CSallday

How common is it for someone in a PhD program to do summer software engineering internships? Are PhD students expected to work during the summer, or do they get the summer off for things such as internships?

Why does it look bad if you take the GRE more than twice? Because of Score Select, won't grad schools have no idea how many times you took the test?

Two questions: 1) Do we have to know our exact research area when applying to top CS grad schools? Or do they want us to go into grad school exploring topics/advisors? 2) Similarly, if we happen to know exactly what we want to research in grad school, will having all our undergrad research in a different field hurt chances of admission? For example, if I did my undergrad research in a couple areas (let's say parallel computing and mobile computing), but I want to pursue a different area (say machine learning) in grad school, will the fact that I haven't done research in the field I want to pursue hurt me?