starmaker

How in the world did you pull that off? I got married in August and we spent 6x what you did on catering (and that doesn't count the booze). We didn't WANT to spend that much on catering...we looked for ages and could not find cheaper. Of course it really didn't help that we had to get all the food gluten-free (my husband and one of his sisters are severely Celiac), because that meant that we were restricted to high-end companies. And how in the world did she do that? Ours cost that much, for half the number of people, and we weren't at a fancy venue, had the reception in the same place as the ceremony, spent less than you did on clothes (maybe $700 total), and the only flowers that we had were picked from a relative's garden. A friend with an iPod did the music, and all of our decorations were hand-made by my husband. Our wedding was very low-frills (though fantastic). It was also in the bottom quartile for cost of weddings in our zip code. I have no idea how you could have a really fancy wedding on $20K (maybe this is a local-cost-of-living issue?). We paid for three quarters of it ourselves (the rest was an unsolicited gift from my mother). Fortunately I work full-time in addition to going to grad school, and my husband isn't in grad school.

Rankings are based on certain criteria. If you care about the particular criteria for a ranking, then you probably care about that ranking. Phds.org shouldn't be lumped in with the other rankings - it's a customized ranking based on which criteria YOU tell the algorithm that you care about and how much YOU care about each of those criteria. The whole point is that you get to create a ranking that matters to you. If you don't care about the results, why did you go through the exercise and pick the criteria that you did? If what you are really asking is how the rankings relate to your ability to get a job later, fuzzylogician has it about right. I've been working in sub-PhD-level industry research positions for 3.5 years, and the Really Big Name on my resume (where I got my bachelor's) definitely helps me get my foot in the door at places when I'm job-hunting.

Are there any other universities nearby that do more research? If so, you could try to work with one of their professors.

It sounds like you are interested in these "backup" programs for their own sake, but worried that you won't be able to get a job later if you attend them. If I were you, I would contact these two programs and ask about their job placement rates. If the programs are in departments that are part of the NRC study (e.g. public policy), you might even be able to get those numbers from the web.

How old are you and where did you grow up, that having a stepmother or dating parent - even if that had been the case rather than an incorrect assumption - would be considered novel enough to be teasing-worthy or even comment-worthy? I grew up in a conservative area with parents who divorced and remarried (and thus a mother with a different last name than me, and a stepfather too for that matter), and I got teased and bullied for a lot of things, but never about my parents' names or marital situations. Because it wasn't unusual enough to use as a basis for teasing, even in that conservative area. I did not change my name when I got married. I would not have changed my name even if I were in a different profession where people don't publish. If my future kids don't approve, they can deal with it.

As long as you can afford the application fees, there's no reason not to bother. But if you really want the PhD, you should make sure to have some lower-ranking schools as well (if the situation is "either I get a PhD from a top school or it's not worth it to go," then of course you just apply to top schools).

Like anthropologygeek said, do your homework, but not just in the sense of making sure the prof works in the subfield that you thought. Look through their website and make sure that you don't ask them questions whose answers are right there on the site. I just found an MS thesis advisor the other day. When we met, he really did most of the talking, telling me about his upcoming projects and intended research directions.

To get a sense of how competitive different schools are, one thing you should look at is their acceptance rate. The website Petersons.com provides this info for all the grad programs that are willing to give them the numbers. Since you're a non-native English speaker, you should also look at TOEFL requirements for different programs. Some program websites may provide links to grad students' websites, and some of those students will have their CVs on their websites. By checking dates and/or looking at the CVs of more junior grad students, you can get some idea of what their qualifications were when they entered. If your school has alumni who are in CS/CE PhD programs abroad, you could contact those alumni, and ask them where they applied and where they got in. I would say, start by looking for middle- and lower-ranked programs that happen to have faculty who are strong in your area.

