belowthree

I address everyone as: I have yet to have anyone object.

It happens, rarely, but unless you already know how you'd go about it it's unlikely you'd be able to do it.

By avian carrier, preferably one that was compliant with RFC 1149 or RFC 2549.

Well... first I'm not sure how many students will get accepted after that point, I wouldn't expect a huge wave. That said, the people the department really wants to court are more or less likely to get a response before the visit day so they can show up. (Or at least, the professors who are at all on the ball already have put the students they really want to court on the list by then... maybe you are awesome but the professor you want to work with doesn't pay attention to admissions... who knows.) I think it's probably best I issue the following as a disclaimer so none of you get the impression I actually know what I'm talking about: I have spoken with zero people on this year's adcom about how the actual adcom part works. My information is all second or third hand and tells me only a little about how the process is structured, that's it. I do not read the minds of the admissions committee. I will be as surprised as anyone else on this board when they get around to releasing more admits, waitlists and rejections.

Before April 15th. (Actually looking at the results page if you get waitlisted you have the fun distinction of hearing back after sometimes...) Yeah, the department's a bit weird, if you look through the history on the results search you'll see that UCSD's sends notifications all over the place. Generally the way the process works from what people have told me about it is that professors look at the list of students and say "hey I want X and I'll fund them!" I don't think masters works this way, no idea. I wish i had more information that I could share with you, but I really don't know much. I know the first round list has been completed though, so generally no news is worse news as time goes on. So... just... wait and hope? I haven't heard back either, it's a bit of a bummer.

Just go ahead and show up and visit. I went and visited several of the schools I was thinking about over winter break. Wanted to see the campuses and departments. It's surprising how much you can judge even when almost everyone is out for break. If you want to actually meet with profs, send them an e-mail beforehand and set up a time before you just show up.

Maybe not the most helpful advice, but this is one thing I would be sure not to write... (The part about literally, especially don't put it in bold.)

Can we really stop this? This just isn't how it works at most schools. The people with multiple accepts should feel free to take the time they need to make a good decision. (I don't by the way. I'm waiting on schools where some people have been accepted too, just calm down and if there's a spot for you they'll let you know.)

I did 11 apps over three weekdays. I didn't care about when any of them other than the first ones were due, I just started them before the first deadline and kept going until they were all done. My first apps were due Dec 15, so they got done two weeks before right alongside the apps with the Jan 15 deadlines. I got them done early to make sure that my LoR writers all got e-mails two weeks before the deadlines so there was nothing preventing my LoR writers from going ahead on submitting the letters to the online systems. This, naturally, did nothing from preventing one of my letter writers from submitting his at the beginning of February. Ah well.

Give our department a little more credit... people factor in for the idea that not everyone is going to accept and I'd imagine that a lot of the pending acceptances are from profs that haven't really figured out who they want to admit yet. Take your time, figure it out, UCSD waitlists a bunch of people each year and we haven't even gotten to that point. When people are actually officially on a waitlist then you might want to go ahead and begin the process of feeling guilty. No need to do it now, feeling guilty this early is just overachieving.

There's a bunch of weird funky research institutes out there. There's also staff positions at universities which are sometimes research related. (Being a sysadmin for a research lab for instance may not be the most direct path, but it often provides a door.) There's also a bunch of R&D jobs in industry but unless you're quite good then you're likely to enter those on the other side of grad school instead of before grad school.

I didn't apply to one school because their app fee was just ridiculous and I applied to two because their website and application fees were just so downright reasonable. I felt that it mattered in terms of how open-minded the department was likely to be, but I wasn't sure. (This was after I screened them all for much more important concerns.)

Ah... the comments always seem a whole lot more useful to me than the numbers.

They might not actually... the round that's went out is the first round of acceptances that are what is currently viewed as top tier. They may take some time with the rest of the apps. UCSD's process is a little odd. I don't know a whole lot about it, but the parts I do know seem like it's a bit tricky. As far as I know, they have not sent out all acceptances yet but the acceptances that have gone out was basically the first list of people that profs said they'd fund from the pool. (Though it's unclear whether all the profs have even bothered to look through and make all their decisions at this point.)

