ase_lima

I'm a current UofT MASc student. If you tell me which prof at UofT you got in with, I can give you some insight into the quality of his research group, etc (you can message me instead of replying to this post for the sake of privacy if you wish)

Yes, I have friends who have been accepted to all three schools (with fellowship) without any published papers, although they had research experience (i.e. had stints at different research labs)

Does anybody know what portion of students admitted to the PhD program receive SGF or 1 year departmental fellowship? For students that have not received a firm offer of financial aid, what are the odds of receiving aid later on? From the Results section, it seems quite a few students in previous years received departmental support in April.

I can give you advice as a current MASc student at UofT (albeit with a focus in Electronics and not comp arch. specifically) who is likely headed to Stanford for PhD studies. First of all, UofT's comp. arch. group has lots of top drawer faculty - you may want to look up these people: Paul Chow, Andreas Moshovos, Greg Steffan, Natalie Enright Jerger. Take a look at their research groups and you'll see that they are very productive and have had numerous publications in leading Conferences and Journals (which for an outsider is one of the best indicators of research productivity). As I have lots of friends in the comp. arch. group, I can tell you that they have very close relations with AMD, Intel, IBM, etc. Moreover, if you are willing to step slightly away from computer architecture specifically and look at, say, FPGAs, I can tell you that UofT has perhaps the world's best FPGA research group (they develop FPGA architectures, CAD tools for FPGAs, soft processors for FPGAs, etc.), and is EXTREMELY well connected with the two major FPGA companies (Altera and Xilinx - in fact Altera has a key research and development centre adjacent to the campus). UofT's industry connections, while perhaps not as good as Stanford's, is still very good, and you really don't have to worry about getting a job after you graduate as most of my peers have graduated with very nice jobs. On the other hand, I'm not too much of a fan of Stanford's Master's program; yes it offers an excellent selection of courses, but the fact that you will likely get no research exposure (which ends up SERIOUSLY hurting your chances to get into a good PhD program afterwards if you are so inclined) and the fact that you have to pay roughly $100k for the 2 years there (whereas at UofT they would be paying you) doesn't make the program to appealing at all. I think between Stanford Masters and UofT MASc, I would choose UofT MASc mainly because of the possibility of getting to do some high quality research and not being down $100k. The only reason I'm heading off to Stanford for my PhD is because I have already done two degrees at UofT and need a change of scenery.