belowthree

I happen to be bouncing between one UC from undergraduate to another for graduate work. As much as our schools are getting completely rocked right now and faculty recruitment is shot, staff retention is shot and undergraduate enrollments are being restricted... graduate students are just slightly more insulated. For one, they've been explicitly excluded from the pay cuts that are likely to implemented in the UC system shortly. (As far as I know they'll be implemented about 2 minutes after they figure out how to program the payroll systems to do them, they already announced the new policies.) Second, grant money funds a lot of this type of thing. We're really hurting for state funding, but California schools aren't losing grant money any faster than anyone else is. TA positions are going to be around still. Probably restricted a bit, but they'll be alive. Now in terms of first year fellowships, that will probably get impacted. There's some UCs that generally don't fund students until their second year and you might start seeing that in more departments. I'm not disagreeing with frankdux that funding will be a bit harder, but I just happen to know a bit about how the UC funding streams work and graduate students happen to be lucky to be on the ones that aren't as affected by the whole California melting down thing. Or so I'll keep saying, unless they tell me not to expect my stipend in September. If they do, I'll let gradcafe know. Don't get me wrong, funding is tight everywhere. But in this instance I'm not sure UC schools are a whole lot worse off than some of the schools that lost amazingly large percentages of their endowments. At least in terms of graduate student funding. In every other respect... we're really hurting. Sorry for the digression, just wanted to address this since I've seen people say these types of things lately.

Ever?

Just get your applications mostly done before you leave in September. Pretend as if that was the deadline. You have the time and then you won't have to worry about it during the rush anyways. Faculty members are probably going to be more available and have less letters to write... and that way you won't have to stress about it when you're trying to figure out a new country.

Well, the best way is probably to meet them at a conference and buy them a drink.

Hmm... talking about classes is the one thing I forgot to discuss with my advisor. Is it terribly typical to plan this quite a bit before the start of the term?

Didn't study. Did fine.

These scores won't present a problem to your application, but these scores won't really help you much either. No scores really would...

Not having lab/research experience kills a lot of applicants regardless of whether or not they had Ws or Fs. Obviously the OP would want to have a strong research background by the time application season hits. In any field really, though obviously it's more important in some. Research experience is one of the best ways to overcome a bad academic record. But a bunch of As in the last several years works too. So going with both is probably wise no matter what field the OP is in.

If they're interested in your research they'll be interested in you.

I just graduated two weeks ago, I'm not ready to go back for a bit longer...

Generally if you already know you want a PhD you should go directly for one where you can. Better funding, for one.

I think it's a good plan not to bother to chose one or the other and just apply for fall to the schools you'd want to go to, and then if that doesn't work out, apply again for the spring. (or the following fall)

My guess: Not really. I'd still do it anyways, and talk about how you get engaged when you're passionate about something and therefore your major GPA is meaningful in that it's the level of performance that can be expected of you when you're engaged and excited.

There's no simple way to answer that. You get a feel for it after awhile. Until then, you can use where the research is published as a rough guide. For people not familiar with your sub-field, this is likely what they'll have to do anyways. If something's published at a top-notch world-class conference that generally means that it had to beat out at least some other high quality research to get published. This isn't always true and sometimes things just happen for odd reasons. But it's a close approximation and usually what adcoms rely on. If it's published in a good place, it'll be viewed as good research. Unfortunately this often means that good research published in a bad venue gets overlooked. Although if someone in your field actually reads the paper (likely to some extent if your application gets beyond a certain point) they might be able to tell, but this will only happen if they determine you're promising and if you publish in a junk venue you might not ever get that far.

I'm pretty sure this is rare in engineering, but I'm on the crazy CS end of it, so maybe it happens in the other eng fields?

Letters, letters, letters, letters.

