PhD Application Eval

[CSNoob]

Hi,

I'm applying now to hopefully start a CS PhD in September 2012. Things about me:

1) BS from Brown in math in May 2008. Got straight A's taking almost all math and physics. (Came to Brown intending to major in physics, but moved to math. Now wish I'd majored in CS obv.)

2) I took 3 CS courses in undergrad:

a) An intro to C for non-CS majors that was really easy (CS4 for people who know Brown)

An intro to programming in general through Java for CS majors that's considered to be pretty hard (CS15)

c) A class on algorithms--turing machines, decidability, complexity theory (CS51)

3) I TAed the aforementioned algorithms class. I think that I'd like to research algorithms and complexity theory as a PhD student.

4) I did summer research as an undergrad at the University of Minnesota in combinatorics. I didn't find anything interesting, but did manage to write one paper and get an authorship in another. Neither was published anywhere but the prof's website of course.

5) After finishing undergrad, I went on to become a professional online poker player. I was pretty successful at this.

6) About a year ago, I became interested in the problem of catching poker cheaters. I started by undertaking a monthish-long project to catch a prominent poker cheater on my own using statistics and information that I gathered from the poker community.

7) Since, I've done a bunch of different related things. Uncovered a bunch of cheating scandals.

8) I was hired by a poker site along with a friend to undertake by far the largest independent audit ever done on a poker site using our own statistical methodology and scripts that we wrote ourselves. To test our methodology before accepting the gig, we (mostly my friend) created poker AIs that cheated against each other to run blinded tests, which were very successful. We gave the site a clean bill of health, but some of the incidental false positives that we found proved that our method was extremely sensitive and worked well in the wild.

9) Took a grad-level compiler design course taught by a famous prof and got an A. I wrote a pretty cool compiler for this class, IMO, and the prof will write me a recommendation.

10) Not sure where my other recommendations will come from yet. I had professors who wrote me great recommendations in both math and physics in undergrad, but I've not kept in touch. I'm not sure what the profs that I did research with at University of Minnesota thought of me.

11) Over the summer, I started with a friend a very successful website uncovering some of the darker areas in the poker world. After doing so, I've been featured in various articles, podcasts, etc. in poker-related media, and I've gotten a few mentions in mainstream media, though nothing incredibly impressive.

12) I've yet to take the general or subject test GRE. Given how my practice tests have been going, though, I expect to do near-perfect on both the general and math subject test.

So, can I get into tier one or tier two schools with this resume? Is there anything that I should be doing right now to further my chances?

(I am very easily googleable from what I've listed here. Feel free to google me, but please don't post my name or any links to things with my name here. I'm not incredibly concerned about anonymity, but I figure I might as well preserve anonymity for now at least.)

[Adamah]

Honestly I don't think your chances are very good. While your work experience is colorful and off the beaten path, that's not very relevant in an application to a PhD program.

My biggest concern is your weak background in CS classes. Admittedly, a CS undergrad major is not required for a PhD in CS, but they do expect a minimum background in the subject. Aside from the intro classes, you've taken 1 undergrad and 1 grad class in CS. From an adcom perspective that raises questions - does this person really know what CS is? How does this person know he wants to study CS?

My other concern is the weak research background. The summer research is helpful but won't get you too far. This will knock you out of the tier-1 but isn't a big deal for tier-2 schools, from what I've read.

I think you'd be better off A) getting a master's, where you can improve your academic CS background and maybe work on some research, or finding some kind of research-oriented job where you can take classes on the side (preferably paid by the company).

[OH YEAH]

The guys in the CS department @ Brown are really nice and care about the undergrads. I think you should go into Brown one day and talk with one of them and ask for their advice.

You can get past the "non-CS major" thing by doing really well on the CS GRE. This isn't a given though, the CS GRE is very hard. If you want to go to a good school, I doubt your LoRs will hold up... you need to do more research and meet more CS people (a did well in class LoR from your super famous recommender won't help, unless that person thought for some reason that you have lots of research potential). I'd ask that recommender what kind of letter they will write for you.

If your desired research area is something like machine learning, your work experience may help if you can convince the adcomms that what you did was novel. The press coverage doesn't hurt. Again, this is probably something you should mention tangentially in your SoP, save the bulk for your research experience if you can get any.

Good luck!