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FAQs - Preparing, Applying and Deciding on Graduate Schools
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I received my Ph.D. in 2009 from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. I am currently an Associate Professor of Computer Science at IIIT Delhi. In the last 8 years, I have written Letters of Recommendation(LoR) to 70+ students, and the total number of LoRs that I have written is 350+. List of Universities where my recommendees have got admits are (arranged in the decreasing order of number of admits or accepts, GaTech being the highest): GaTech, CMU, USC, ASU, Cambridge, Princeton, UIUC, Ohio, Rice, UCLA, UMich, NUS, NTU, Stony brook, UF, ETH Zurich, JHU, Lero Research Centre - Ireland, and few others. The period of Sept / Oct - March / April is unnerving for many students who are keen on graduate studies. I am super lucky for working at IIITD, where a lot of very good students go for graduate school (especially Masters). Here are the students who started graduate school in 2017 and 2016 for whom I had written letters. During this period, there are a lot of questions that get posed to me about the admissions process, programs to choose, letters of recommendation, how to decide on which school, etc. For the last couple of years I have been maintaining an internal group level document where we have captured some of these questions and with some of my answers. Given that these will probably be the questions most students applying from India may be asking, I have created this page to share the questions and my responses for the same. Feel free to write to me at pk [DOT] guru [AT] iiit [DOT] ac [DOT] in if you see any questions that you are looking for and you are not able to find an answer here, I will be happy to answer and add it here. This page is mostly intended for the students applying for Masters program in CS / allied areas. |
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Questions |
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Depends on how much money you have and how much effort you are ready to put in this! Mostly students apply in the range 8-15, 10 is generally a good number to cover all categories. Whatever the number, I suggest distributing these schools in 3 buckets -- 20 - 25% in dream schools (like say Stanford, MIT, CMU), which may be really really hard to get through, but, if you get an admit, you are definitely taking it, no second thoughts; 20 - 25% in safe schools, there is a very high probability that with your application quality, you should get an admit in these schools; and 50 - 60% in probable schools, it is not fully clear whether you will get an admit here. These are the most difficult ones to decide and when you get admits from here, it is hard to make a decision too. Parameters that you should look for * May play a more significant role when deciding on the school. None. If any, may work in negative most of the times. I strongly think Professors, generally receive a dozen emails everyday from students / others interested in working with them. For a Professor like me, I get at least 10 - 15 emails a week in this context, so you can imagine how it will be for a Professor sitting in CMU or ASU! So, unless you have some strong reason/ connection to the professor, do not write to him / her. It should be one level below CS, i.e. it should be at the level of Machine learning / Systems / Security / etc. and not something like Data science for health care from third world countries i.e. too specific. This will help the admissions committee to gauge your application better, but, be open for change, if needed. Strike the balance between focus and fluidity. If you come out as someone who is very rigid, you won’t be considered a good fit. Keeping the above answers, it is again going to be one who can write a very strong letter. Whoever is ready to do that, you should grab them. Not really for normal applications, if you do anything wrong, they definitely will blacklist you and your university too. Some university applications will ask you whether you’ve applied before and what the result was. You should worry about this problem only in such a scenario. It is ok, but keep it minimal. As explained above, professors get a lot of emails, so you should avoid. Also, if you take the admission and using your university ID, etc. @andrew.cmu.edu ID if you send an email to the professor, it is going to be received better than a gmail or a IIITD email ID. I am strong promoter of the idea that you take a course (or an independent project) of the faculty whom you want to RA / TA, get an A in the course, and then reach out to him / her asking for RA / TAship, you are more likely to get it. Some services that students from India use are This is a hard question to answer and a very subjective one. I did not know that Ph.D. was in my cards when I was in my undergraduate program :-) One of the primary quality you should have for Ph.D. is persistence for 4 - 5 years on getting it done. This requires much longer answer. Please refer to this document for the detailed discussion on this topic. This is a very subjective question. It depends on many factors like, what you got out of the B.Tech. program, what you want out of the Masters program, your financial status for doing the Masters immediately, etc. Generally, getting a Masters degree immediately after B.Tech. is a good approach and for Ph.D. my suggestion would be to take a break after Masters and then take up Ph.D. Some Masters programs need work experience, you should check the program details for this. CGPA is definitely a key aspect that the admissions committee will look at, if you have an amazing LOR and a great GRE score, slightly lower CGPA will be ok. CGPA, GRE, LOR, SOP are the key aspects for getting an admit. Tone definitely matters. You should check with the recommender beforehand whether he / she will give you a strong LOR. You should take LORs only from people who are willing to give you strong LORs. I have seen most of the B.Tech. students start in the 7th semester (and/or the Summer before), I think this is good timing. You should plan it a way that you have enough time for preparing GRE, taking consent from recommenders, doing multiple iterations on the SOP. Dependent on the school / programs you are applying. 315 in GRE may be very good to get an admit in say lower tier Univ. while it may not get you an admit in higher tier Univ. Keeping only the score for decision here. Also, split of Q & V is more important, some schools might stress on Q above 90%ile while other schools can have 80%ile on both Q & V. I believe any project that is beyond course project and spanning for more than 2 semesters will be attractive in your CV for admissions. I will highly recommend such projects, primarily because the professor(s) you are working with can give you a very strong letter. It may not be just the university that matters, admissions committee will look for who is writing the letter and what is being written in the letter too. You should prepare accordingly. Some University will ask you to use services like Foreign Credits. Some university will ask you for your score, transcripts, and scale, they will convert. Some students also use WES. Score of 3.5 - 4 will be good. Anything less than 3.5 will be a problem. Very high GRE score and LOR can compensate for a low score in AWA GRE. This is also a subjective question. Your interests and kind of school you want to study will probably drive the decision on narrowing the streams. Here is an abstract way of narrowing down the streams. Put a value of 1 - 10 where 10 is the best and 1 is the worst, candidly put the value in each cell. Look at the total for each programs, this will help select or reject a program; the key is to be very candid in putting the values.
