jasorod

I haven't heard anything as well ... on the UT status page, it says "under review" ...

BTW, UNC has a pretty good Computer Vision group as well, including adjunct faculty and researchers such as Lazebnik (UIUC), Frahm, Pollefeys (I believe he's now at ETH Zurich, but he's still listed as UNC faculty as well), and they have done a number of collaborative projects with the Univ. Washington and Microsoft Research, including researchers like Richard Szeliski. You can see some of the work the UNC Computer Vision group has done here: http://www.cs.unc.ed...hael_Frahm.html I'm not as familiar with the Duke vision group, so they may have a more formidable collection of full-time faculty, researchers, and equipment, but don't assume that if you decide UNC is the best fit that you won't be able to also involve yourself in vision research. In other words it's not quite the "either-or" proposition that it may seem.

Well, in the end, you're the one who is going to have to work hard at graduate school, and on a PhD track, we're talking multiple years of hard work. With no disrespect to your family or friends, or any other people advising you, I think if your heart is not in the work you're doing, then you're really not doing yourself justice, nor are you doing justice to the people who'll be depending on you to-do good research and contribute to the overall process. You know yourself best, so trust what you know is right. It may take a little bit of contemplative reflection to really dig down to find what's inside of your heart, but you should be going to school for yourself, not for anyone else. This isn't being selfish ... this is really drilling down to the center of what motivates you, and what will get you to go that extra mile when the going gets tough, or when you want to achieve that extra measure of success.

Not saying the ranking was a fabrication, I just simply can't find a speciality in "Graphics, user interaction" in the USNWR. Also the NRC ranking apparently have some problems as well: http://chronicle.com/article/After-Years-of-Delay-NRC-D/65918/

Congrats on getting into both schools! Being familiar with the area, both schools are really good, and I'm not really sure if I would say that Duke is more "established" ... if anything, if you are intending to stay in the research-triangle area, both schools are going to carry some serious weight. Even if you plan on getting a job further north in the DC-beltway, you are again in a toss-up between the two, unless there is a specific sub-field that you are attempting to target, such as robotics, systems, graphics, etc. Plus the further north you go, you're going to run into a lot more people graduating from other schools in the mid-Atlantic and northeast such as MD, NY, NJ, PE, MA, etc. If you are planning on an academic route, I unfortunately can't help you there :-( BTW, I'm not attempting to hi-jack the original question, but while we're on this topic, is there a de-facto resource for finding the rankings of graduate CS programs in the computer graphics speciality? For instance USNWR's speciality rankings do not include the graphics sub-category, yet I've seen Universities claim to be some X rank in the field. For instance, you mentioned that UNC is the top computer graphics program in the U.S., yet I would have thought that distinction would have gone to Stanford, considering the plethora of computer-graphics research that has been generated by them in the last five-to-ten years. As far as a ranking generated from a school's research in the sub-domain of computer graphics for the last five years, the closest thing I could find is this: http://academic.rese...5&continentid=2 Is there any other resource that is considered a more precise indicator of a graduate program's performance in the computer graphics specialty?