Any news from PSU / UCLA CS PhD admission?

[networking]

I am waiting for admission from UCLA and Penn State.

Has anyone heard about any news from them?

[newms]

I am waiting for admission from UCLA and Penn State.

Has anyone heard about any news from them?

Apparently UCLA sent out a lot of results last week. See the results board: http://thegradcafe.com/survey/index.php?q=computer+ucla

There have only been 2 results (1 admit and 1 reject) posted for Penn state so far.

[networking]

Have all admissions from UCLA been sent out?

I have received neither acceptance nor rejection. ;(

Is there a waited list in UCLA?

[Hendersa]

I am waiting for admission from UCLA and Penn State.

Has anyone heard about any news from them?

I have not yet received a formal acceptance/rejection from Penn State for the computer science PhD program, but I can tell you what I know. I heard from the CSE graduate students that acceptance notices are sent out in the first week of March.

I just returned from Penn State's engineering graduate recruitment weekend. It was on 11/12 February. All of the graduate engineering programs, including computer science, were covered at that event. The invitation that I received for the event arrived to me via e-mail on 21 January. The graduate students that informed me of the decisions being mailed in March gave me that information at the event.

Here are some other items that might help you determine where you stand:

1. There were seven students that applied for the computer science PhD program that went to the event, including myself, and somewhere around 70 students overall that attended (including the students applying for electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, etc). I don't know how many CS candidates were actually invited. Four are currently seniors that will be completing their BS in computer science this semester (SUNY Binghamton, University of Rochester, SUNY Buffalo, and a smaller private school near PSU that I can't remember the name of). The other three already have or will be finishing their masters degrees this term. Of the seven of us, three were women and four were men.

2. Of those that have masters degrees, one was in electrical engineering, one was in computer science, and one is an MBA. I am the MBA, but I have about 15 hours of graduate coursework in EE and CS. The fellow with the MS in CS and I have industry experience in computer science-related fields. He has about five years industry experience and I have about twelve years.

3. Only three in the group had any publications: two of the masters students (one being me) and one of the undergrads. I have two CS publications, both conference papers. One conference was in Florida, the other in Japan. Both were papers on brain-computer interfacing for robotics.

4. The graduate students at PSU showing us around told us that we were most likely going to be accepted if we were invited to the recruitment event, since PSU would not pay for our travel expenses and hotel stay if they weren't interested in us. There was also a much smaller turnout for the event than in the previous year (which had 25 or so CS PhD applicants show up).

5. We were shown different labs based upon our research interest areas. Of the seven of us, we had three interested in data mining, one for embedded systems, one for computational methods, one for algorithms/theory (OS thread pooling), and one for distributed systems/networking (Byzantine fault-tolerance - me). I was passed from group to group and saw four of the labs because of the broader applicability of my chosen area (secure networking, scalability for supercomputing, communication among multicore CPUs and FPGA components, etc.).

6. My scores are a 1510 GRE (800Q, 710V), 3.67 undergrad GPA in CS (Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University), a 4.0 graduate GPA for the MBA (Jacksonville University), and a 4.0 graduate GPA for my EE/CS post-bac coursework (University of North Florida). I am currently under a one-year grant from PSU's Center for Neuroscience, and I visited the CSE department and toured its labs when I visited the campus for a grant review meeting with the Center for Neuroscience last summer. My CS PhD application was completed and submitted to PSU on 14 November 2010. I also applied for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the NDSEG Fellowship, but I won't find out about those until April 2011. I mentioned that I applied for those fellowships in my PSU application.

7. The big recruitment push was for the hardware-oriented lab projects, like MDL. Those projects have dozens of students, and funding for more. The grad students told us to seriously consider those projects, since funding was available right away (i.e. research assistantships in the first year) and there were more opportunities for publishing because of the quick evolution of hardware. If your expressed interest in your statement of purpose was hardware-oriented, you are increasing your chances because of the $100+ million in research funding coming into the CSE department largely from hardware-oriented sources like Xilinx and Microsoft Research.

That is about it, I think.

[Cosmic]

I just returned from Penn State's engineering graduate recruitment weekend. It was on 11/12 February. All of the graduate engineering programs, including computer science, were covered at that event. The invitation that I received for the event arrived to me via e-mail on 21 January

Do you know of Information Sciences & Technology (ist.psu.edu) students were also invited?

[Hendersa]

Do you know of Information Sciences & Technology (ist.psu.edu) students were also invited?

They were not. IST programs of study are within the College of Information Sciences and Technology. Computer science (actually "computer science and engineering") falls under the College of Engineering. The list of majors that were invited to this particular event are listed at: http://www.engr.psu....h/programs.aspx

[Cosmic]

They were not. IST programs of study are within the College of Information Sciences and Technology. Computer science (actually "computer science and engineering") falls under the College of Engineering. The list of majors that were invited to this particular event are listed at: http://www.engr.psu....h/programs.aspx

I thought so. Thanks so much for sharing this! And congrats on your upcoming offer

Edited February 15, 2011 by Cosmic

[networking]

Thanks for replies.