PhD Chances

[varunagrawal]

Hi,

Firstly, thank you for taking the time to read this.

I am currently a MSCS student at Georgia Tech, planning to apply to PhD programs for Fall 2017. My GPA is 3.85, I have presented 2 posters at Microsoft conferences (Computer Vision and Machine Learning) and 2 at Georgia Tech organized poster sessions (Robotics), have a paper in review for ICRA 2017, an abstract under review for ASEE 2017, plus I am hoping to be able to submit a paper to CVPR within this month. I can assume with fair confidence I will get great, if not stellar, recommendations from my advisors here. My school of choice is MIT.

Just wondering what more would I need to do to improve my chances of getting admitted? Any help would be highly appreciated.

Thank you again.

[pterosaur]

If you're looking for what you can do to improve your chances for this application cycle, there's not much time to change things at this point. The main thing you have left to do is nail your SOP. Based on what you've written, you seem like a strong applicant. However, you do only mention MIT. Is this the only school you're applying to? Remember that there's a bit of a crapshoot in applications no matter how good you are, so be sure to give yourself options. Also remember that even highly qualified applicants can be rejected if the ad com doesn't feel there's a good fit between the applicant's and program's research interests.