Unfortunately, I understand the CS and some allied programs admissions best, so will be able to help only in CS related programs. This is a personal choice I believe. If you have the support (financial, family, etc.) for doing it just after B.Tech. I will recommend that. This allows you to have a deeper understanding of one area and can become an expert in the area as you grow in your career. This also allows you to get into top 25 companies which may be harder to get into just after B.Tech. from India. Yes, B.Techs. can directly apply for Ph.D. in the US at least. Procedure is very same as the M.S. applications, but the evaluations are different. “Low” is subjective! If you are aiming for good schools, I would recommend recommend retaking it. But, historically, I have not seen a lot of improvement (seen always only few points) in the score when students retake it. It is expensive to apply to many schools, so if you are finding it hard to do as many applications as you would like and you would need waiver, please reach out to schools, here is a page which describes the procedure for application fee waiver at Brown University If you have publications in the area you are applying or in any other area it is good, but, even if you don’t have one, it is not going to limit you from getting an admit in a good school. It is all about how you present your application about what you have done with the resources you had at your disposal. Even if you are applying in a different area from the one you have a publication, I think it is ok, you should argue about why you did work in area A and why you want to shift to area B. Prior work in area A shows that you are capable of working in an area and producing output, this is what faculty are looking for in an application. Generally the committee is looking for the quality of work, and the contribution you had in the work, less of the organization. I have had students with experience in a smaller organization or a startup, etc. get great opportunities at good schools. I don't think so, but, you should make it really clear on your SOP why you want the 2nd Masters degree. Make it crystal clean on why the committee should selected you. You want to describe what you picked up from the Master's degree you already have and what you want to do with the 2nd Masters degree. I dont think so you are in any disadvantaged position if you are applying directly after undergraduation. I believe the admissions committee is looking for a distribution of different sets of background / experience in the class; none of my students who applied directly had any experience of not getting admitted because they were fresh out of college. Generally, one year break is not sufficient to have any difference in your CV, you will have to make it a 2 year break, e.g. if you are graduating in 2019 / applying for fall 2019, your applications are in by Dec 2018 / Jan 2019, so if you want to skip one year and apply for fall 2020 your applications should be in by Dec 2019 / Jan 2020, which means you would have had only about 7 months (May 2019 - Dec 2019) or so to do work and add experience in your profile. For this reason, mostly students apply 2 years after their graduation year, which would allow you to have at least 1.5 years of experience in your CV. During this 1.5 years, you can engage in variety of work which can strengthen your application. As said in other answers, admissions committee values any experience, especially anything around research and teaching. Depending on the school, department you apply the importance may be different and also it depends on whether TAship is available to all Masters students in the program / school you are applying to. Sending the 4th LoR will not affect the application either ways. Absolutely yes, any experience / work that you have which many others may not have will add value to your application. Participating in these competitions helps to showcase your efforts outside the classroom, initiatives that you take, and if you have won competitions shows your level of involvement. Admissions committee values these kind of variety of experiences. Yes, I do meet with students individually and in larger groups too. Some of the sessions done until now are: |
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| Thanks to Megha Arora, Vedant Swain, Ashwin Rajadesingan, Rohan Katyal, Amod Agrawal and Yashovardhan Sharma for inputs in various parts of the article. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Last Updated on 28th January 2019 |
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