STILL A WORK IN PROGRESS!

In the interest of your time, I am going to try my best not to talk about things that you can find in the 100 other such posts about grad applications. Also, this blog specifically targets Ph.D. applications as I exclusively applied to Ph.D. programs. Most of the things discussed below are also relevant to a Masters application, but they may vary.

I am going to break the entire process down into a few parts, and then elaborate on each of them:

  1. School databasing
  2. English evaluation tests
  3. Creating your CV
  4. Choosing and informing your letter writers
  5. Reaching out to potential advisors
  6. Writing your statements
  7. Interviews

School databasing

Arguably one of the most critical steps in the process and one that can drastically change where you end up for grad school is which programs you apply to.

My process of choosing programs involved scouring CSRankings, trying to look for relevant faculty and how active they have been in recent years (I would recommend filtering the publications to last 5 years instead of the default 10 years).

Of course, this is a really lazy way of doing such a critical step. Therefore, I would recommend one also look at the faculty list for the programs they are interested in. In my experience, I was able to find faculty members relevant to my field who would not show high up on CSRankings. If your field of study is interdisciplinary, and not just restricted to CS, looking at the faculty list becomes even more important as CSRankings does not cover faculty from other departments (such as ECE in my case). Finally, talking to your advisor (and letter writers) about their recommendations for programs and faculty is crucial to make sure you apply to the right set of faculty and programs.

In total I applied to 13 programs (12 CS and 1 ECE) across 13 schools.

When looking at a grad school and faculty, I would recommend noting down the following things:

  • Application cost
  • Location of the school (if it is important to you)
  • List of relevant faculty and their affiliation (CS/ECE). Also, check if they have adjunct status in the other department
  • GRE/TOEFL requirement
  • Check if any of the faculty are NOT hiring
  • Also check if faculty have any guidelines for emailing them

English evaluation tests

This is a relatively short section as I won’t go into detail about how to prepare for these exams.

TOEFL is a mandatory test for almost all programs. GRE has been made optional for most schools, and very few programs recommend submitting scores. However, I would still recommend taking both tests. Please take caution not to submit GRE scores to programs which explicitly mention NOT to submit them.

I would recommend choosing GRE/TOEFL dates well in advance, even before the applications open, as it best to finish them off before the real game begins 😀. GRE took me about 3 weeks to prepare and then another week for TOEFL. In case you were curious about my scores, I got 331 on GRE and 117 on TOEFL.

Some preparation resources:

Creating your CV

This step is pretty straightforward and there’s plenty of resources online to help with it. Just a few pieces of advice: for a PhD application, focus mostly on your research experience. Don’t structure it like a job resume; feel free to elaborate your contributions in the research project. The structure that I would recommend is:

  1. Two lines to summarize your research interests (optional)
  2. Education
  3. Publications
  4. Research Experience
  5. Awards and Honors
  6. Teaching and/or Mentoring Experience
  7. Professional Experience (this could go after Research Experience if it is relevant to your interests)
  8. Any academic projects and skills you wish to highlight

Here’s my current CV for reference.

Choosing and informing your letter writers