I don't know what programs you're talking about, but this certainly isn't universally true for all NSF programs. (Unless they created a new review process in the last 6-9 months...) With most programs, you do get detailed reviews from each of your reviewers and a panel summary, so you do get feedback... slightly better than you would get back for a paper submission. Actually it seems that paper submissions are closer to what you'd be thinking of as they sometimes provide you the 1-5 scores that the reviewers assigned over several categories. At least in my field...

I looked at a bunch of these through the application process, I'll go ahead and post some of my notes and comments from when I was looking... I'm making a vague attempt to order them. University of Washington, out of the schools you posted, probably has the best security team for systems and networking work. Their security group is large, has plenty of good people and does a lot of good work. If you're interested in doing systems security you should go here unless you really already have a relationship with a really good prof elsewhere and you know he wants to work with you. JHU - JHU's close proximity to the capital and focus on government money provides them with a fertile funding environment. The reason this is important is because this allows JHU to recruit and do research at far greater levels than most schools around here in the rankings. These guys do research and they do a *lot* of it. Some of it is quite good and some of the people here are quite good, Avi Rubin in particular is well known and excellent. I actually really liked a lot of things about JHU, but I have a feeling while the quantity of research is vast, the quality may suffer some. That said, if you personally feel like you do top notch work without getting pushed to do so, then you may do very well here as given their funding numbers, I'd imagine you'd have plenty of support to do interesting work. Princeton - So Felton is the big name here. I think it's interesting that they group PL with security and that seems to reflect itself in a lot of the types of research that happens here. If you want to do hardcore arch or systems security work, you're not going to find as much of that here as you might want. Not so much with the crypto either I would think... (though it's certainly there) That said, this is an interesting group because it's one of the most focused on things like policy and some very macro and global concerns and if you find technology policy as related to security interesting, then this is a great department for that part of the field. Cornell and Brown - I'm grouping these together because my opinion of them is pretty similar. Their security research groups exist, have people doing work in them, but neither are really that good. No major projects or people. (with potentially the exception of Civitas at Cornell which is pretty big within secure voting, but secure voting isn't really really that impressive, it's a great problem, just not that impressive.) Cornell probably gets a slight nudge over Brown, but out of your list, these seem to definitely be on the lower end. This may just be because neither of them are doing any research I actually care about as I originally gave these schools 0-10 scores based on my own research interests. Texas (UT-Austin, yes?) - When I looked at these guys the first reaction I had was "gee what's this big gaping hole doing where a good security group ought to be?" Their security group has a bunch of professor's names down, but only two of them are really legitimate security people. (Shmatikov and Walfish) It looks like Walfish was *just* hired so it seems UT-Austin is noticing the gaping hole in their department and working to fix it. That said, this also means Walfish has few publications under his belt right now and it remains to be seen whether he ends up making an impact. As for Shmatikov... well... he certainly publishes in good places, but I can't really say I liked his work much. Overall I think UT Austin's security group is underpowered and not that great, which was surprising for a department so well thought of for their other programs. University of Maryland (College Park) - These guys don't even pretend to have a security group, which is good, because they don't. Arbaugh is a security guy, but he splits his time with Microsoft now and again and I wasn't actually that impressed with his work last time I saw him talk. It's not that he was bad, he just didn't really impress me that much... you certainly could do security work here, but it'd be tricky.

Software Engineering is generally a field full of people looking for jobs in industry and not a whole lot of research happens. (From what I've seen.) It seems like an odd choice for a PhD, though a reasonable one for an MS. Which means... *drumroll* look for schools with strong masters programs who enroll a lot of people.

It would be a lot easier to answer this if you listed the programs you were talking about and people could chime in with their thoughts about each one. Just asking for strong programs out of all programs in existence is going to be tricky and you'll get a bunch of different answers. I mean you're probably just going to hear the answer that I'll be giving you which is: most of the top 10 schools have strong security groups. There's some ones out of the top 10 with strong security groups too, but it's really hard to just name a top 10. So what schools are you interested in?

