On Grad School Applications in Computer Science
I’m hoping to write a post on this topic sometime as a way to give back the help I’ve been lucky to receive. For now, here are some resources that may be helpful to you:
cs-sop.org: A collection of successful statements for CS PhD programs. I have benefited a lot from this initiative and I have shared my statement there too.- My research statement: It helped my acceptance into CS PhD programs at Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, CMU, Harvard, and Cornell. I shall note that the machine learning world has changed quite a bit since I applied in 2022 and there are many new exciting opportunities on top of what I wrote about in my statement.
- Advice by Prof. Boaz Barak at Harvard. Relevant tweet thread. Also Boaz recommends against emailing professors before applying.
- Advice by Prof. Gautam Kamath at Waterloo on how to ask for a recommendation letter
- Advice by Prof. Mor Harchol-Balter at CMU
- Advice by Prof. Noah Smith at UW
- Advice by Yijia Shao at Stanford for international students
- Jean Yang’s application materials (a bit old but I found it helpful)
- List of advice posts on CS Rankings
- List of resources by Paul Liang and friends at CMU
In the meantime, please suggest topics you’d like to see covered via this Google form. Otherwise please feel free to reach out if you have concrete questions I can help answer. Unfortunately, please understand that I may not be able to respond to all requests; I’m more likely to write back if you have specific questions beyond “can you review my statement?” or the email isn’t generated by ChatGPT.
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