belowthree

I don't really feel like it's important schools tell me or that I deserve reasons. Then again, I already know what the largest downside to my admissions file is, so maybe it's understandable that I don't feel the need to know as much. That said, if a program where to reject me for a reason *other* than my GPA I'd be very curious what it was, though I certainly don't think they owe me an explanation. Also I think if they were to actually hand out explanations it would just cause people to complain more. Can you really blame them for not telling you anything? Even if you personally wouldn't, many of your peers would. It'd be a nightmare.

No one pursuing grad school is so daft as to do it for the money... okay, maybe the bio folks. I have no idea why my peers are a more balanced cross-section, I'm going to blame it on the EE, MAE and structural folks. Conservative bastions, those. I wonder what would happen if we omitted people just applying for master's degrees. (Since arguably, at least on the engineering/sciences side, some of those *are* just in it for the money.) Or to be less discriminating towards the many master's students who intend to get a PhD later, perhaps another poll split down "planning to pursue a career in academia" vs. "planning to pursue a career in industry"?

Well in engineering it's not uncommon to do internships at companies over the summer your first few years. (Until you can't leave your research during the summer anymore) This provides a nice income for those months and allows you to pay off debt and put some money in a sock for next term.

Wow huge gap between sci/eng and humanities. For those asking: Social Sciences go under humanities as far as I'm concerned...

Zero but I hope to eventually change that. Fun topic, good post, etc..

So the IGERT coordinator at the school I've been accepted at was nice enough to call me today and tell me I should apply for their fellowship. I assume this is a good thing, but I'm curious exactly how this might have come about. The IGERT program isn't really directly related to my research, but I could make an odd fringe case for it and hey who knows. What I'm a bit more curious about though is whether or not this is something the department likely did because they don't expect to fund me in different ways. I haven't gotten any funding information yet, so did they just take everyone they aren't planning to fund from their admit list, throw the names over the IGERT coordinator and tell the coordinator to call around and get everyone to apply and see who'd get funded under that? I mean it doesn't really change whether or not I should apply for it (I should) but I'm curious if anyone has an interpretation of what this actually means...

I picked out a bottle of late harvest wine at Trader Joe's for each of the professors who wrote my letters. For the outside researcher I arraigned to have a fifth of bourbon placed on his desk. I'm not sure I'd recommend this though, it's easy to go wrong. I don't think there's one good answer to what to get someone. The things I gave were pretty personal. The bourbon I gave was my favorite type, (though I actually rarely drink bourbon, but I though he'd appreciate it more than vodka, it was a hunch) the wine I gave was something I had recently taken to, etc... The only reason I was comfortable doing this is I had drank with three of the four of the people who wrote my recs and was pretty sure the fourth wasn't averse to the idea. I didn't know the three profs in a context where I felt comfortable giving them hard alcohol, but a late harvest wine seemed perfect. Oh, and in an amusing LoR + drinking related story: My friends and I naturally screened the wine for quality before I gave it to my letter writers. Not carefully evaluating the wines would have simply been irresponsible. So there's one excuse to drink during the application process. (You know, if you didn't already have reasons to drink...)

The applicant waiving their right to force a program to divulge the letter is entirely different from whether or not the applicant actually ends up seeing it. It's fairly important to remember this distinction. Nothing about waiving your right to view a letter prevents a professor from giving a letter to a student or even, in some cases, asking a prof to give you a letter to read...

There seems to be two camps of applicants: the first camp believes that letters of recommendation are a hurdle they just have to pass and they need to figure out three professors who will vouch for them to complete their application. These people view letters of rec as an annoying requirement that's painful and takes a lot of time. Their goal is to get their letters, move on and avoid getting bad letters. The latter camp of applicants view letters of recommendation as an opportunity to provide admissions committees with the information that actually matters. For the most part people in this camp face the decision of having to figure out which professors would provide the best recommendations and choosing people carefully to provide a broad view of the applicant from the most diverse perspectives. The former camp generally wants the process of getting letters of rec to be easier, less of a hassle and less fraught with problems that could provide downsides to their applications. The latter camp actually understands that if everyone got only excellent letters of rec they're absolutely meaningless and there's an actual reason the letters of rec are important. Unfortunately for the people in the former camp, most professors are in the latter, so don't expect the expectation of confidentiality to evaporate overnight. I called it a dick move because I think it's rude to demand they give you a copy of their letter when you're asking them for a favor. I understand your reasons for wanting to do it, but you shouldn't be asking anyone who might give you a bad letter in the first place. I agree that professors should tell people what they think of them honestly and not just trash talk an applicant in their letter. But at the same time every professor I asked to recommend me did so knowing that they could be honest with any admissions committees they sent a letter to. I asked them to do me the favor of taking some time to assess me, judge me and write up the results of that and send it to their colleagues. They shouldn't have to answer to what I think of their letters. This is something I value and if they're saying good things about me I want it to be because they honestly think good things and not just because they don't want to have to deal with what I might think when I read the letter later. In some ways, demanding that letters of rec be more public undermines the ability for professors to actually write helpful letters of rec. If it turns out that they don't think very well of me then that's a fairly serious error in my own judgment and I shouldn't have asked them to judge me. Yes, it's normally polite for them to politely tell you that they aren't comfortable writing you a letter if a student makes the error of asking the wrong person for a rec, but this is a courtesy to cover up for the requester's error in judgment.

