the bio world. Here's the thing. A PhD will in fact cause you to be considered overqualified for some jobs. The point is that it's also opening a door to other jobs - you'll be considered overqualified for "store clerk" or "lab tech," but now you'll be qualified for a bunch of industry and government scientist jobs that you weren't before. If you would rather do a job that a PhD would overqualify you for, then yeah, you don't want a PhD. The point of getting a PhD is to be qualified for the jobs that you would have been underqualified for otherwise. Honestly, you might be overly worried. I understand this sort of worry coming from someone in a field where there are few non-academic jobs. But you're in a field that is more employable.

Off the top of my head, I can think of big industrial biotech/pharma, biotech/pharma startups, working in a national lab, working in biodefense at a defense contractor or FFRDC, getting a commission as a science officer in the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, writing grade school science textbooks, patent law (not the same as "working in a patent office," and you'd need to get a JD for it as well) and working in science policy.

I would be careful about any program-for-working-professionals type program that is separate from the normal program and has different admissions standards. Those programs are usually not as prestigious as the normal ones at the same school, and are sometimes stigmatized. I've had to explain to interviewers and such, while job-hunting, that no, I'm a part-time, working-professional student, but my MS program is the same one that the full-time students do and not a night-school deal. For online programs, you might want to look at Columbia University. They're ranked well, and their online students take the same classes and get the same degree as their resident students. http://www.cvn.columbia.edu/index.php Unfortunately, MS admissions committees sometimes care more about GPA than PhD admissions committees do. On the plus side, they will care a lot about his industry experience, and at some well-ranked universities the admissions standards for the MS are lower (because MS students tend to bring their own money rather than being supported by the school).

The co-op program is a great program - generally considered to be one of the best such programs out there, maybe even the best - and it's not uncommon for the full-time MSCS students to do it. It is possible, thought, that Northeastern would give you funding anyway. They do fund some of the MS students.

Are we playing the Stress Olympics or something? This is, after all, the forum intended for people who already went through the application process, got their results, and matriculated.

You are not too late for me. I don't apply until fall '11. Anyway, I do have a few questions about Brown, which is on my list, so thank you! Do you know what the CS PhD program's attrition rate is? Why do those who leave tend to leave? I am interested in Brown's Brain Science training program. I'm unclear on how exactly it works, though? Do students earn a PhD in their home department, and a certificate in Brain Science? Do they actually get a degree in, say, Computer Science and Brain Science? Do they get no formal recognition of their Brain Science experience at all on their degree/transcript? Or something else? How many classes does a student take in this training program? According to the NRC 2010 study, the median time-to-completion for Brown CS students who completed the PhD was 7 years, and only 17% of all PhD students received the degree within 6 years. Both of those numbers are rather worse than average for CS doctoral programs. First of all, are these accurate numbers for the program as it stands now (I know the NRC had a few errors in their data, plus the data is four years old at this point)? If not, what, roughly, are the actual numbers? If they are accurate, and Brown students tend to be slow to get the degree, do you have any thoughts on why that is? Also according to the NRC 2010 study, the percentage of Brown PhDs with jobs lined up at graduation was 61%, which is below average for CS programs. It did have one of the highest percentages of students getting academic jobs, at 30%. Are these (still) accurate numbers? If so, do you have any idea why the placement rate is low? Given the high rate of academic job-taking, and the difficulty in getting academic jobs, could that be causing the low placement rate? Is there pressure in the department to go into academia rather than taking an industry job? Are professors good about helping the students get published? What sort of input, if any, do graduate students have into how the department and programs are run? Brown used to have an IGERT program in which the CS department participated, Computation and Mathematics of the Mind (which is still advertised on the CS website), but the program has expired (IGERTs usually only take five classes' worth of students). Do you know if Brown CS intends to participate in any more IGERTs in the near future?

