gradSchoolBound

Thanks! Good luck to all of you guys as well.

I chose Rice University

No I have not decided. I know I have to decide it by tonight. So that I can fax my decision tomorrow. I visited Rice last week and liked it. But, I liked Wisconsin as well, and both are strong in one of the two areas that I am interested in. So, it is a tough decision.

I am interested in research related to computer architecture, programming models (compilers, tuners, runtime activities) that make programming multi-core, many-core system easily and efficient. If I go to Wisconsin, I am most likely to work with Prof. Hill or Karu - Wisconsin's architecture group is, I believe, very well known. My reservation with this place is that there is no advisor assigned right away (this is the standard mode of their operation). Go there, TA for a semester, take classes, do independent project and then choose an advisor if things work out. Also weather sucks! If I go to Rice, I will probably work with Prof. Sarkar, who is also very well known for research in languages for parallel computing. Also there is a lot of expertise in the area of compilers and programming languages at Rice. My reservation with Rice is small department and lesser number of profs. to choose from. If I go to UMass, I will probably work with Eliot Moss and Charles Weems, both of them are again well known for work in programming language and computer architecture. Again, not very many people working in this area there and also only one or two graduate student currently working in this area. In insight into this would be greatly appreciated at this point.

I am not sure yet between arch research@Wisconsin and Rice. I am visiting them on April 8. Hopefully, I will be able to make up my mind by then.

I have received fellowship for the first year and guaranteed RAship for 5 years.

I received the invitation visit to TAMU for March 4th. I declined the offer for the visit. They sent me the acceptance letter in the second week of March. I have declined the offer. My area of interest is Programming Language, Compiler, and parallel computing

@Herring Thanks for your input. That was very helpful. Yes, I am interested in working with Prof. Sarkar if I go there. So my decision has basically boiled down to deciding between Sarkar at Rice or Mark Hill, Wood and Karu at Wisconsin. I am interested in parallel computing, and language and architecture associated with it. You are also right about Livny and Miller's research. Livny's Condor project has moved beyond the research phase. It is like one giant product. Miller is doing some cool work, but its more like product development than research. I talked with both of them when I visited Madison.

I heard from them today. I contacted the POI yesterday asking him if I should accept offers from other universities. He replied to me saying that he wanted to see me at Rice and that there must have been miscommunication between him and the ad com. Today, I received the admission letter by e-mail. Pretty exciting. I don't know where I want to go now.

I completely understand your situation - moving to a new place while being away from home, family, relatives and all alone. The best place to look for rental place is www.rent.com. Also most places advertised here are professional and don't think you will be swindled if you stick to places advertised here. Also, if you find a place and want to run the name of the place by me, I will help you to verify if the place is good. When you lease an apartment from rent.com, they also send you 100 gift card in the mail. Since you gonna be in Danforth campus, I suggest Clayton, Ladue (rich neighborhood) or Creve Coeur (does not feel like part of St. Louis at all. safe and quiet). Loop is tricky. Things change from block to block, but cannot suggest anybody to live there. If I was gonna be in St. Louis in August, I would probably have been able to help you more and would have assured you that I will not let you be homeless in St. Louis. But I will be moving myself for grad school. But, if you really really need help at any point in time, pm me. A lot of my friends go to WASHU and I can introduce you to them. Anyway, I am confident that you will get a good rental place, and be happy in St. Louis. It has a lot of history to it- from being a french colony to once a competitor for a major city in the US + Washu is an excellent university and cares about its students. So, you don't have anything to worry about.

Hey! as a St. Louisian, I suggest you look for apartments around Central West End. For eg. a lot of grad student live in houses in street called Laclede Ave (walking distance from WASHU). If you want a quieter nicer neighborhood, but which requires little more driving, I suggest areas like Clayton, Ladue, Kirkwood, and esp. Creve Coeur (very nice but further away from university). I would not suggest any place south of Interstate 64. around where WASHU is.

I have not heard from them either. At this point, even if they accept me, I will probably decline. I would guess that many applicants will hear from them after their visitation weekend, which I believe is around March 18th and when other people start declining the offer or through mass rejection. Last time I contacted them, the lady at admissions office made the whole process sound like a plot of a suspense thriller - 'anything could happen, you know'. I was like whatever. Anyway, hang in there my friend!

http://engineering.tamu.edu/graduate/nef/

I was pleasantly surprised as well.

