Grad school list

[memnus]

Had a short chat with Z about grad chools to apply to. Posting here (from colloquium) so I don't forget.

University of Washington
University of California - Berkeley
Stanford
Georgia Tech
CMU
MIT
Boston College
Boston University

... Kinda heavy on the Boston, isn't it? I'm also suddenly dithering (gah, graphics is eating my brain) between masters and doctorate level programs, and between software engineering and graphics.

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Comments

[carmiendo.livejournal.com]

I VOTE CMU HARD CORE

... at least come visit it! you can crash at casa de carmen!

[memnus.livejournal.com]

Hell yeah will I be making grad school visits.

[willworker.livejournal.com]

I know Georgia Tech's got a good CS program, but do you really want to live in the south?

Steve

[memnus.livejournal.com]

No, no I really don't.

[floccinau.livejournal.com]

I'd say visit it before you cross it totally off your list. Unless the objection is primarily climate-based, Atlanta is better considered a northern city with an unusual number of southerners. It's probably 75% transplants from elsewhere.

[willworker.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know that the major cities in the south (Huston, Atlanta, etc) are tolerable, but really, I wouldn't want to spend many years stuck in a city, and if I left, I'd be surrounded by /Southerners/. Doesn't look like he's crossed it off his list, though, which is probably a good choice. My first-hand experience of Atlanta consists of a few-hour layover in the airport some years ago (and a shorter one more recently), IE, not much. :)

Steve

[dormcheese.livejournal.com]

You've likely read my post on moving to Atlanta, but I have a few weeks more data to relate. The only thing overly Southern that I've noticed about Atlanta is the distribution of minorities working blue-collar jobs. The attitudes and opinions of people with which I come into regular contact (profs, other students, retailers, etc.) don't seem to be any different from those around Mudd. I so far haven't run into any Intelligent Design advocates in the check-out line, as I did once at Mudd's local Trader Joe's. Complaining about the weather I can understand; it's been muggy recently (but not terribly so), and I hear it can get much worse. Of course, Boston and many other parts of the country are going to be much worse.

I would definitely recommend applying for the Ph.D. programs of the schools you're interested in, especially if you know someone in the department you want to work with in particular. Ph.D. students get a lot more funding and respect from the profs, and have all sorts of opportunities to do research. Of course, that presupposes that you want to do massive amounts of research... Just keep in mind that Ph.D. students can drop down into the MS program, but you can't easily go the other way around.

Anyway, an interesting observation I've made: many of the profs in GT's AI department got their Ph.D.s from CMU. I'm not sure what that implies.