Option 2, but if for some reason you feel like the letter from the first professor could also be exceptional you should feel free to ask for one from that professor as well. Then: 1) You have a backup if someone falls through. (It happens, one of my letter writers submitted my letter extremely late, I would have had an incomplete app most places during their review window had I not had a fourth reference.) 2) For the schools that really seem like they'd get annoyed at more than three letters, you can figure out which faculty members know which other faculty and send the three most appropriate to the adcom. 3) For most schools they won't mind one additional letter as long as it's only one of them. (Be careful though, I am not in you field so this could be completely wrong, it may be that in fact in your field adcoms really do mind additional letters.) But don't do four letters unless you feel like they're all going to be really good. Your letter writers should all be enthusiastic to write a letter for you when you bring it up.

No, I haven't noticed any particular subfield that people universally gravitate too... everyone seems to develop their own likings. I know there's a lot of math in that part of the field, but outside of that I'm pretty clueless with what the AI folks are up to. That sounds like a decent deal. Do you know the professors well enough where you'd have a route to a research assistantship a semester or two later? Yes, you'd want to take the research-based masters route if your program offers a choice. Your goal would be to do good world-class (seriously, world-class) research that shows admission committees you're ready and capable to step in on day one and impress the hell out of them. If you think you can stay were you are and be funded and do good research there, then staying seems like a reasonable idea. If you do good work you'll be able to move someone people have heard of for your PhD. You may not have a particularly need for MIT or Berkeley, but you should shoot for that level of work anyways and then allow yourself to be mildly disappointed if they end up rejecting you. (At which point you can accept some other wonderful school's offer.) Yes... if you can do good work there, it will be recognized. The better schools are better because it tends to be easier to do good work there (and they tend to demand it more often) not because people going there are inheriently better. If you feel like you can do good work at UNT then that work will be recognized more or less fairly. (I mean, yes, there will be a slight coloring that the work was from UNT, but sometimes that coloring can work in your favor, i.e. even if faculty member thinks badly of your school they may still go "wow this is impressive work for a student from there".)

Hand written letter. There, more personal.

If they want you they'll fund you. GPA has little to do with that. If your GPA makes the top schools want you less they might not fund you.

Look at HPC (High performance computing) or Parallel Computing Labs.

Yeah CS is pretty different in this regard. Everyone gets an 800 on the quant or close, so it doesn't really matter much. It can hurt you if you don't get good scores, but otherwise it's pretty irrelevant. Verbal needs to just be not bad, unless you're a foreign student, in which case they might want to see better scores. (Doesn't sound like this is an issue for your BF.) Most important factors for CS are still going to be his LoRs, just like in most other fields. He sounds like his GPA is in decent shape, a decent statement with some standard LoRs should probably slot him in as an unfunded MS student at most schools. Funding being considerably trickier and often varies depending on which school he goes to. If you go as an MS student to a school where they accept unfunded PhD students or have a lot of PhD students doing TAships to pull their stipends... then you're going to have a much harder time getting funded. But there's plenty of schools that fund most of their PhD students as researchers and have plenty of spare TAships open for MS students where even if they aren't explicitly funded they can get funding. (Maybe takes them a quarter or two, but they get it.)

I'm of the opinion that the type of work you do far far outweighs the ranking of the program you happen to be in. Which isn't to say highly ranked programs are bad, indeed, it can be far far easier to do excellent research at a highly ranked program where the standards are high and you're surrounded by brilliant people. But if you feel you can do good work at your current institution, good world-class work, then it will be recognized. Just make sure you're getting into top publication venues, etc... where you're actually competing against research from the higher ranked programs and not just sticking to local conferences. If you keep doing that, by the time you graduate with a PhD, your program may not be unranked anymore.

Doubt it would make much of a difference unless you were looking at a math-based subfield, which there are several in CS. So what type of work do you plan to do? Your qualifications do look a little slim for a PhD program perhaps... you might want to spin through a Masters first and grab some research experience.

Then UCSD IR/PS probably, but I'm not in your field and am slightly biased since I go to and like the place. (UCSD, not IR/PS) But I know we're really good if pacific rim is something you're interested in. Then again, Columbia. But $30k better in UCSD's strength area? I doubt it. Ask one of your professors.