Looking at program committees and editorial boards tell you who did interesting research in the past, looking at publication records in current conferences tells you who is doing interesting research now. (Where now is defined as six months prior, but hey... ) Both help, but you may not find that new precocious associate professor that just landed at a new institution if you look only at program committees or place too much weight on them. (Though usually by the time someone manages a position as a professor they're on a PC somewhere...)

Heh, I thought about that... I'm in computer security and we bleed occasionally over in the non-computer part of security as well. But I think then that any professor in that field would also be even more likely to maintain the security of their rec letters.

I'm not in computer vision, (edit: nor computer graphics for that matter! Man there's really no reason I should get these confused...) but I think this applies... two professors that I asked or heard answering this question gave the following advice: 1) Look at the archives for the top conferences in your field 2) Look at who publishes 3) Look at who publishes really awesome work 4) Figure out which institutions contain those people 5) There's your list of schools

That seems like a dick move... I'm sure if you handle it with enough tact then maybe it would work out, but I imagine there's plenty of professors who would happily tell you to take a flying leap even if their rec letter was going to be strong. Maybe our fields are different, but I can think of several professors in mine who would happily tell a student to shove off if they made such demands. As it should be, I think...

It depends on what budgetary streams you're talking about. Universities are a complex organism that derive money from a diverse number of sources. Cutbacks in state funding for the UC system at least generally are going to cause changes in the number of students these institutions enroll at the undergraduate levels more than most. It will also have an effect on student fees and tuition costs which will likely go up. However, it's unclear to me that this will have a terrible impact on graduate students. Especially those who are getting paid out of a grant. Grants are already written with the expectation that tuition goes up and most departmental funding actually comes out of grant overhead, which means that the funding streams likely to most directly effect graduate students relies on an institution's research funding. For those institutions who derive most of their money from federal funding, the picture actually looks reasonably sunny as the new administration has been quite vehement to pack funding for science into most of its major initiatives. The recent stimulus bill has more funding for science and a lot of that is going to go directly back into universities over the next two or three years. Science funding looks to be going up and not down. Which isn't to say everything is rosy, there certainly are going to be places that lose grants from industry and that's going to cause more contention for federal dollars... but if you look at an institution's federal funding rates you should do alright. Conveniently, I computed this the other day while procrastinating about applications. It's not formatted very well because the forum doesn't seem to allow me to use tables... but this data was pulled from the combined CS+EE NSF numbers. These are the top 32 institutions that get federal money tracked by the NSF, as well as how much money that really ends up being. This data is for CS and EE both combined. If it says 99999 that's because I included it even though I can't exactly place it in my ranking. There may be other schools which exist that show up in those places too, but for the first 32 I can guarantee that those are the top 32 funded schools from the data I had. Dollars in thousands: 1 JHU 203294 2 GaTech 161860 3 CMU 138491 4 UIUC 121494 5 USC 118112 6 UCSD 114651 7 Penn State 94628 8 UT Austin 79497 9 MIT 78201 10 Berk 74978 11 U MD CP 57462 12 Stanford 53860 13 OH State 49904 14 Vtech 49851 15 Cornell 42463 16 Purdue 42433 17 UCSB 41752 18 U Mich Sys 41133 19 WashU 40972 20 UCLA 37418 21 AZ State 34358 22 Amherst 28979 23 UCI 26922 24 Uwisc-M 25247 25 U MN 24405 26 Washington 22874 27 Princeton 22682 28 Brown 22298 29 U Hi Man 21252 30 Drexel 20492 31 Clemson 20136 32 NC State 20031 9999 Vanderbilt 19924 9999 U AZ 19786 9999 U UT 18167 9999 U Chicago 18144 9999 Univ Fl 16808 9999 UIC 16778 9999 Or H&S 16702 9999 UCD 16167 9999 Northeastern 15976 9999 Caltech 15566 9999 Duke 15497 9999 SUNY 15058 9999 RPI 14446 9999 IN U 12397 9999 NC Chapel-H 11764 9999 Dart 10764 9999 UCSC 6917 Edit: Numbers corrected, sorry about the white spacing, this forum software is really stupid when it comes to tabs.

Calm down, I wasn't judging your research or anyone's on here. I was just pointing out that rejection is something we all face at some point. I wasn't saying anyone's work is not innovative, but rather that any innovative scientist will eventually face rejection. If you haven't yet it doesn't mean you're not innovative, it means you're early on in your research career. Good for you if you haven't gotten a paper rejected yet, that's really quite good! Nothing in my post was supposed to insult anyone are claim that anyone's research wasn't good. I was in fact, trying to say that any claims of such are totally ridiculous and pointless. My intention with that statement specifically is I was trying to point out that we should just all calm down and accept that sometimes people get rejected and sometimes it's fair and othertimes it isn't and worrying about it is a waste of everyone's time. Unless you honestly have a suggestion on how the admissions process could be closer to perfect that scales... in which case, suggest away, I'm sure many schools would actually be legitimately interested, most schools know that their admissions processes aren't that great. I generally agree with most of what you wrote, but I did want to quickly jump in and disabuse you of the notion that any serious chip fabrication project could be undertaken and completed from conception to publication in 18 months. That would be insanely quick and far below the norm for that kind of project. Some things really do take a long time and have research cycles on the order of years, especially if you end up need to snag a grant (and donated fab time, you'll need both) before you can even start, in which case you're looking at probably a year from concept to funding (if things go quickly) and then potentially years more for design, implementation, fabrication and publication.

