belowthree

I haven't taken a spring break yet and it doesn't look like I intend to this year either. For quite a few years now breaks just mean I don't have classes and most of the undergrads go away. Campus is quiet, it's nice. The downside of getting involved in research as an undergrad: you start turning into a grad student early.

I suppose it depends on the funding agency and the field. I think at that point they're writing grant proposals more to show that they can (departments that are hiring them do care) than that they necessarily expect to access the money in the grants. Where do you think some people's RA funding comes from? But maybe they're doing something tricky and they manage to take portions of that grant with them... but in my field and in my institution grad students can't even be PIs on a grant, (grad students apply for grants under their advisors) so I'm not sure how you'd explain to the funding org that you'd need to move an award because someone who doesn't even have their name on the grant moved to a new institution... Uh, I should mention that private funding is a completely different story and when I talked with a company about funding my research they suggested that if they were going to go for that they'd go ahead put my name on the grant so that I could move it when I moved. (And I was an undergrad...) So... there's certainly some types of funding you can get to move with you. Just not most of the big ones that actually allow nice things universities care about (like "overhead" costs) to be deducted from the award. This is actually quite common in my field... so it may not be as far out there as you'd think.

TA life, RA life, Submitting Grants, Submitting Papers...

Okay, first off, I should mention that it just doesn't happen. Pretty much if you don't already know what you'd do to flip it it's not going to flip. They made their decision for a reason and you telling them you really want to go just won't cut it. That said, the two instances where I've heard of it happening: 1) Applicant X has a very close relationship with well-known professor Y at his home institution and Y makes a phone call on behalf of X and says basically "hey didn't you read what I had to say about X in my letter of rec? Are you guys dumb? I told you this guy is great, he's awesome, you should take him and I'll stake my reputation on it." 2) Applicant X has a very close relationship with professor Y at the institution he was planning on attending. Y totally meant to get X in and something went wrong with the paperwork or Y forgot to tell the adcom he wanted X by the deadline. He calls up the adcom and says "Oh yeah I forgot to mention I really want to work with X and I'm going to fund him." Usually even having both of these things won't flip a rejection. Just the only time I've ever heard of rejections flipping at all was because of one of these two cases. Basically there's nothing you can do, the only possible person who could flip this for you is a prof willing to stake their reputation on you. In all of the cases I've heard the only thing the applicant ever had to do was mention to the professor that they got rejected and then the prof went ahead and got on the phone. No questions, no prompting, no requests. The prof just went and did it. If someone doesn't instantly come to mind then I'm sorry, but there's likely nothing you can do and you should accept your rejection letter with pride.

Unfortunately grants don't usually move with you until you're already a professor. (And sometimes not even then.) Grants are assigned to institutions, not individuals. At least for the NSF, I assume most others are the same. So it's not like you can get a grant for your project and then run around and ask which institutions want to hire you. Unless you're talking about something like the CAREER award or a similar program?

I can think of no schools that people would really think of as top schools in CS which don't have strong clusters in most of the sub-field areas. The broad strength that allows them to be good in so many areas at once is part of what defines a top program in CS. There certainly are schools with specific strong areas and strong people in certain sub-fields, but they aren't top programs, they're just schools where it wouldn't be entirely idiotic for someone to turn down a top program to go there instead. Your field may work differently, but in ours there is a certain set of schools everyone is referring to when they use the term "top schools" or "top programs." It is fairly well defined. I think part of the issue might be in CS our departments can actually get big enough where you do have departments that can have some top people in every sub-field within one department. The department I'm in now hires in clusters and tries to hire three top people for every sub-field within computer science and that's just how they build research groups. If they only have two next recruitment time they're looking for a third. One of the departments in our field has 126 professors. That's enough to cover most sub-fields and that's a top program. I agree with you that the distinction can be silly, but you're really not getting that in this case the definition is not silly for the reasons you think it is. In some fields there are departments that you just rely that most of the research that comes out of them is going to be pretty reasonable. Which isn't to say it's going to always be the best or that other schools can't beat it (they can and do) but just that at the very least you can look at some institutions and assume that the work which comes out is going to be reasonable. Anyways... I think I'm just getting redundant at this point.

Some fields really don't care about teaching experience. I think they figure that if someone isn't already a decent teacher they can learn by doing. If the person turns out not to be a good teacher, then they just stick them to teaching graduate students. It's a little weird, but in the research heavy fields they decide whether or not to hire you because of your research. If you turn out to be a good teacher then they'll let you teach classes where that's needed and if you turn out to be a poor teacher they'll let you stick to teaching courses where people don't care. So in some fields whether or not an applicant is trained to teach is not that relevant. That said, even in my field most program mandate people spend at least a little bit of time as a TA.

