starmaker

It depends on your professional experience (through things like internships, plus any full-time industry experience that you had before getting your MS), where you got your degree, who you know, and where you are. In my part of the US, there definitely seems to be jobs for people with MSEE degrees.

There are a couple of places (Indiana and Tufts come to mind, and I'm pretty sure that I've read about some school in Colorado that does it too) that will actually let you get a joint PhD in cog sci and CS. That might get you the best of both worlds. If you are picking one or the other, I'd say go with CS, because too many people, including some potential employers, have no idea what a cog sci degree means (I'm saying this as someone with a cog sci bachelor's degree - I can assure you, a lot of people will look at you blankly). Often, the profs who do computational cog sci stuff will have appointments in the CS department too, so you'd still be able to work with them.

I'd say it's worth talking to the POIs (and their grad students) so that you can get a sense of what they are like. These are potential bosses that you're talking about. Having a bad boss (either someone who's a jerk or someone who's nice but a bad manager) can really make life suck, even if the work that you're doing for them is work that you thought would be your dream work. Also, you want to know if they are taking on new students, and you want to know what direction their work is going in - maybe that project that you thought looked so great on their website is going to be done within the year, and in the future they're not going to be working much in that subarea.

I have no idea what the market is like in India, but in the US, there are plenty of jobs for people with master's degrees in engineering fields (though some of them, like most government contractor jobs, require you to be a US national). And an MBA is only really useful if it's from a prestigious program or one with a strong alumni network - there are a lot of awful MBA programs out there.

Why did people mark chaospaladin's comment down? It looked fine to me. Anyway, when I started reading this, I was going to suggest applying elsewhere because the school in question apparently has a Graduate School full of tools (oh noez, you have real scientific accomplishments but your hoop-jumping skills grades were low, in the presence of mitigating factors, so clearly you need to be rejected, because why should we prioritize real accomplishment in the field?). I am glad that you managed to overcome this silliness and ended up in an excellent situation.

Stanford will probably like the whole entrepreneurship thing, but they will still probably want you to have significant CS background. So will most other programs, including programs well out of the top 4 (why are you only looking at the top 4?). You might want to take a couple of classes as a non-degree student.

There are some programs that won't give you a full assistantship with stipend if you have an outside fellowship, but will give you supplemental money (say, an extra 5k/year) on top of your fellowship. There are also places that will make up any difference between your fellowship and the standard stipend - say that your fellowship pays 20k/year plus tuition, but the standard assistantship stipend is 24k, they'll give you a 4k/year supplement.

I'm guessing that religious studies students don't have opportunities for paid summer industry internships (which is what I would advise for a fellow STEM grad student) in their own field. But, there might be something that follows the same idea, like summer research fellowships at museums or archives. So that might be an option.

RA funding is professor-specific (except in programs that have rotations, which CS programs don't usually have - in those, the department usually funds student rotations, I think). TA funding is departmental in many departments. Internal fellowship funding can be through the department/program, school, or university, depending on the fellowship. "Do you think in that case it would be wise to contact the professor of the so called lower ranked university in advance ?" Yep. If anything, professors at lower-ranked programs are more amenable to chatting with prospective students about their research and their program than many profs at higher-ranked ones (who are deluged with attempts by prospectives to make contact and gain favor, and may get tired of it).

I have this problem too, especially since my MS classes are three hours long. I also have the problem where if I take notes in real-time I don't follow what's being said either. Here's what I do to get around these: - Do the reading ahead of time if possible. - If notes or slides are made available before class, print them out and follow along during the lecture. Take notes on them to supplement them. This way, at least for me, I'm not so consumed with taking notes that I don't process what's being said, but I'm engaging with the material so that I don't tune out. - If not, find the portion of the textbook that is the subject of the lecture, and do something similar. If there's no class textbook, find a relevant book yourself, or print articles. - If the class is longer than 90 minutes or so, take a bathroom break. Most profs aren't sadists and will have a break anyway if it's a long class, but if they don't, take one regardless. It's not like they'll tell you that you can't go pee, and the walk and switch in environment will clear your head a little.

Nobody? Really? They get more than 600 applications every year; surely I'm not the only applicant on this site.

