CS PhD Profile Evaluation

[phd4me2013]

Hey Everyone,

I am a domestic senior undergraduate CompEng major from USC. I was hoping to get some opinions on my chances of admission to some CS PhD programs.

University: USC (California, not Carolina)

GPA: 3.97

GRE: Not Taken Yet (For reference, SAT was 800M/800CR/650W)

Research Experience: Spent junior year working on data visualizations for machine learning research, got 3rd author position on two workshop papers at major conferences.

Work Experience: Interned one summer at a startup, the next at Google Mountain View on the Search Infrastructure team

Letters of Recommendation: 1 from research advisor, 2 from professors where I was one of the top students in the class and vocal, but no deeper outside-class relationship.

Schools I'm thinking of include:

UIUC

U Washington

UT Austin

UCSD

UCLA

Brown

Columbia

Duke

NYU

UNC

Thanks!

Edited July 5, 2012 by phd4me2013

[phd4me2013]

Any input? What I've really been confused by is how hard it is for US based students to get in to US schools... For example, see these links:

http://gradschool.du...cs/admitcps.htm

http://gradschool.du...about/stats.php

Duke CS PhD 2012;

Total Applicants: 312

Accepted: 39

Rate: 12.5%

Domestic: 37

Accepted: 12

Rate: 32.4%

International: 275

Accepted: 27

Rate: 9.8%

32.4% is a hell of a lot better than 12.5% !! What I'm curious about is whether this phenomenon is generally true at most US schools, including the 'big 4'. So for example MIT's ridiculous 4% admission inflates to a 'real rate' of ~15% for domestic students, which really isn't so bad...

Any thoughts?

Edited July 7, 2012 by phd4me2013

[ssk2]

That might be explained by the tendency of international students to apply mainly schools they've heard of. I've noticed this from reading the Edulix forums - a lot of Indian applicants will go for schools they've heard, as opposed to schools which might suit them better (in terms of fit or competitiveness). Domestic students probably have a better idea of where might be best for them (and likely better careers advice too).

Interesting find - I had a brief look at the schools I am applying to but couldn't find analagous statistics.

[phd4me2013]

Yeah, most schools are pretty cagey about putting out their admissions statistics... I would postulate that especially if undergrad admissions are more competitive than grad the school would be unlikely to make the statistics public.

For anyone whose interested, here are some other places I've found: (Of course some mix together Masters and PhD, or don't separate international from domestic)

UNC - http://gradschool.unc.edu/admissions/stats.html

University of Washington - http://www.grad.washington.edu/about/statistics/admissions/

UT Austin - http://www.utexas.edu/ogs/prospective/stats/

Anybody have any more of these?

[ssk2]

The only one I've found so far is from UPenn although it doesn't offer a domestic / international breakdown: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/grad/admission-stats.shtml

Also, to confirm my earlier point, from this article:

The biggest mistake I see students make, especially among foreign applicants, is to order their admits based on US News and World Report rankings and select the school with the highest ranking Your goal is to maximize your long-term success and that means maximizing your prospects once you complete your degree. I will focus here on the PhD side, but similar considerations apply for the MS degree.

[wine in coffee cups]

Anybody have any more of these?

Most of the schools I know of that post data have already been identified, but University of Minnesota is one more. It's also amazingly extreme in terms of international applications for graduate CS. Do the math and you'll see 93% (1025/1101) of applications are international, and admit rates are 19% (199/1025) international and 75% (57/76) domestic. Quite the disparity!