Very Good Will Hunting.

10 ) Everyone who wrote you a letter of rec just sniggers now everytime you encounter them. 9 ) You wake up one morning to realize that you never actually filed your application in the first place. 8 ) They send you a back a job application and it's not for a TA or RAship or for their institution at all. 7 ) The graduate coordinator calls and asks if you got confused and were trying to apply to the university's undergraduate program. 6 ) They mail you back your application with red pen editing marks all over it. 5 ) When you go to a conference and see the professors from the school you applied to, they all start laughing when you step out of the room. 4 ) All the rest of the folks at the conference smile at you strangely for the rest of the event and you get the impression that there's a joke being passed around. 3 ) They call and tell you that you needed to get your decision back to them by April 15th... of last year. 2 ) The status site just stops letting you login. 1 ) They refund your application fee on your credit card and you never hear from them again.

Nope, I agree completely that the cutoff is field specific and even perspective specific, each person has their own idea on where the line is. (Often biased on drawing it just slightly below their own program conveniently!) But this is not my point. (Though I will point out that the OP and I do actually share the same field, so it's not like I was telling someone in a completely different field the my own ideas about how things work in my own field must magically apply to them.) Right, all of these factors are incredibly relevant when an applicant decides which program is right for them, but if the OP is truly wondering what defines a top program in terms of reputation then that determination is independent of these factors. There are plenty of reasons to chose a program that isn't a top program because it's right and better for you, but that doesn't mean suddenly the program gets to call itself a top program or that people will think of it as such. Again, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that whether or a not a program is a top program should necessarily matter in the least. I'm simply saying that if we want to define what a top program is then these factors aren't included in the equation, despite the fact that they're all excellent factors that an applicant should use to select a program for themselves. The OP asked "what is considered a top program" not "how would I find out which program is right for me?" The latter question is dealt with on these forums so much that it can be very easy to run off and provide the answer to the one we see all the time instead of realizing that the question here is different. However in the end this may also be a case of the OP simply asking the wrong question and you answering the question he *should* have asked. (Unclear, given what I've seen from the OP in the past it seems he knew what he was asking and was actually asking about the reputation of a school and then will factor that into his decision with the types of things you talked about and go from there.)

Oh wait are we talking about TAs actually *teaching* classes? That almost never happens at the public school I'm at completing my undergrad degree... discussion sections only. On extremely rare occasions a TA will be pulled in to teach a course during the summer.

Absolutely send the e-mail asking about the research. The better part is you should feel free to send the even bolder e-mail asking questions like "I'm wondering what types of research you'd envision me working on" or "I'm curious how you see me fitting into the research you're currently doing" if you know that the other prof has already expressed interest in working with you. One nice way to do this would be to respond to the original prof's e-mail with a polite thank-you and then ask some open questions slanted towards the other prof. Feel free to flip-flop them on the to/cc fields and actually address your message directly to the professor you plan to actually work with. (What you do in the opening "dear soandso" line is up to you, you can either put them both, put none of them or just put the guy you want to work with) This way you keep the original prof in the loop, acknowledge that professor's e-mail and your e-mail ends up being an e-mail where you were referred to talk to the prof by one of his colleagues instead of an e-mail from some grad student walking off the street. If you do it right you should be able to accomplish all of these goals in one concise message. The cc line is absolutely your friend and I urge you to use it like a surgical instrument.

I don't think you'll find that numbers are as useful as you think: Here's me by the numbers: Program: PhD, Computer Science GPA: 2.7 GRE: 780Q, 570V, 4.0W Publications: 0 So far: Three acceptances and counting. You can see the schools in my signature until I replace them with numbers later. I won't be enumerating them here because I'm not interested in providing future applicants bad notions about the competitiveness of programs that were kind enough to accept me. In other words the folks out there who think numbers like GPA and GRE provide an accurate gauge of ones ability to get into a program should feel free to bite me. It's not a useless metric, I'll be the first to admit to that, but it's not really that *useful* either.

If you haven't already got an acceptance, that's bad news. If you got a rejection today, that's bad news. Everything else is just news. It's extremely unclear how they decided who to reject today. I suppose if we knew the profiles of everyone who got rejected we might be able to find a little more, but my GPA is low and my last name and first name start near the beginning of the alphabet and I haven't heard anything... so... there's a few possible things they could have been going by and aren't.

At most places priority goes to later year students so funding the first year is the most difficult. This isn't always the case, but I'm sure they wouldn't mind if you asked...

