the poisoned pawn

same here, but i couldn't be more careless

1. Consider if you are passionate for advanced study/research. 2. Do some research & work harder on courses. 3. I can't say. It may be pretty hard to get in a PhD program with a 3.0, but it is totally possible for you to go to a Masters program first to improve your GPA and research experience if you eventually want a PhD.

Probably going to UW-Madison. I'm pretty sure I will focus on machine learning or theory. If anyone does not attend PhD program at UMass Amherst or Rutgers, could you please decline your offer since it's April 15 already and I will appreciate that a lot. I will also decline the offer from Ohio State so it may help some people here. I am very unhappy with this year late results. I got rejections from Maryland today (via website - not email, April 15) and NYU 2 days ago (why did they wait until the deadline to give me a rejection?). Still didn't hear from UMich (they said that they have no timeline for decisions when I inquire about my application status) and Irvine. I know that the chance to get in this late is almost zero but still, why? In any case, good luck to all of ya. We have good time, and bad time waiting together.

When you say machine learning, you should be more specific about whether it is applied or theoretical machine learning. Technically, machine learning is everywhere in computer vision, nlp, robotic, etc. If you just want to work on the more theoretical aspect of machine learning, I would say both schools are roughly the same. I'm not sure if it is true that Maryland is better at NLP since UMass has a lot of great professors on information retrieval from text data. Overall, UMD is a bigger name and is in a more interesting location compared to UMass. I would pick them over UMass based on this factor IF the research opportunities are the same at both schools.

free hug

For my case, UW Madison has no waitlist, so backing out my offer will probably not affect anyone except my bridges. That's not the case for other schools which do have people waiting on the waitlist. Some people may get rejected from the waitlist for no good reason while they should have got in because you finally back out your offer. There are cases when you definitely want to wait from the rest of the schools you applied to (like you don't have full funding from the current options, or large ranking gap). Otherwise, if you guys already have a good option (the school provides funding, has faculty you want to work with, etc) and none of the rest is much more significant than that option, then you should move on with it. That would do a great favor to those on the waitlist.

The point is there is no guarantee that you will get one of the top prizes, so, it is a little bit risky to put all effort in this contest. A research project with a professor will get you a good recommendation letter and even if you are not able to produce a really good result, it is still counted as a research experience in your application. Joining the contest will be very interesting, but I will do a research with a professor as well. That's a safer path to make a good application.

It will definitely be a boost to your application, but I personally believe many people will not equate that competition to a research experience.

Overlord scan

Do they have a term and agreement about having a decision by April 15 when we submit the application?

As a general agreement among schools, April 15th is the the deadline to accept or to decline an offer. It is almost April and I only received decisions from 6 out of 12 schools that I applied to. Yet, the available choices are not the ideal ones. There should be a topic like this somewhere in this forum which is for all majors, but I think it is better if I post it here in order not to read the posts starting with "it depends on your field, ..." The first option is the admission to University of Wisconsin, Madison without guaranteed funding. That means I by myself have to apply for the Epic RAship and other positions that are available in order to get a funding otherwise I have to pay for a while. The second choice is UMass Amherst. I'm admitted to the MS track and on the waitlist of PhD track. Both are good schools but the funding situations are still very unclear. Not much of surprise, I received rejections from the very top schools like Berkeley and CMU. The schools that I am still waiting for are actually good ones like Michigan, Maryland, NYU, UCI, Rutgers and OSU. One of them is my undergrad school. Should I expect to receive all of their decisions by April 15th. Generally, do you guys know when should I expect to know whether or not I'm getting off the waitlist of UMass by the deadline? I know it is a very bad situation to accept an offer and then decline it. So what's the best strategy here? Feel free to discuss and give advice for my case as well as adding yours here. Cheers.

Usually, it's difficult for undergrad students to have a paper, we have a hard time looking for a professor that has a project (which fits the capability of an undergrad) to work on. It was not until my 3rd year that I learned enough AI/Machine learning theory to join a research. Masters students have more time and background to do research, some have a masters thesis to show off. If you can have several good papers, projects and a thesis during your masters, then yes, it is definitely a big advantage to get into a top school. In any case, I think if you find the professors and research that you want to work with, ranking becomes less important. If you plan to be a top professor in a top school, then I would consider trying to get in a top 20 school.

I'm on the same boat, but in the PhD track. I may come to the visiting weekend, so, maybe I can get some more information about it and will be more than happy to share it with you. But still, I would like to hear from other students/people here about this as well.

The point is maybe he's the only professor there who works on things that you are interested in. I'm talking in general.

It's almost a week already. Let's revive this topic.

The university has an awesome infrastructure (aka super nice buildings) for majors such as business, math, computer science, physics and one of the biggest gym out there,..., but the statistics department locates in a quite old shitty building. It can be a bit depressing Just one thing to take into account.

A computer scientist can be as mathematical and theoretical as any other field. One of my CS professor who is doing a lot of theory in machine learning had a PhD in Math (in one of the top 5 school for Math), but his PhD advisor is a computer science guy with CS degree. I totally lose my interest in system due to the bad grades and the awful professors who taught my OS, architecture courses. However, I saw a lot of professors with mathematical background do system research at my school. Either I'm missing something or ...

little monster (gaga)

I don't know much about system area, but for theoretical CS such as machine learning-AI, algorithm analysis, geometric computation, etc, I think almost all papers are about abstract ideas, proofs and algorithms. At the end of some paper, there are a few experimental results that demonstrate the efficiency of that particular algorithm or method.