I guess I should appreciate that you are not trying to be an ass. Well, my friend, everybody's brain works differently. When I see questions in math and even when I reach an answer, I can't help wondering what could have been a better way of reasoning an answer out. Or, I am easily distracted into thinking what if the figure was changed in certain way, then this problem would be unsolvable without additional information etc. - I hope you get the point. It is harder to explain in the amount of typing I am willing to do. GRE is no place to do that - you try to get an answer in shortest possible time with the least amount of calculation, then forget about the question and move on. Some people are good at taking test - managing time, logically deducing answer quickly and moving on etc. I had to acquire that mindset before doing better in GRE. The case may be different for somebody else. By the way, questions in GRE may not require advanced mathematical knowledge, but some of them have much more mathematics behind them than just what is obvious at a first glance. Do you know that nobody have been able to prove or disprove if there are odd perfect numbers? Well, I saw a question in GRE which had to with this fact but one did not need to know this to answer the question. Getting answer was just a matter of a few number crunching and logical reasoning, but if you knew little more mathematics behind it, you could not help getting distracted.

I have been offered anywhere from 22,000 to 40,000 per year. 40,000 is through fellowship for US nationals

Yes, I completely see that happening. When I first took the test, I got 630 in mathematics, and I have always been good at math. I did college level calculus when I was in high school, double majored in computer science and mathematics, won honorable mention in AMA math contest while participating impromptu, won a national research award in mathematics from MAA. I was so depressed and thought that was the end of my dream of going to a good graduate school. I took the test again after a year - this time with just two weeks of practice (but with a lot of timing practice) and scored 780. When I took test the first time, I did not had the feel for GRE questions and what they are looking to test - I was over analyzing questions, pondering on what is interesting about the question etc. and ran out time in the end. In CBT, I think you are heavily penalized for unanswered questions.

I think @Zep has a valid point. I don't see how this is whining in public. He is making observation about general research trend in systems. What he expresses here has been acknowledged by experts in this field. He is not calling names either. This is a public forum meant to discuss ideas like this. Hence, I don't see any reason why anyone should be offended. Through examples and reasoning one could persuade @Zep how his beliefs are wrong if one feels the necessary to do so rather than ask him to shut up or discuss things in private. Through discussions of ideas and acknowledge of problems is how we move forward.

@Zep, you have a made a historically very important point in your post. In 60s, 70s and 80s, many new ideas used to be explored around systems, and computer architecture. We can see the results of such explorations in the invention of dataflow (as opposed to Von-Neumann) machine. The ideas such as time-sharing, parallel processing, virtualization are all results of the exploration of such 'wild and crazy' ideas in systems - we have come up with virtually no new ideas in the last 30 years. Yes, some of them have been rejuvenated. At the fundamental level, most computers today are still the same. As the computer became cheaper in the 80s and started becoming available outside the academic community and a larger part of the industry - thanks to IBM 360 machines - a huge demand for computer scientists arose. To satisfy this demand, there was a mushrooming for computer science departments all around the nation. Their goal was to meet the growing demand of the industry instead of waste several years investigating unconventional ideas without the promise of a success. There was mushrooming of computer science conferences everywhere. To mitigate the flooding of research papers in these conferences, the easiest way to verify the quality of research was to show some numbers using standard benchmarking tools. Hence, computer science research became a number game. Just having some unconventional ideas on a paper was not enough - numbers became the mantra. And one's research productivity was largely quantified by one's number of publication. Moreover, obtaining funding for exploring research idea that departed from mainstream computer science research became incredibly hard or impossible. Hence, we have the current trend of graduate research - take somebody's work, tweak it a little bit, benchmark it, obtain n times better performance and publish it. And the sad part is, a lot of these benchmarking results are wrong, as was pointed out by a conference article by a computer science professor at U of Colorado. In some way, systems people have shot themselves in the foot. The slow-paced innovations in the systems field have contributed to the shift of research focus from fundamental computer science research in systems to its application in various fields, such as AI, bioinformatics etc, even though there are so many cool things waiting to be done in the area of systems.

Got acceptance letter today with TA and excellence fellowship. Really happy as Wisconsin is ranked really high in both systems and programming language, my two areas of interest.

@DamianD: Did you receive your admission letter? Do you know the dates of visit weekend? Has anybody else heard from them? I don't see any recent entry in the result section either. Whats going on down in Texas?

I e-mailed the grad ad coordinator today and she replied (in no more than 10 words approx.) that the applications are still being reviewed.

What colleges have you heard back from so far? From what I can observe in results section, every year there were some Rice admits reported by this time of the year. May be Rice has decided to admit nobody this year. "Ah, money is tight; folks, lets skip this year. Plus we can call ourselves more selective than MIT, with 0% acceptance rate."