Well I've written two NSF grant proposals (okay technically one that I wrote again to resubmit) and I got rejected most places, so why don't you all quiet down and play nice. (I'm pretty sure I'm not helping much with this flamefest...) michigantrumpet: I think everyone knows you must have done some pretty good work if you ended up getting in all the places you did. Clearly there's more there than just a name on a paper and I'm sure your recommendation letters spelled it out quite nicely for the admissions committees. Anyone who thinks those letters were important just because of the name and not because of what they said about you probably isn't worth arguing with. As for the rest of you... life's tough, deal with it? It sucks to get rejected, but get used to it, you're going to get rejected a lot for conferences, grants and all kinds of things. It's just how it is. (And if you aren't getting rejected, your work is probably not as innovative as it should be...)

Hey, out of curiosity, did you find a good way of dealing with this type of thing in your application? I didn't really figure out how to deal with the papers that were in various stages of progress on the various projects I work on... Did you list them as in progress or something? The other problem is ours weren't currently being submitted to a conference by the time the application period rolled around, so I didn't really feel comfortable listing any of them...

Yes, straight from undergrad. I decided not to go for a master's first because of issues with funding. (Namely, I need it and MS students don't get funded.) My grades last term have me on academic probation this term, so I can sympathize with not liking your grades from last term. I have to say, every acceptance (sample size: one) I get while on academic probation gives me a slight thrill that I've stuck it to the system. It's pretty juvenile.

It does sound like Harvard would be a better fit. If you were interested in applying any of your work to security though, it is possible UCSD's sysnet group would find interesting things to do for you... you should contact some of the professors CC'd on your acceptance and check what they were interested in you for. If you want, PM me the list of names and I'll tell you which gets overloaded with e-mail and which would likely be the best to start with.

You certainly don't need one to apply, but getting accepted is another matter entirely. Most schools do have policies that they won't accept students with below a 3.0, but at many places exceptions can, on occasion, be made. It's certainly not easy to get accepted... But it can happen. I'm getting a crash course in terms of answering this very question... stay tuned!

Ah Berkeley, interviewing me just made me consider you a possibility... Well I've seen this coming for a week, so no surprise. Still annoying, it looks like I won't get a chance to be in the Bay Area for another 4-7 years. Frustrating.

The harbor cruise is not as impressive as it sounds if it's what I think it is. (But I'm happy the department came up with that, it's a good gimmick...) But check out both campuses, see what you like. I'm not familiar with Harvard's program, but it didn't look all that great to me when I was looking at schools. This all vastly changes about based on your area of focus though... what is yours? I can at least tell you whether the cluster you'd be working in here is good and probably could provide a brief comment or two on any potential advisors you might be looking at... As for thread jacking, I hope no one is too concerned about it, they can just skip over these posts if they don't like them, or we can take this conversation to PM.

Your signature mentions you got into UCSD already so you're not in a bad position. The program here is reasonable and well funded. There are certainly better programs, but things here aren't bad and the weather certainly is good. (Though that gets on my nerves sometimes, I could do with a spot of rain now and again.) We actually have parties when there's thunderstorms here because they're so rare. I remember sitting out on a porch my freshmen year with a friend or three and quietly drinking, playing music and coding as the thunder just kind of rumbled overhead. *coughs* Alright, I'll be quiet now.

This is another point where I think things get a bit field specific as some fields basically have money falling out of trees and so in some places finding funding isn't a terrible terrible challenge and usually TA is the funding of last resort and in some departments, is virtually always available. (In others, this isn't true at all, ask around and see how many masters students are getting funding on the spare TA positions... if there's a bunch of masters students with TA positions then they're likely to always have some left for PhD students who aren't funded through other means.) Plus once you get an advisor as long as he keeps the grant money rolling in you can get funded as an RA... But again, this all depends on the field. Well, not just the field actually, the department too, some are vastly better funded than others, I know at least the NSF releases numbers for institutions in terms of federal funding by broad subject area... look and see where yours is on the list. My current institution is well funded, I don't know about the ones you are applying to.

No, not much, I just wouldn't even bother listing it as something that supports your application except on your CV along with the rest of the things you did. Your research experience (or lack of it) is worlds more important. I only brought it up because you need to clarify in your own mind what things do and don't help your app if you were to ever do this in the future so you can focus on the things that help the most. Whatever research experience you have should have been completely highlighted and explained in depth, in comparison to that a helpdesk job is irrelevant.