Your chances seem fine to me if you have good recommendations/statement of purpose/fit with the department, but if you really want a PhD (i.e. you'd rather get one from a lower-ranked school than not get one at all), you should apply to some schools not in the top 25 as well. The admissions process at the top schools is very competitive, and you simply can't assume that you will get into one even if you are a very strong applicant. I don't know the specifics of which programs are good at information extraction, but I can give you some other reasons besides chance of acceptance for expanding beyond the top 25 too: - A program that is lower-ranked in computer science in general might be higher-ranked in AI. Some departments have subfields that are much stronger than the rest of the department. People who hire PhDs in AI fields will be aware of which programs are good in AI specifically. - A program that is lower-ranked might have a particular faculty member in your field who is very strong and well-known, and this faculty member may be able to place you into a job, after you get your PhD, that is better than what graduates of the program normally get. One of my prospective programs is like this - it's not known as a strong program in general, but it has one very famous and well-regarded faculty member who happens to work right in the area that I want to study. - If you are one of a program's stronger admits (because it is lower-ranked and there is not as much competition for admission), they may offer you significantly more money to study there.

Based on past threads, there seems to be some field-dependence. The idea is similar, but in some fields, the minimum grade that you should be getting is an A- rather than a B, and there are a few in which (or so I am told) you should be getting straight As. But what you've been hearing is what I've been hearing, including from professors (who presumably know how academic hiring works). And I've seen how hiring works in industry research (a concept which exists for cog neuro as well as my field) - very few places care at ALL about your grades, especially with PhDs. They care about the projects that you've worked on, the papers that you publish, your technical skills, the quality of the research talk that you give at your job interview. Think about it this way. Why should the people hiring you care about your grades, as long as they were good enough that your program was willing to certify your competence? You aren't going to be earning your pay by taking classes and acing exams. You're going to be earning your pay with your teaching and research. So they care about those. A 3.4 vs a 3.9 isn't particularly relevant (coming from a field/program where 3.0 signifies competence). It doesn't give the employer info that is useful to them. If you need motivation to study, consider that you need to pass your quals, or you won't make it through the program. If that means that you study hard in whatever subjects you need for quals, but cruise other classes...well, that's triage, and triage is an important skill in grad school (or life, really). You should put the extra time into excelling in your research (and, if you eventually want a teaching position, your teaching), where you can accomplish real things beyond jumping through hoops to optimize a 4.0-scale number.

What if you have a lot of work experience AND some publications/conferences? I'm glad somebody asked this question, as I've been wondering about it too. My jobs have all been industry research jobs and would fit in a CV. My main concern with a CV vs a resume is that resumes usually describe what you did at each job, and CVs don't. But CVs are more academia-oriented, and contain other info that resumes don't.

Anybody else working on this? I don't expect to get it, but I figured I might as well give it a try. If you're typing the short essays directly into the webform, make sure that you save often, so that you don't get logged out and lose your work. I already discovered this the hard way.

Yeah, the only way, usually, that MIT EECS admits you for less than a PhD, is if you were an undergrad in the department (and in that case they're admitting you for an MEng, not an MS). Normally there is funding for everybody. If you don't want to get a PhD, but you're interested in MIT, check out some of the related departments. Aero/Astro offers a bunch of MS options, many of which are heavily CS-oriented in nature. Brain & Cog Sci offers a neural/cognitive computation track, if you're into that. The Media Lab (which has many CS-oriented groups) offers master's degrees, and there's an interdepartmental MS program in Computation for Design and Optimization.

Heh, I didn't speak the local language, so I wasn't confident about my ability to communicate with a taxi driver. Yeah, it was a nice feeling. It was a pretty low-key atmosphere, so I wasn't too nervous. And then at the banquet I got to watch professors do shots of the famed local liquor (which is 58% alcohol by volume and burns like fire).

I have a friend who was in a similar situation (albeit at a very different department, one that is very small). She stuck it out with TAing at first, and then lost funding altogether because of weird interdepartmental politics. She found a sympathetic professor, with some influence, who was outside her subfield (but in a subfield that she was willing to move into), asked if he would consider taking her on, and explained what had happened with her previous funding. She said (truthfully) that if she couldn't get some kind of reliable funding, she would have to leave after her MS. He must have pulled some strings in the background, because within two days she had an RAship in her original subfield.

In the "good prof in a mid-rank program" category, look at Prof. Aslam at Northeastern University.

