giantfox

CUNY is okay. I think you will probably be a bit disappointed at the level of the classes there. I've heard grad students complain about how easy they are and the level that they are taught.. but the point of a PHD program is to do research, not take classes. CUNY has a number of really amazing professors in some fields, such as Multi-Agent Systems, Logic, and I know some really great individual professors in Natural Language Processing as well as Cryptography (although ideally you would like a program in which there are an abundance of professors you would want to work with in your field). The goal of any applicant in Computer Science grad programs is to get into a top 6 and, if that is not possible, a top 20 ranked computer science program (Usually measured by USNews CS rankings). Anything below that number the only metric that is important is the individual lab that you would like to work at and the research that you will be doing. If you have a decent amount of publications in top venues it will not matter where you get your PHD (unless you go into industry, and then you want the prestige of the institution). Getting research experience will help a lot. In your application you will need to write a research statement and describe some sort of research work you have done in the past. If it matches up with the work one of the advisers you are aiming to work with it will give you a leg up on the competition. Paying for a PHD is not the smartest of ideas even if you have the money for it, and if you are doing research with an adviser (which is needed to complete your PHD) you should be funded under one of their grants. If you are paying for your PHD you might as well get a Masters from a better institution (such as NYU or Columbia (Columbia being the much better program)) and try to get some research done there before applying to PHD. Then you will know whether you really want one, and you would have the ability to drop out and get a decent job if you didn't want to do research. Even though PHD in CUNY would be cheaper, it would cost more in opportunity costs. The only other institution I can think of close to NYC is Rutgers which also has a decent CS (comparable to NYU). Stonybrook is also good, but they are pretty far from the city. Again: The research that you are interested in and the professors that you would want to work with are the most important thing. If you haven't answered the question of what and with whom you would want to work with I would not apply to any PHD programs. About job opportunities afterward from CUNY.. it would be really hard to get a viable academic position seeing as you are completing with top ranked people from better ranked institutions for very competitive jobs. If your PHD research is in one of those fields that are more applicable than theoretical and you market yourself well you can get a decent job. Look at the alumni at the lab you would want to work at see where they ended up. Some labs have better success than others. Be careful to note that there is a difference between working as a Software Engineer at a top company and being a Research Scientist at a top company. Some labs may boast their students working for Google or such but they are employed as Software Engineers, jobs that may be just as easy to get as Master graduates from better institutions, and they might have been better off not spending the extra 3-5 years of their life to get to the same place regardless of yearly cost of the program. Again, good luck!

I know a decent amount of people in the PHD program at CUNY as well as had talks with professors about the admit process there. They seem to admit a large percentage of students into the program but the problem at that point is finding funding. I think that with a good GRE score you have a decent shot of getting in. Your best bet is to find professors in the CUNY system that you would like to work with and emailing them. I know that there are different opinions regarding the PHD process about emailing professors but I think in the case of CUNY it is probably a good idea. I think CUNY would be a better program than POLY; many more professors in the system as well as the fact that you can take courses in both NYU and Columbia after you pass your qualifier. No research experience is the one thing that might hurt you in terms of finding professors who would like to work with you at the start, and you will probably have to TA for a while to keep yourself afloat at CUNY. Is there any field in particular that you feel like you want to work in, and any professors in general there? Good Luck!

Thanks BKMD. Your response confirmed what I already felt. I met with David Smith and he seemed to have some really interesting projects going on and for some reason I don't remember if Aria Haghighi was there that day, but that may be because he just got hired and might not be taking on any students... I was thinking Hal Daume as being one of the better fits for me research wise and placed his name as one of the few professors in my application to Maryland, but I didn't consider Jordan Boyd-Graber at the time because he was located in the iSchool and not the CS department, which I am realizing was a mistake. Mostly, I am thinking that I would probably be happy in either department research wise. I am going to try and talk to the department over the phone tomorrow and perhaps an adviser that would be available to speak to me. Location though is a big factor, and I have no idea where I might be happier, although a lot of people seem to like the Amherst area, I am a bit worried of the rural location as a big city guy myself.

Thanks for the response. My interest was with Machine Learning with applications to NLP. I know that Amherst has great Information Retrieval and Information Extraction professors and I have met them all and like them a lot. I think that Maryland has a better NLP in general in all NLP sub-fields (including Machine Translation, Speech etc..) and they also collaborate with Johns Hopkins making them a much larger group, although the UMass professors really seem to be at the top of their fields. This is going to be a reallllly hard decision!

I agree that they are separate. Even in the cases where they overlap, these projects have multiple students working on the separate aspects of these problems. There will be a graduate student who is familiar with HCI practices doing the evaluation as well as an AI grad student working on the implementation of the program, who may base their implementation from information derived from a previous HCI evaluation. If your goal is to work as a PI on a project involving the two it is probably better to be well versed in AI, whereas HCI concentration will probably focus more on understanding people. But this is hard to say, since HCI is such a new field. Most of the PI's I've seen working on such projects have degrees in AI, but that might change now that there are much more HCI based programs out there.

Thanks. I am really happy with both acceptances. I don't know if I have time to actually talk with members of the faculty at UMaryland, but I do know people who have graduated from the program, and might be able to connect with students currently in the program. Right now, the problem is that the two programs are both really good that the decision is just about a toss up, I'm looking for any sort of information that might make the decision easier... It might come down to whether I am more interested in the Machine Learning aspect which UMass seems to be very good in or whether I am more interested in the NLP part which UMaryland seems to be better at. Any additional comments would be appreciated!

George is right. AI and HCI have many overlapping applications. Look at aIED, ITS, and the IUI conferences for some of the subfields where these two ideas meet heavily. I had the same dilemma about a year ago, so good luck to you!

Hi Everybody. I had been accepted into the University of Massachusetts Amherst and University of Maryland College Park and now that April 15th is coming soon I need to make a quick decision. My interests are in Artificial Intelligence involving Machine Learning with applications for Natural Language Processing and also a bit of Human Computer Interaction (These are fields I have done research in as an undergraduate). Both offers are funded. I have visited UMass and talked with professors I would be interested in doing an RAship with there, but I have not visited UMaryland or spoken to any professors there as I was recently admitted there. Does anybody have any any advice on how to choose at this late stage or have any comparable information about the two departments? Thanks!