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Pauli

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Everything posted by Pauli

  1. Why are you focusing on just the name schools? There are many strong and competitive CS programs with higher admission rates.
  2. Every department has different needs each year. Like person above, no one can give you what the chances are.
  3. You're making things up in your head. The value of a research lab is distinct from the international perception of a university. American employers don't look at a university's ranking, but instead at the time you spent there. If there's a really strong research lab in that area, it's definitely worth checking out regardless of people's perception of it.
  4. You rank the strength of a conference or conference based on what your advisor and her peers says is high quality or not. A good advisor will not let you waste time submitting work to weaker conferences unless that work is preliminary or seed works.
  5. Very likely not, especially if you plan to take your quals and prelims in CS, where they'll be asking you an assortment of questions from core topics such as data structures. You may end up being tested on concepts such as sorting and trees, just two of many topics.
  6. If you decide to go to industry before grad school, my reference letter writer from undergrad told me that what may happen is that you get enough money where you could buy a car, then start a family, then buy a house, and then start raising kids, and then you will no longer be interested in grad school. If you're going the professional-oriented route, finding a program shouldn't be as difficult if you're willing to fund your entire post-graduate studies.
  7. Whoa, whoa, whoa. IT professionals make up only a part of computer science graduates. Some graduates also end up becoming consultants, scientists, and designers.
  8. I remember that place having a waiting list, and some times grad students who apply don't get accepted. Do you have a back-up housing option, just in case?
  9. I don't consider College Station to be a small town, and see it more like a small city since it has all the basic things that larger cities have (this is coming from my experiences of having previously lived in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Antonio, and Austin). Also, College Station is an amazing city to do research due to less distractions.
  10. USC has an amazing graphics and robotics program, but I haven't heard much of either their HCI or AI program.
  11. Don't listen to karajan2000. He/she oesn't know what he/she is talking about. The honest truth is that both schools are comparably similar. You should make your decision on which university offers a better financial package, which school has a more accommodating research lab, and which school has a city that better matches your taste.
  12. PhD programs don't accept students because they high GPAs. They only filter students with low GPAs. It's the entire package that determines whether students get in or not.
  13. Sadly, it really is...
  14. The main places to stick to that have a large concentration of grad students include some parts of Northgate or across the street from north campus (e.g., College Main, Casa Del Sol, University Apartments) or any that are farther south like apartments located near Southwest Parkway or Holleman Drive. A large number of undergraduates tend to live in the "McApartments" on Wellborne Rd or Harvey Rd, so you may want to stay away from those.
  15. To lyes (the original poster), please disregard Adamah's statement above. It is incorrect for several reasons. First of all, every competitive Master's program states that in order to highlight that the program is also accommodating to industry-minded prospective students. Secondly, Adamah is not familiar with George Tech's MSCS program at all, so is also not aware of GT's huge strengths over Oxford on the research areas you're interested in. Thirdly, Adamah doesn't seem familiar with how MS programs in CS are run, and his existing comments are inaccurate at best.
  16. There's so many amazing research projects going on at Georgia Tech, and I have quite a number of friends that did their Masters there and they seem to like it. I'm not familiar with Oxford's program, but for the conferences that my classmates and I attend at my current school, I often see other GT people but haven't met any from Oxford.
  17. A university and department's web page isn't designed by the faculty, but by a staff of public relations and communications people. The strength of the faculty isn't going to be affected by or is correlated to the web site's presentation.
  18. Not all PhDs just want to be professors. A decent number in engineering and science want to go off and work at national or industry research labs, where they often require graduate degrees. There's always a need for them. The world doesn't always need more, say, archaeologists.
  19. Honestly, grad students don't really do traditions like undergrads, since most grad students did their undergrad elsewhere and don't feel as attached to the traditions there.
  20. But that's totally not how faculty search committees work. I've spoken with enough faculty from different universities, seen enough related talks on the faculty search process, and attended way more seminar talks than I care to remember to know that university prestige is a weak and shallow indicator in the faculty search process. There are way more useful indicators that those faculty search committees can and do rely on that helps them narrow down the selection process: whether the faculty candidate can contribute well to the program (e.g., grant writing experience, scholarships and grants awarded), whether the faculty candidate is a compatible fit to the program (e.g., is in a research field that can provide strong cross-department collaborations), whether the faculty can expand the program's "name brand" through publications (e.g., number of works published, news articles coverage on his/her research), whether the faculty candidate can teach (e.g., teaching and teaching assistant experience), whether the faculty candidate is a great communicator (e.g., faculty candidate interview), etc. There are so many factors that go into the faculty search committee process that to say that university prestige is one of the few major factors is very misleading. At the very most, search committees may use it to help weed out borderline cases, but it's far from being a dealbreaker, as strong and well-rounded candidates from less "name" schools will triumph over candidates who heavily rely on university namesake alone. Additionally, it should be noted that a large number of graduate students don't just go to academia, but also go on to major Industry R&D divisions and national research labs. The latter ones definitely do not use university prestige as a factor in their hiring, and I've seen quite a few cases where those employers choose graduate student candidates from less "name" universities such as satellite state schools over the prestigious "name" schools just because the former simply had stronger academic portfolios. I've said this many times before, and I'll say it many times again: it's not where you go to grad school, but how you spend your time there. The "name" schools have the advantage of having more resources and better connections, but it's always about opportunity spent at that school that's most important whether one goes to industry or academia. University prestige is largely a myth.
  21. I updated mine shortly after acceptance, since I just wanted to get it out of the way. It's also an interesting way to announce your new school to friends, lol.
  22. “When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.” -Alexander Graham Bell
  23. Were those profs Americans? If so, they must be shallow, since rankings are a shallow indicator of a program's strengths. For example, Wisconsin has a superior program for computer architecture compared to, say, MIT, even though CS program rankings put MIT higher. Plus, graduates are judged more often by their time in the program and who they worked under, not where they went to school.
  24. Not sure if you're a troll, or ignorant. I have a feeling that you're a combination of the two. All three programs are great in CS and have their own strengths and weaknesses. Berkeley is no exception.
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