Not sure how valid my advice is here, but if I was waitlisted I would be writing an e-mail to the professor I interviewed with very quickly, if only to say hi and mention "hey so I'm waitlisted, lemme know if there's any information I can provide to help out. :)" Or something equally polite yet pushy.

I share your feelings, but wanted to mention that a surprising number of schools I applied to did appear to consider my application. My GPA is lower than yours by about half a point and several schools loaded my additional documents from my website and/or interviewed me. Now it certainly is very painful to actually get an acceptance with a low low GPA, but it does appear that if you have an impressive app they will still look at it. Which has been a comfort. (Although at a few in some ways it hurts to know they did actually look at it and decide to reject it anyways, but there's really no pleasant way to get a rejection letter.)

Man it would be awesome if there was like a tool that everyone could use to post their results. If it was searchable that'd be even better. I mean if you really wanted you could look at the history of the program through the years and see when some of them actually get around to contacting students! Wait, that's right, we have exactly this tool: http://www.thegradcafe.com/survey/index ... t=a&o=&p=1 Anyways... I'm expecting to see the first responses at the end of next week. If their habits don't change it should be between thursday and saturday. It's also possible they send out something this evening, but that seems unlikely.

Preferably with alcohol included in the equation. Poke in the right places and you'll hear all the complaints you'll want. What types of things you hear can tell you a lot, but keep in mind that there's not a grad student in the world who doesn't have a few complaints, so don't be surprised when you poke and things just come tumbling out. If they still don't complain after alcohol and away from their profs, if anything I'd be worried.

Yeah of course, I wasn't asking whether or not it was a good deal, fellowships are always a good deal if you can get them, I was just curious about some of the broader implications like: 1) Does this mean they bothered to even check if someone was a good fit for the IGERT program or are they just telling everyone to apply to see what happens and then deal with everything else later. If I was the department I think I'd probably end up doing the latter but if they were doing the former, that'd be nice to know. 2) If I get rejected from the IGERT program, will the department then go ahead and look for other ways to fund me or is this just what they tell applicants to do when the department doesn't really want to fund them. Sounds like the former is probably closer to the truth but I was worried about the latter. 3) If you apply to a school's IGERT program and then later decide maybe you didn't want to go, is that a bad thing? It sounds like the answer to this is also generally no. I asked the same question of the person who called me and she seemed to indicate that although they'd generally like you to know that you're going, if you can't, you can't. As for a fellowship being a good deal because of no work requirements, I was chatting with my advisor about it today and apparently IGERT money is one of the few fellowships which comes with a few minor strings. Apparently there's usually some extra classes to take or some other strange things involved in the program. When I talked with my advisor about this at my current school his largest concern seemed to be that I don't generally react well to being required to take courses I'm not interested in, so he thought that those requirements might be a bit more problematic in my case, he seems to know me a bit too well at this point. That said, there's no way I'd turn down or not apply for funding over coursework requirements, (I'd probably wash floors for funding if they wanted to offer me that) just thought it was interesting that it was the first thing he brought up when I mentioned it. Don't interpret me asking as me being hesitant over whether applying is a good idea. I just figured I'd post a thread to engage in some related idle speculation while I'm filling out the application...

Only one of them does... I'd have thought two of the other would... oh well.

So on the UIC website it said I was conditionally admitted. I didn't know what that meant until today, but given my low GPA I just assumed it was going to be something dumb like a GPA requirement I'd have to meet and maybe something I wouldn't be able to meet and it would be horrible and I'd have to fight for an exception to get in and.... No, I got the official letter from the graduate college finally today, it turns out the reason for the conditional acceptance is just that I haven't graduated yet and they want another copy of my transcripts if I go there to make sure I actually have a degree by the time I enroll. So that worked out rather nicely. No one is going to rescind your acceptance unless you don't graduate, lied on your app or maybe commit enough felonies between now and then that it becomes awkward or something.