My username is from the Killers song "Spaceman", which is (at least in my interpretation) about a guy who is full of despair about his life and just wants it to end, to be somewhere else, and then he gets abducted by aliens, and the experience shifts his entire perspective and makes him realize that his life isn't so bad and he doesn't really want to leave it behind. It's a turning point in his life. There's a line in the chorus, "The starmaker says it ain't so bad." I had a very, very rough time in undergrad, with some patches where I was completely trapped in despair. I came out of it as a much more resilient and adaptable person, as someone who is much better at stepping back and regaining perspective than I was. I learned how to be resourceful and land on my feet. Plus, after how unhappy and stressed I'd been at times, nothing in the "real world" seemed "so bad" to me. Now, I play a role to my undergrad friends where, when they are stuck in despair (my alma mater is notoriously high-stress), or fearful about the future, I can help them regain perspective, like young alums did for me. Having been through the grad apps process a few times at different levels (my unsuccessful senior-year round, my successful post-bac and masters ones), I would like to be able to do the same for anxious comrades in the grad apps process who haven't been through it before. I'm playing the role of the starmaker from the song - to myself if I start to get too stressed, to my younger friends, possibly to people on this board who need some emotional support or consolation. Hence, the name. My avatar (as of this post) is just meant to be me. It doesn't quite look like me - among other things, avatar-makers aren't good with curly hair - but it was the best I could do.

*laugh* And yet, those same people who write those op-eds tend to be hostile to evolutionary biology, climate science, stem cell research, social psych, ecology, cosmology, and any kind of science that's easy to make fun of in a nonsensical soundbite, which covers most of them (was it Bobby Jindal who made fun of volcano monitoring in a speech several months ago? and anti-science laypeople always love to pick on anything involving fruit flies...). And presumably any engineering that clearly stems from any of those fields. I'm not sure what fields such people DO support - it seems like most fields eventually take their turn at the hot spot on the pundit roulette wheel. I have to say, I've never much appreciated the idea that STEM is "head without heart." Would a humanities student appreciate scientists calling their field "heart without head?" What this list says to me is that computer science majors spend a lot of time reading fora on the Internet.

Most people seem to think computer science = programming = IT. With someone I actually know and reasonably like, though (as opposed to some random person), I'm generally willing to explain what I do at whatever level of detail interests them. My little sister, who is an aspiring medievalist, has trouble keeping what I do straight, and for a while she described me to people as "some kind of robotics technician, or something" (I was working as a pattern recognition & machine learning scientist). She took an intro CS class as a breadth course last semester, and I had some fun (no sarcasm intended) explaining to her how the code that she was typing actually gets "understood" as instructions by the computer (she said that my explanation was genuinely interesting but that she was glad to be studying medieval drama and not anything computer-related). The other side of this is, I've worked at defense and security contractors for most of my career, and in some cases this causes people (from both ends of the political spectrum) to assume that I'm politically conservative, or at least a neocon (especially if they also know that I'm an officer in a US military auxiliary). Hahahaha no. Not even a little bit.

This, and the other advice in abacus123's post, is excellent. I'll add, don't be trapped. Always have a Plan B. Not just one that you could survive on, but one that you'd be happy to do as a career. If you don't feel like you have to be in grad school to have a good life, you'll enjoy being there more. People who don't think they have any alternative are people who are vulnerable to being abused and/or exploited by their advisors or other faculty. They're also people liable to become extremely stressed by any setback.