I posted this link in another thread, but I figured it should be its own topic. Prof. Harchol-Balter of Carnegie Mellon University has been involved with computer science PhD admissions at CMU, MIT, and UC Berkeley (all top programs). She gives a talk to CMU undergrads who are considering grad school each year, advising them on how PhD admissions at top programs work, and she wrote this talk up and put it on the Internet. http://www.cs.cmu.ed...dschooltalk.pdf It's a great resource - advice from an insider, with detailed explanations of what top CS programs in the United States look for in a PhD applicant. Note to international students: The section on what makes a good letter of recommendation could also be a useful resource for your letter-writers, since standards for what makes a good letter differ from country to country and they may not be sure what an American audience wants to see.

Your GPA is fine. Your wording suggests that you don't think it is, but it is. I see no reason that you shouldn't apply to top schools with this. You don't want to apply ONLY to top schools, of course, but you should be reasonably competitive. For an explanation of how PhD admissions work in top US computer science departments, I recommend this article by Prof. Harchol-Balter of Carnegie Mellon University, who has been involved in PhD admissions at CMU, MIT, and UC Berkeley (all of which are top-10 CS programs) over the course of her career. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~harchol/gradschooltalk.pdf The article is a great resource. Section 3, in particular, explains how admissions committees at the top programs value different aspects of your profile.

A tip for finding interesting research questions that are feasible: Read recent papers and find some that interest you. Then, closely reread the "discussion" sections of those, where the authors talk about the limitations of their research and potential future directions for this line of research. You can come up with solid interesting topics that way. You can also look for limitations of their research that they DON'T discuss, and pick a topic that would address those. Just make sure that nobody already took your idea. The first time I came up with my own research topic with no help from a prof or other research supervisor (using the method described above), I discovered after a month of good work on the topic that somebody had beaten me to it. I actually managed to get a new topic from applying the above method to the paper that scooped my original topic, and got a well-received conference poster out of it and an A in the class that this was the term project for, but it was a pain having to re-start everything, and if I'd done a better lit review in the first place I wouldn't have run into the problem.

Many universities have some sort of prestigious internal fellowship for new graduate students where incoming students from different programs or schools compete with each other. I am guessing that that's what your University Fellowship is. Departments and schools will sometimes have their own internal fellowships as well. I would say, try to get a fellowship if you can (though it's not the end of the world if you can't - most students will be funded through TA/RAships). Others in this thread have listed several major reasons why. I will add a couple: - With a fellowship, you have financial independence. There are advisors out there who will use students' financial dependence to require them to work extremely long hours, or specific hours, or to prevent them from taking a vacation, or to coerce them into dropping outside hobbies, or any number of other things relating to work conditions. If you bring your own salary, they don't have the financial control over you. - With a fellowship, you can choose your advisor without regard to whether they have funding for another grad student. You may even have an easier time being accepted into their lab because of this.

Phds.org will let you rank English programs (or programs from any number of other fields) by percentage of students who were supported primarily by the department, percentage of first-year students who received departmental support, or both (and it will give the actual numbers). Syracuse, U of North Dakota, and U of Pittsburgh all reported 100% of their students were funded, and quite a few others topped 75%. Petersons.com will let you look up individual departments and see what the funding packages were (they also report how many students were funded out of how many total in the department, but don't separate master's and PhD, so that can be misleading). For example, according to Petersons.com, in 2007-2008, the U of North Dakota English department awarded 1 RAship with a stipend of $5379/year, and 25 TAships with an average stipend of $9575/year.

It always seemed to me that it was the other way around (which sure doesn't help me). A good GPA + a poor GRE looks like a good student who is bad at taking that particular style of test. A poor GPA + a good GRE looks like someone who is smart but lazy. Neither is necessarily true, but those are the impressions they give. The exception, I guess, is if your undergrad program is very no-name or sends few students to grad programs, so that there's not much track record with which to evaluate how well your undergrad program prepares its students. In that case, good GPA + poor GRE might give the impression that you got good grades because your undergrad program had low standards. Are you in a field with a GRE subject test? If so, you might consider taking the subject test even if the programs don't require it. If you bomb it, you don't have to send it (you can send the required general GRE scores without sending subject test scores), and if you do well, you've demonstrated that you have some depth of knowledge in your field according to a standardized scale.

