opsimath

Just accepted yesterday for ECE. I really wanted to move to a bigger city, but I couldn't turn down their funding offer. Oh well. That's not such a bad problem to have. dzhang, can you be more specfic? There's a whole neighborhood called Riverside, and lots of apartment complexes in the area have Riverside in the name. My ex lived down there, and it was a total ghetto; I use that term lightly, though -- there's really no place in Austin where I don't feel safe, but it's a neighborhood where cars get broken into, you see police hassling people at 2-3am on the side of the road, etc.

I see Columbia has sent out at least one Ph.D. rejection; I really wish they'd just get it over with and reject me so I could move on with my life.

And 3rd ones now, too. I see this pop-up saying that I have some mail with 'Congratulations' in the subject and think I got accepted to some school I haven't heard back from yet. Nope. It's just Wisconsin, again. And again.

Whoa! The data in that link floored me. I've revised my opinion from being sure that Cornell is "better" to being unsure about the matter. For the sake of argument, here's one way in which their metric is flawed. Consider a simple model where you only have two broad areas, systems and theory. IMO, it's indisputable that Cornell is much stronger than UT in theory, and that UT is somewhat stronger than Cornell in systems. Just looking at that, I think it's reasonable to say that Cornell is "better" overall. But, many more systems papers are published than theory papers, so if you use a metric based on papers and citations like they do, UT will dominate, and I just don't that's meaningful. Moreover, even if that's how you decide to define quality, who cares? If you're a theory person, Cornell is the better* place to be regardless of the strength of UT's systems area, and visa versa. Just to clarify, I wasn't making an argument based on selectively. I don't think there's a total order (or even a rank order, or, for that matter, even a partial order) on students across schools. I suspect it's statistically harder to get a fellowship at UT than it is to "only" get admitted at Cornell, and that UT and Cornell simply use different criteria. I just wanted to point out that even though I should be biased towards UT, I consider Cornell the stronger department. I probably shouldn't try to convince people that the department that I'll probably end up in is weaker than a department I've been rejected from though, so I'll stop here *and of course this depends on what area you want to work on within theory. If you want to work with formal logic in ACL2, UT is clearly the better place to be, and it doesn't really matter that Cornell is arguably the top place in the entire world to do algorithms.

I would guess UT-Austin, UW (Washington), and CMU, just because those are the three "strong" programs I know that have large groups dedicated to software engineering, but I don't know enough about the field to really say. No doubt I'm leaving out a number of good programs. The SE folks always seem to be trying to get papers into ICSE and FSE, so I'd check out those conference proceedings to see who publishes the most.

I have to disagree with bernard here. As someone with a fellowship offer at UT who was rejected from Cornell, I would love to be able to say that UT is "better" than Cornell, but overall, I think Cornell is stronger than UT. You can find some areas where UT has more top faculty members (like comp arch), but there are more areas (like theory) where Cornell has a stronger program. Ecological fallacy. This is like saying Yahatanishi must be denser than Manhattan because, gee, I don't see how the US is denser than Japan.

I'll be there, although I've been admitted without aid, so I'm probably going to end up heading elsewhere :-(

Congrats! Maybe I'll see you in the fall. Has anyone heard about funding? The survey page only has one funding result (a fellowship). Maybe TAs and RAs haven't been assigned yet?

There's one on the weekend on the 7th, and another on the weekend of the 28th. Anyone else sign up for the March 7th weekend? Heard anything back about the schedule yet?