Icydubloon

Cornell

Apply for the top 4 anyway. You might get in.

I would assume for most R&D positions you need at least an MS and a PhD is usually preferred.

This might help you gauge the number of PhD CS applicants, here is the information about CMU's MS CS: "You are one of the select few, less than 8% of the more than 1000 applicants, that we are inviting."

Do them all. Go big or go home

I applied for both ML and CS PhD and have received decisions from both departments.

Machine learning. The new Data Scientist industry role caters perfectly to ML/big data students.

Wait for them to call you. Perhaps the "super important person" could be out of the country for all you know.

About 3/4 of people in my current lab have interned at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. as a non-research software engineer.

I'm assuming you're asking about CMU. They actually deactivated their online tracker sometime in December so there's no way to tell.

Was accepted to CMU Machine Learning today. The interesting thing is that they did not contact me at all prior to the email acceptance. I was expecting at least a phone interview since both the professor and I will be stuck with each other for 5 years.

This one is pretty good

From my POI: You get at least one phone interview before being invited to the visit days. Once you're at the visit days, there will be more indirect/direct interviews. After the visit days, you'll be notified of acceptance.

1.5 pages, 11 pt times new roman

Just wait and check your spam folder. One of my acceptances was in my spam box

I would say a lot of emphasis is placed on the venue as well. It's obvious that conferences are better than workshops. If I were you, I would submit it to the conference at a mid-tier. Reason being, many workshops don't have as extensive of a review process as conferences/journals.

Good luck with that

If any school asks me to fly out for an interview, whether they pay or not, I would reply asking them to do it over Skype. If they want me to visit, that's a different story.

Handshake and thank you in person should suffice.

+1 for simple website

Get a job

Sleeping

Undergrad prestige does play a role in admissions. Take any (top) school and look at their list of PhD students. Most of them tend to come from known to well known undergrad schools.

No objective.

Internship.