It sounds to me like you're okay, but you could email them and ask. They're really helpful - they got back to me within a day (the reply was negative, but that's not the fault of the people answering questions).

If the students mostly live in a nearby town, maybe that town is where the interesting social and cultural attractions are, and you could do the same commute. Do you know anyone who attends or works at this university (or any of the other small-town universities you are considering), whether in your field or not? If so, you could arrange to visit them for several days, talk to them about life in the town, and see what you think of the town during that time. You could do the same with big-city universities, for that matter. Though in either case, you have to keep in mind that as you spend more time in the place it will become less novel, which may decrease the distraction.

When I applied to MS programs, I applied to 2 programs (my selection criteria were "local," "allows part-time degree students," and "has a thesis option for MS students"). Next year when I apply to PhD programs, I'm planning to apply to 10 programs (at 9 schools) and 10 or so fellowships. Of those, 5 would be shots in the dark (top 20 programs), 4 would be (I hope) "fit" programs, and the remaining one would be the closest thing that, with my undergrad GPA, I have to a safety. Of course, my list of places to apply could change by next year.

Really, this depends on you. Neither option is better for all grad students, and I would assert that neither is better for grad students in general. Based on your post, for you it's a question of whether you have the self-discipline to succeed in grad school in a place where there are lots of other things to do. Since I don't know you, I have no idea if you do or not. Another thing to consider is whether either option will make you bored, actively unhappy, etc. This is something to consider for other location-related factors as well (e.g. climate, prevailing political ideology, availability of public transit, cost of living). Most of the people I know who drank the "It doesn't matter what the place is like, all that matters is my program, because I am a Serious Scholar !" kool-aid when they picked a program, ended up miserable in grad school and dropped out.

According to Petersons.com... Vandy: Info not provided IU-Bloomington: Average internal fellowship - $17500 + tuition, average RA - $15600 + tuition, average TA - $13400 + tuition. Numbers of each in 2009-2010 were 13, 5, 36, respectively. 74 students out of 91 full-time received any departmental finaid. Boston University (I wasn't sure whether you meant this, Boston College, or UMass-Boston): Average internal fellowship - $18900 + tuition, average RA - $18400 + tuition, average TA - $18400 + tuition. Numbers of each in 2009-2010 were 1, 1, 4, respectively. 9 students out of 20 full-time received any departmental finaid. UT-Austin: Average internal fellowship - $19000 (not sure if it includes tuition), average RA - $17000 + tuition, average TA - $17000 + tuition. Numbers of each in 2007-2008 were 15, 35, 50, respectively. 110 students out of 145 full-time received any departmental finaid. Their data is all from 2007-2008, two years older than the other schools', so the numbers are more likely to have changed. All of this info is for the respective schools' sociology graduate programs (MA + PhD - Peterson's doesn't separate them).

If you are applying for a PhD or academic master's, go with the professor (unless the colonel has a PhD - but even then, a "personality" recommendation is not very useful). The people making the decision want to know whether you will do well in the program. They are going to give more weight to the word of someone who has been through such a program themselves, and to the word of someone who can attest to your specific abilities that would allow you to succeed (personality is good, but you need the talent, the background knowledge, and the skills - personality alone won't do it for you). If you are applying for any fellowships, there may be some that do care about personality, for which the colonel's letter would be useful.

Do you have a spouse, significant other, nearby best friend, or trusted housemate, that you can vent to? I'm an MS student planning to go for a PhD when I finish the MS, and for me, the person that I talk to is my husband. When I was an undergrad and didn't have a significant other, I talked to those of my hallmates to whom I was closest (we were allowed to choose our own dorms, so a lot of the people closest to me were people that I lived with), and a few other close friends (particularly alums, who had been there done that). Just having somebody to listen and relate and give you moral support can make a lot of difference.