This is just the CS in me that has to caution against relying on this. E-mail doesn't actually work where someone has to let their software send you those notifications and there's no way for you to force them to when they open it. I certainly never allow anyone to get notifications like this when I read e-mail. That said, I agree that sending a follow up is not necessary unless there's actual content in it. I recently did send an e-mail similar to this a grad coordinator, but the main purpose of it was actually to remind a professor that I had asked him some questions last week. I put him on the cc list for the e-mail and he promptly responded instead of the coordinator and then the answers to my other e-mail came quickly afterwards. So this is one effective mechanism of actually using these types of messages. To address the rest of your question, I think it's probably okay to attempt to contact them once more, but beyond that might be excessive. One other way to deal with this is if you find that a graduate coordinator or someone else there is responsive when you e-mail them, you might politely inquire that you're waiting to hear back from a faculty member to try and make a decision and you're wondering if they might be out of town or otherwise occupied and if they aren't how it might be best to contact them.

Uhm... this seems to be an excellent definition of how people should pick out a top choice for themselves. It is not however, a very good definition of what people mean when they say top program. Unclear which the OP was asking for, but the term top program generally refers to the reputation of the place, not the fit with the individual researcher. I agree with you that it's stupid to evaluate a program based on it's reputation, but that doesn't make your post a whole lot more responsive to the original question if the OP was actually asking about how people see different programs and their reputations. (And no, a top program is not based on rankings alone, especially not the USNews rankings. It's based on the rankings prevalent in people's minds in the field, which is a bit tricky to put down on paper, though a lot of ranking systems tend to make a good stab at capturing it. If you want to search just based on research quality go to the top publication venue in your sub-field and see which institutions are publishing there.)

Probably included. The funding offer I got broke it all down for me so I could see... but if it doesn't you have to assume it's included, they won't miss an opportunity to make the number appear bigger. Hell the offer I got included the tuition waiver as part of the number at the top of the page in terms of how much support they were offering...

In my mind, anything top 10 in a field can go ahead and claim to be a top program, things just in the top 20 are stretching it but will claim that anyways.

You can e-mail some faculty and see if anyone is interested in working with you enough to fund you.

Whoever is raging out on the results page should calm down... too much pent up frustration perhaps?

Me too. No funding though, I think that's common for them... they offer hilariously more slots than they can fund and let it figure itself out. Or at least I think I remember hearing that somewhere. Anyways, I e-mailed to find out who took an interest in my application so I can see if they're interested in funding me. Also Wisconsin seems hilariously cold and I think my little Californian self might just turn into an icicle coming into contact with the place, so there's many things to think about. Certainly I'd have to stop wearing sandals year-round...

Yeah you really have to be careful where you publish, especially as an international student... there's just so many lousy conferences overseas that if you don't have some strong work in conferences well known in your field you won't get any recognition for your ideas. Unfortunately this means you have to shoot for a much higher standard a lot of the time... the reason I'm still unpublished is because we've only been applying to top tier conferences and we weren't quite ready to do that yet... Anyways... a few handy guides: Specifically for security: http://faculty.cs.tamu.edu/guofei/sec_conf_stat.htm (Aim for Tier 1, but publications in Tier 2 are very reasonable.) General: http://www.core.edu.au/rankings/Confere ... 0Main.html (I think this ranking is somewhat dubious and not all that great in terms of correctly distinguishing between A and A+ conferences, but it does provide a good reference on which conferences to avoid. Generally you should aim to publish at no conference rated lower than an A unless you have a good reason. (i.e. it's a beginning conference or workshop or something you really want to publish in and you don't particularly care about that paper being seen as particularly notable.) The citeseer impact ranking, in my mind, is completely dumb and doesn't correspond very well to how much people respect conferences, but it also exists.

Hmmm... personally I wouldn't ever infer the correct mechanism for addressing someone based on what a faculty member would call them. They probably have a very very different relationship with the staff member than a recently admitted grad student would. I would be surprised if a faculty member *wouldn't* be on the first name basis with staff even at a school where staff mostly would expect formality with people they hadn't worked with for years.

I know at least in my department at my school if a professor is interested in sticking up for a PhD student (read: they commit to funding that student) then the student can go through an internal process to switch their degree type from an MS to a PhD with a one page form. (This means that a tricky undergraduate can go from a BS to a BS/MS to a PhD without ever having to take the GRE. But it requires a lot of things to work out well, usually entails paying for the first year or two of grad school and you have to be good enough to get a professor to fund you that it would have been wise of you to apply elsewhere instead anyways...) So... it really depends on the department.