Bah. They changed the extenuating circumstances for eligibility, and I'm definitely out now. Oh well.

Yes, taking a couple of grad classes and doing well will help you. So will successfully holding down a job in computer science. I was also a low-undergrad-GPA person, and I did these things for a couple of years. I got into MS programs. For you, if you do well in a couple of grad classes and work in the field for a bit, I might suggest WPI, Dartmouth, Boston University, Northeastern University, Brandeis University, various not-super-high-caliber state schools.

I have used it, and was impressed, and making good progress, but I spent too much time on it up front and then burned out. It can be sort of addictive - you want to pace yourself.

I've done posters and been on panels before, but this was the first time that I did a full presentation of a paper (it's also my first first-author paper). I am very tired, because there is a 12-hour time difference between home and the conference location, and my body seriously doesn't believe that it's supposed to be asleep and be awake at the times that I want it to. Most interesting takeaway lesson: If you're getting to the conference venue by riding a bike three and a half miles through a typhoon, wear crappy clothes, and bring your nice ones in a waterproof bag. Your raincoat will not actually protect you from getting soaked in those conditions. Fortunately the nice conference volunteers gave me a shirt to wear while mine was drying, and mine dried in time for my presentation.

Wow, your field is not like mine. Our conferences are peer-reviewed and a paper in a conference proceedings is a "real" paper (that counts toward tenure evaluation and everything). We generally have to get camera-ready versions of our papers in at least a month or two before the conference. On the plus side, that means that nobody's up finishing a paper the night before a conference. Though they might still be finishing their slides. I highly recommend getting your paper done early. I think the best time to start presenting at conferences is ASAP (or at least, as soon as you have work worth presenting). Don't be afraid of national or international conferences - in my experience, people are friendly to the kid who's just starting out. I think your idea of developing conference papers from your seminar work is a great one.

As usual, these articles fail to acknowledge opportunities for PhD-level scientists outside the academy. We get DoE national labs, DoD labs, the NIH intramural program, NASA, NOAA, the NSA, FFRDCs, government contractors, nonprofit research institutes (e.g. WHOI), Big Pharma, technology startups, the energy industry (both traditional and alternative), the research labs of large for-profit companies (Intel, IBM, Microsoft), the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, the military. Not everybody wants or needs to be a professor. PhDs are crucial to large parts of industry and government. The fact that there are more STEM PhDs than there are assistant professorships is a feature, not a bug. One of my projects at work - a government contractor - has four PhDs working on it. These people didn't fail to get academic jobs. A couple of them were the pick of the litter. They came here by choice. They are happy here, they get to work on cool research, they avoid the race to tenure, and they make more money than they would in academia. This sentence is just incredible: "Many young Americans bright enough to do the math therefore conclude that instead of gambling 12 years on the small chance of becoming an assistant professor, they can invest that time in becoming a neurosurgeon, or a quarter of it in becoming a lawyer or a sixth in earning an MBA." Ha. Hahaha. Do these authors know what the job prospects are these days for lawyers, and how much it costs to go to law school? What kind of oblivious person these days markets law school as a path away from penury and toward job security (of course, if you combine it with a STEM PhD, you can be a patent lawyer and have a relatively easy time getting a cushy job)? Do they realize that in order to be a neurosurgeon, you have to spend four years in med school at $50k/year, completely win the residency matching process - almost nobody's a shoe-in for a surgery residency - and then spend six years working 80+ hour weeks for pay of $40k/year, and maybe a couple more in a fellowship? Have they noticed that an MBA doesn't do much for most people unless it's from a highly competitive, expensive, top school? At least in a STEM PhD program they pay you while you get your PhD, even if not very much. Also, with all due sympathy for the biomed folks, not every field of science expects you to spend half your life bouncing around postdocs. "A prime symptom noted by all: a growing aversion of America’s top students — especially the native-born white males who once formed the backbone of the nation’s research and technical community — to enter scientific careers." Oh noez, not the native-born white males, whatever shall we do...oh wait, in the modern world, the US scientific talent pool includes women, people of color, and immigrants. Now, in fairness, they say that top US students in general are avoiding scientific careers. But aren't they writing this article about how US students shouldn't go into scientific PhD programs? Shouldn't they approve? If they don't, have they ever considered that articles like this one might be playing a role?