do professors always visit admitted applicants' websites?

[mach]

Hi,

 

as part of my application, I have set up a website including more information about my profile like applications and industry/research experience. However, up till now, only one professor from a school has visited my website and download some stuff. I am quite worried now because this school is the highest ranked on my list and I have no visits from my match or safety schools. So, the question is:

 

is it true that admitted applicants (almost) always have their websites visited by some people from their admitting schools prior to receiving offers?

 

I am just curious, and hope some more experienced people can shed some light on this.

 

thanks

[SANDIEGO]

Hi,

Any professor wanting to take on a student for 5 years of funding in his/her lab would want to make sure the student is an excellent fit. Therefore it makes sense that they would carefully investigate potential hires, and that means going through any and all information given in the application including websites. If they haven't visited your website and/or have only given it a cursory glance, it is most likely that they are not (yet) seriously considering you as a candidate.

[TakeruK]

I think it really depends on the field. Some of the schools I applied to explicitly told us NOT to include a URL to a website or anything in our application materials because they only want to evaluate people on the basis of the submitted application materials. So some schools might have this kind of policy which could explain why they didn't go to your page. 

[SANDIEGO]

It definitely depends on the field. But from a computer science standpoint I think that NOT having a URL/website might even be a little weird. And so many computer science research projects and academic projects include visual elements (graphics, HCI are examples) that it's difficult to really see the work without a computer.