What program are you applying for? PhD, Computer Science (I'm applying in fall 2011, and am already in an MS program in CS). Why grad school and what's your journey? I did my undergrad in a different (life sciences) field. My grades were quite low (undiagnosed medical problems combined with a school noted for relative lack of grade inflation) and I couldn't get into any grad program. I had taken a number of CS classes, and used them to get a job after I graduated. My job happened to be a CS research job, working under a PI, and I discovered that I loved doing CS research. I started taking classes to improve my formal CS background, but eventually decided that in order to be considered for most PI jobs, even outside of academia, I would be better off with a PhD. Plus, a PhD, with its research emphasis, was sounding like fun! So I decided to get one. I went for an MS first because 1) I needed to prove that I could do well in classes, 2) it gave me more time to build my CV through work, and 3) PhD programs have high attrition rates, and I wanted to make sure that I had some graduate degree no matter what happened in the PhD program. What challenges does your field present and what hurdles do you need to overcome? Women are still a relatively small minority in CS, and unfortunately still face prejudice, harassment, and discrimination in some quarters. So there's that. I can't think of much else that's CS-specific that will be a hurdle. I need to overcome my own undergrad grades in PhD program and fellowship applications. I need to finish my MS, and continue to balance work, school, and the rest of my life. What skills are you working on? I'm working on implementation (programming) skills and presentation skills. Also, filling in some of the odd little holes in my background that come from having not gotten my bachelor's degree in the field. How are you keeping motivation and what perspective have you gained from the process? I get through tough times in my MS program by daydreaming about the future PhD program, about getting publications accepted in prestigious venues, etc. I've been through the process a multiple times at this point, so I don't expect it to be too hard.

I am in CS, and I got into a mid-ranked MS program with a 2.5 undergrad GPA (not in CS, though), after having taken a few non-degree CS classes in which I did pretty well. In fact, I not only got into both places that I had applied to, but I got a substantial merit scholarship from the one that I ended up attending. I had lower GRE scores than yours, but my industry experience (about a year and a half at the time that I applied to MS programs) was research rather than straight programming, and I had a couple of publications. I think your chances are just fine, but that you should try to pick programs where the department has more influence in the admissions process than the graduate school. When the graduate school has more influence, that means that people are more likely to be cut based on low stats, in general. Don't email profs and ask them to keep an eye out for your application. That's a little presumptuous - you're asking for a favor. Instead, pick a prof or two at each target program, explain some of your qualifications that might be useful to them, and ask if they are taking new students, where they see the lab going in the future, things like that (don't be too dismayed if they don't respond - profs are busy and might just not have a chance to get back to you). If they are really interested, you might get a nice research dialogue going. The academic blogger FSP has written a few posts about the way for an applicant to introduce him/herself to a prof at a target department. I suggest that you read all three of these posts. http://science-professor.blogspot.com/2010/11/getting-to-know-me-and-you.html http://science-professor.blogspot.com/2009/11/you-choose.html http://science-professor.blogspot.com/2007/12/writing-to-me.html

Try inviting one or two of those couples over for dinner some evening - you don't need to know the area to do that. Or invite them to watch a movie and eat carry-out pizza, if you'd prefer. Or to drink beer and decompress after an exam. They might not know the area either, if they're first-years. You could get together for an explore-the-town expedition some weekend. Do you know any grad students who were undergrads at the same school? If there are any around (I know psych is less friendly toward "inbreeding" than the engineering and applied science fields that I'm more used to, so maybe there aren't), they're more likely to understand the campus culture and the town and to have a group of friends there already, and they might be able to help you out.

You've already gotten some great advice here. Let me address the social side of things. Look outside your program for a social life. In a non-academic job, it would be nice if you made real friends with some of your co-workers, but it would be quite reasonable, and in many ways preferable, to simply have pleasant, collegial relations with them, and to have your real, social, friends elsewhere. There's no particular reason that academia should be different. Student activities might be a useful way to meet new people who aren't in your program. So might volunteer work. If you are religious, check out your faith community for potential friends (and if not, many universities have groups for secular students and many communities have some sort of organization for non-religious people). Your school's grad students' union/council might run social events for students across different departments. Don't write off undergrads - I had some grad friends as an undergrad and some undergrad friends as a grad. Don't write off the married people in your own program - just because they have someone to spend nights and weekends with, doesn't mean they don't want to bring other people over to socialize sometimes (trust me, I'm married, and I would be quite unhappy to have no social life outside of my marriage, and we invite people over probably once to twice a week). Plus, the married people might have friends who are single, who could become your friends. If you live in a dorm, it probably runs social events. If you don't, your neighborhood might run occasional social events, or your school might have an off-campus students' group. At some universities (like my undergrad one), grad students can get free housing in undergrad dorms by performing a resident-assistant-like function, and this can be a good way to integrate yourself with a campus (and you might make friends with the other grad students serving this role). I realize that you said: And of course all of this is completely disregarding the fact that I really don't have time to socialize or have hobbies or anything else. Make time. It's that simple. You are in for a long several years if you do not take back some control of your time (other people have mentioned some ways to do this). You are a student, not a serf. You are a whole person, not a machine for doing well in school. And believe me, when you hit those inevitable times when you feel like nothing's going right at school, having something else that you do to provide you with a sense of self-worth is invaluable.

