I've been impressed with UMass ever since I visited, and almost went there instead of CMU. Andy Barto is another professor there you might want to talk to. Rutgers is a small program, but Mike Littman runs an awesome lab and seemed like he'd be a good advisor. Other than CMU, and UCLA (which I didn't wind up visiting), I got rejected from the 4 others on that list that I applied to (MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, Penn). In retrospect I would have applied to Toronto and UW as well (after hacking off some that were on my list).
Since none of them seemed to specify an advisor ahead of time, I chose based on the quantity of people I thought I could feasibly work with. Which is, of course, biased toward large departments, but at the time I hadn't narrowed my interests enough to know much.
But yeah, I wouldn't recommend applying to more than 8. I did 14, and not only was it a huge financial drain, but it was basically a waste of time-- ranked in order of my personal interest in the schools at the time, I got rejected by 6 of the bottom 7 and was accepted to 6 of my top 7. I think schools choose students based on how well the student's interests fit.
Accepted to CMU U Massachusetts-Amherst U Michigan- Ann Arbor U Southern California Rutgers U Texas-Austin UCLA
Rejected from MIT Georgia Tech Stanford UC Berkeley Caltech Penn U Illinois- UC
And that was the approximate personal-ranking scheme at the time, except that MIT was 2nd after CMU and UCLA was just after UC Berkeley. At the time my interests were in reinforcement learning/ multiagent systems. If/when I apply for a postdoc things will be a lot different.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gusl![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-26 05:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-26 05:32 am (UTC)My position here can best be described as:
* programmer, 3 days / week
* researcher/student, 2 days / week
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-26 01:34 pm (UTC)Since none of them seemed to specify an advisor ahead of time, I chose based on the quantity of people I thought I could feasibly work with. Which is, of course, biased toward large departments, but at the time I hadn't narrowed my interests enough to know much.
But yeah, I wouldn't recommend applying to more than 8. I did 14, and not only was it a huge financial drain, but it was basically a waste of time-- ranked in order of my personal interest in the schools at the time, I got rejected by 6 of the bottom 7 and was accepted to 6 of my top 7. I think schools choose students based on how well the student's interests fit.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-26 06:34 pm (UTC)Would you mind sharing which schools were you accepted to, and rejected from?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-26 07:59 pm (UTC)CMU
U Massachusetts-Amherst
U Michigan- Ann Arbor
U Southern California
Rutgers
U Texas-Austin
UCLA
Rejected from
MIT
Georgia Tech
Stanford
UC Berkeley
Caltech
Penn
U Illinois- UC
And that was the approximate personal-ranking scheme at the time, except that MIT was 2nd after CMU and UCLA was just after UC Berkeley. At the time my interests were in reinforcement learning/ multiagent systems. If/when I apply for a postdoc things will be a lot different.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-29 01:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-29 01:23 am (UTC)