Fall 2016 Chemical Engineering PhD

[Argon]

Just starting this up for the 2016 applicants. Feel free to post anything here. Best of luck!

[Dawnbreaker]

Hi. If anyone has questions on Systems Engineering, in ChemE, EE, or ME, I can help with my 2 cents. Best wishes to all applicants.

@Argon If you are comfortable with discussing, what happened at MIT? Faculty left, interested group is full, funding issues? Any idea where you are headed (UCB or Madison is a good option I'd guess).

[Argon]

Thanks for posting! 

As for me, I'm hesitant to get into too much detail on a public forum just out of principle. But I will say I was part of the MIT CSE program (PhD version of CDO you applied to), and I was accepted joint with the Nuclear department. The "CSE" part is very minimal, and for a number of reasons I'm looking to bring my computational skills back to ChemE. No idea where I'm headed yet, but I feel incredibly fortunate to have such options. I'm pretty excited! Hindsight is 20/20!

Edited December 26, 2015 by Argon

[Dawnbreaker]

@ArgonI understand. Hope it works out to your satisfaction this year. Incidentally, what you said mirrors my impression from last year. My interests too didn't gel well with MIT and hence I applied to their masters program as a safety option. Funny how it turned out. Which type of computational work are you interested in - algorithm development for optimization, inference, control etc; or computation geared towards numerical simulation of ODE/PDE/stochastics? For the former, Wisconsin is clearly the winner in your list. For the latter, it's a good toss up between Minnesota, Berkeley, and maybe UIUC I guess. Congrats and best wishes

[Argon]

Thank you! Yeah, process controls and optimization seems huge at Wisconsin! It is pretty impressive, although I don't think that'd really be my cup of tea. I'm most interested in molecular-scale modeling (e.g., MD simulations, ab initio methods, kinetic modeling) for pretty much any physical (eg., reaction kinetics, transport properties, thermo, material properties, almost anything not bio) related applications. I'm looking at some of the computational catalysis work at Wisconsin; I think computational catalysis may be an ideal research focus for me. As for UC Berkeley, their chemistry department has a ton of computational work I'd be interested in that is on the border between ChemE and chemistry. And I had a great visit at UIUC last year and there were some professors I could see myself working with, so I am very happy with the options I have so far and look forward to hearing back from the rest. Since I've already been through this process once, I have a pretty clear idea of what I'm looking for, so I'm feeling confident that this year will be better. 

I hope your first semester has gone well and that you're enjoying your new grad school life and school! What area of research are you working on/most interested in? 

Edited December 26, 2015 by Argon

[Dawnbreaker]

I accepted the offer from Caltech. However, due to some personal commitments that required me to stay in my home country (International student), I had to defer my offer to Fall 2016. I have been working as a research assistant in my undergrad university though, and also doing courses in consultation with Caltech professors. I think it has worked out great though - I can take courses and learn the material without any exam/grade pressure and do the research I like, with sufficient amount of free time.

My research interest is at the interface of optimal control, machine learning, and economics. Applications are in energy markets, online auctions, clinical trials etc.