Document. Even if you don't have "hard" evidence, write down the date, time, and exactly what happened. If you have your own computer (I wouldn't use a public computer for this), maybe record each one in a separate file so that the computer records the date the file was created, and nobody can accuse you of deciding on the spot to make up a long backstory. Also document any attempts you made to resolve the situation that didn't work. If the harasser is stupid enough to put anything in writing, you're in luck. Save the emails/text messages/whatever. There's a bit about how to deal with sexual harassment as a grad student in the grad advice book Getting What You Came For.

I wanted to bump this thread, 'cause it made me happy to see. My undergrad GPA was 2.5. I went to a top-10 school famed for its difficulty, and from sophomore year through senior year (and for nearly two years after I graduated), I had an undiagnosed sleep disorder that absolutely destroyed my concentration and my ability to commit anything to memory, and left me exhausted all the time. I thought it was all because of stress (until it continued after I graduated). I was sleeping 9 hours/night when I could, and I was still too tired to process what was being said in class (assuming I could even stay awake) and sometimes too tired to even go. When I studied for exams I would forget the previous sentence of the book or notes as soon as I moved on to the next one, and eventually curl up and take a nap. Looking back on it, I can't believe I still managed to graduate in four years. Happily, once I got tested and diagnosed, I got treated. Successfully. Since then I changed fields, from systems neuroscience to CS. I've been doing research in industry full-time for more than three years. I have two journal publications and a sole-author poster presentation (and I'm hoping to have at least two more publications by next fall, when I apply). I did a post-bac in CS while working full-time and am now a part-time MS student (and recipient of a merit scholarship that covers part of my tuition) while working full-time, with a solid GPA (I'm hoping to bring it up some more, though). I've won two competitive conference travel awards and been a co-author of two successful government grant applications. I have a huge amount of service to the field (e.g. through professional organizations) and to promoting underrepresented groups in the field. Basically, I am hoping to be a star in every way that I can except for undergrad GPA, and hoping that everything else will balance it out. I'm planning to apply to programs ranging from the #1 in my field to completely unranked, and for a bunch of fellowships. I realize that I may not get in anywhere but the unranked program, if that, and that external fellowships are probably a long shot, but what you don't apply for, you definitely won't get.

I've been a student at both Tufts (post-bac) and Northeastern (MS, which I'm doing part-time as I work). Your research interests are somewhat similar to mine, though not an exact match. Tufts is pretty good for AI, and has gotten better very recently (they got a couple of new faculty). The department is friendly and close-knit. It's actually more selective than Northeastern's (in terms of acceptance rate). However, its reputation in the larger community hasn't caught up with what it deserves. Tufts is also good at HCI, but I don't remember it being an image processing-heavy department. The facilities are not very good - it's an ugly little building in an isolated part of campus without much common space. Northeastern is bigger and has (much) better facilities and a better reputation. There are a lot of international students, more than there were at Tufts. It's also not super-selective, and I suspect you have a good shot there. But the real strength of the department is programming languages, not any of the things you mentioned as your research interests. I have heard a rumor that there will be a couple of faculty in my areas of interest (which overlap a lot with yours) joining soon, but so far it's just a rumor. You seem to like the idea of the Boston area, and are interested in image processing and computer vision - have you considered Boston University? Harvard is a great choice, but, of course, difficult to get into, even if you are very good. Your profile seems pretty respectable, but I don't know enough about how grading works in India to judge your grades.

If you're good on a bike, JP -> BU becomes a lot easier. If you take the T, you're looking at either a bus (probably in heavy traffic), or a long subway ride from JP to Downtown Crossing and back out again to BU. If you bike, it's a 3-mile bike ride.