Da’s Entropy

Update: this post appears to be the most popular post on my blog—I guess quite a few people find it when they are googling about graduate school applications. As a result, I choose to remove the personal portion and leave the general parts. (2009)

Recently I accepted one of my graduate studies admission, which marks the end of my graduate school applications. I will talk about some of my experiences about this tiring but enriching process in this post.

Why Graduate School?

This is the first and foremost question to be answered. I am devoting the golden age of my life to graduate studies, and there better be good reasons for it. For me, the main reasons are:

• To learn more knowledge: I want to broaden my view and deepen my understanding on various subjects that I am interested in.
• To do creative work: I want to do original research with real impact.
• To have fun: I feel that research and the process of seeking truth/insight is very fun.

I know the above reasons may be a bit idealistic, but nonetheless, they will be my aims for graduate studies.

Area/School Selection

I choose communications as my area of research, as I find it very interesting, and I like the research style for this field — researchers in this field try to find a fine balance between pragmatic system design and theoretical generality, which is very inspiring and intellectually beautiful. Many problems in this area are simple to state, but hard to solve. In some sense, they are like puzzles, but they are more than puzzles as they are directly related to our daily life and social well-being.

I chose to apply to nine programs in eight schools. All of them are the schools in which I can see myself happily studying:

EECS@MIT, ORC@MIT, EECS@UC Berkeley, EE@Stanford, ECE@UIUC, EE@Princeton, EE@Harvard, EE@Yale
ECE@Univ. of Toronto

In addition, in Europe, both EPFL and ETHZ are great schools. In the U.S., UCSD is also very strong in the area of communications. But I didn’t apply to them due to my location constraint.

Application Process

There is not too much to talk about for the process itself. Just prepare all the application materials according to each school’s requirements and submit them on time.

Most application require the following information/materials:

• academic background: GPA, publications, research experiences
• application document: reference letters, personal statement (or Statement of Purpose/Objective, etc.)
• test scores: GRE, and others

All these are, of course, important factors in graduate school application. However, most of them are more or less fixed before the application starts. So if one really wants to further improve ones’ application material, s/he should do a good job on preparing the personal statement and reference letters. But a good resume is an important prerequisite, as it will probably determine whether your PS and reference letters will be read at all.

Personal Statement

I would suggest one should start to write the PS as early as possible, because not only that a good essay may need many iterations to improve, but also the process of writing “forces” one to think through one’s decision on choosing graduate school, which is very beneficial.

For details of writing, there are lots of resources online. Just be yourself and don’t use any cliches that bore the readers. Don’t be “braggy”, and let facts speak for themselves.

Reference Letters

In general, at least three reference letters are required and it will be nice if one can find professors that satisfy the following “criteria”:

• they are familiar with you and have a positive impression about you
• they are working in the same field or in a close field to the area you are applying to
• they have good connection with people in the school/program you are applying to

Professors are very busy so it will be good to ask them as early as possible, though they may still leave it to the last minute. Most of the time it is quite alright for them to submit the reference letters a few days after the deadline, so don’t panic about that.

Contacting professors

In general, it doesn’t hurt to contact professors educatedly — you should do enough reading about their research and know that you really want to work with them before contacting them. I didn’t try this as I didn’t have sufficient time to do enough research, so there is not much for me to offer on this.