Some scholarships and fellowships that fund international students: Howard Hughes Medical Institute International Student Research Fellowships (for students in biomedical sciences) Fulbright Scholarships Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarships AAUW International Fellowships (for women) Rackham International Student Fellowships (for University of Michigan students)

Just a thought, OP...your signature links to your Facebook page, and your Facebook page has your GradCafe username on it. Admissions committee members could very easily match this thread and your real-life identity. If you are unsure about disclosing voluntarily, you certainly don't want them to be able to match your post here to your application without you even knowing.

For an MS program, it is not necessarily bad, but if the MS program requires a thesis (which many don't), the admissions committee might worry that you don't have the focus to complete it. You should probably pick a couple of interesting subfields to talk about in your statement of purpose, at any rate. I think you would be competitive for Northeastern - they like people with industry experience, even a relatively small amount of it, and have strong software engineering faculty and courses. If you are at all interested in programming language design, they are considered a top department in that area. Many of your listed schools, I don't know much about. But I think you would be a very strong applicant for Stevens and UMass-Dartmouth, and a competitive one for Syracuse or NYU-Polytechnic. Ohio State and University of Florida might be stretches, but neither is out of the question and both are probably worth applying to. I would suggest going to Petersons.com and looking for programs with a large number of part-time students. This is because programs with many part-time students also tend to be programs that like applicants with industry experience or a preference for software engineering or other industry-oriented areas.

I'd be happy to answer your question for the programs that I know about if you give me some information. You just rattled off some numbers that are mostly useful for beating cutoffs, and expected a serious answer about your chances. For some reason, CS applicants seem really prone to doing this (I'm in CS, so I spend plenty of time on that subforum). I know nothing about your research & development experience, your subfield(s) of interest, the quality of your recommendations and the faculty writing them, or whether you have a clear reason to be interested in these specific programs. I'm in one of these programs, so at the very least I could help you on that one, but I need something more than GPA, GRE, and TOEFL.

I've worked full-time throughout my MS and my non-degree grad studies. But I do school part-time - it was never my intention to be a full-time student funded by an assistantship (though it will be when I go for a PhD). I have always managed to balance, though this term was harder than usual because my class had an unusually high workload. It helps that I have always worked in field-relevant jobs. When I have been frustrated, it has usually been on the school end of things. My prof this term was a good teacher and a good guy, but he had this weird aversion to doing things by email and was always wanting me to come meet with him in person (about term project updates, things like that). It's like, I work during the days, my commute from work to school is 90 minutes, my commute from school to home is 60. Making me come to campus on a non-class day is not a small thing. When I was a non-degree student, the problem was that classes that I wanted to take were during the workday (my MS program offers most of its classes in the evenings) or that various university offices closed at 4:30.

The issue isn't really what grade he gave you, it's what he can say about you. If, for example, you didn't get a top grade, but you showed particular interest and talent in a certain topic, and that's the topic you want to study in grad school, he might be able to write a nice letter talking about that. The standard wording that I've heard for asking a prof is something like "Do you feel that you could write me a strong letter of recommendation?"