What to Ask When You're Applying to Grad School

MIT had EECS visit days last March, when I first wrote a draft of this.  It was another year of meeting enthusiastic young'uns eager to publish papers and win Turing Awards, which can make one feel even older and crankier.

Since it's application season again, I thought it was time to dig this up. In computer science, prospective graduate students go on a whirlwind set of visit days, where they tour departments, talk to potential advisors, and chat with grad students. It's a heady experience -- famous professors try to woo you to their school. It seems to me prospective PhD students never ask the right questions, and thus don't get good answers to help them make a decision.  Which is unfortunate, because they are making a decision about the next six years of their lives! Where you go can greatly affect your happiness. So if you're applying to graduate school in computer science, you might find this post useful.

Here are some things to think about before you actually start chatting with students and visiting prospective schools:

Think about your goals.  Are you interested in pure academia, or would you like to do some work in industry as well?  What kinds of things do you want to learn, and what skills do you want to acquire? What might you do afterwards?

Figure out your learning style.  Do you prefer a lot of contact, or would you rather be left alone? Do you learn best by taking classes, or by digging into a problem immediately? Different research groups have different personalities and research styles.

Think about what advising style works for you.  It's hard to get a feel for this, but different professors have very different advising strategies. Some like to engage with industry and work on open source software. Some like to publish a lot, while others prefer to work on fewer big pieces of work. One thing that varies the most is the amount of contact you'll have.  Another complication is that some professors actually change advising styles as they progress through their careers; think about students who might know best what the advisor's style is currently, and what it will be over the next few years.

Ask the same questions to many graduate students, and particularly graduate students with different properties.  Everyone is biased! Find out about different experiences. For example, you should talk to students who plan on staying in academia and ones who intend to go to industry.

Formulate specific questions.  There is a natural tendency to gloss over the hard bits of grad school, so try to be probing and ask about specific things students can't fudge. As an example, "When was the last time you did X?" instead of "Do you do X in your group?"

Once you've done a little thinking, you'll be in a much better position to ask good questions and interpret the answers.  Here are some concrete questions you can use depending on your goals.  Be diplomatic; but don't be afraid to do some investigating:

If you definitely want to stay in academia, ask:

• How many students has this professor graduated? How many stayed in academia?  

• How many dropped out before finishing? What did they do after they left?

• Does your advisor introduce you to people at conferences?  Who have you met?

• Has anyone transferred out of the group recently?  Where did they go, and why? (Also try to talk to them.)

If you work best when people leave you alone/you work best when someone checks up on you a lot, ask:

• How often do you meet with your advisor? How variable is this?  

• When was the last time you just walked into their office without an appointment? How often do you?

• How often are they actually in their office? What hours during the day?

• How quickly do they respond to your emails? Do they email you often?

• Which sections of your last paper did your advisor write, and which did you write? Did your advisor read the whole thing? Did they edit your text?

• Did your advisor write code for your project? How much?

If you are not sure what to work on, and would appreciate guidance in picking a research problem, ask:

• Did your advisor give you specific problems to work on your first year?

• Have you ever felt lost, like you didn't know what to work on? How did you overcome it?

• Can you walk me through a typical research meeting with your advisor?

• What's the longest someone has taken to finish a PhD in your group?  How often does that happen?

If it's important to you to be in a positive, social environment, ask:

• What do you think about this paper, X?  (You're looking to see if they trash it out of hand).

• Do you do practice talks? How many? What's it like to do a practice talk in front of your group?  

• When was the last time your group socialized together outside of lab? How often does it happen?

• When was the last time your advisor said something positive and affirming about your work? What was it?

• Do you acknowledge birthdays in your group, or frequently talk about vacations and things outside of research?

If you really want to work with other people, ask:

• How do students in your group manage their code?  Do you use version control?  

• Are there centralized resources available to the group (like documentation), or does everyone do their own thing?  

• When was the last time you shared code (latex templates included)?

• How many of the last few papers from the group had multiple students publishing together?

If you really want to work on your own stuff, ask:

• How long were you here before you published a first author paper?

• Do students work on (and own) different projects, or do they all collaborate on a few big projects?

• Does this professor work mostly on a few specific topics, or do his/her students work on lots of different things? 

If you want to have a reasonable work/life balance, ask:

• Which professor's students would you expect to see in the lab on a Saturday night?

• What is the process for taking vacation? How much did you take last year? (Not counting conferences!)

• How late do students usually stay in lab when there isn't a deadline?

• How often did you TA?

I didn't touch on issues like funding, because it seems to me this isn't a problem in most computer science programs. And of course there are a lot of caveats to all of this; take each student's opinion with a grain of salt. But try to notice patterns! Sometimes the most highly-ranked graduate program or most rockstar advisor isn't the one where you, specifically, will be most successful. Getting a PhD is pretty amazing when you are happy and productive in your environment. Best of luck!

Thanks to Ted Benson, Jon Gjengset, Elena Glassman, Adam Marcus, and Jean Yang for reading drafts of this.

Fall!

It's a new school year!  Remember the first day of school?  Nothing beats that feeling of new notebooks and overwhelmed freshmen.  It's times like this that I love the east coast, and Cambridge in particular.  This is the center of the world for education and you can feel everyone getting ready for the new semester.  In the past I've limited the amount of non-research things I did, but I decided this semester I would take classes in anything I found interesting, regardless of how it connects to my work.  So far I've tried out six classes (about five too many):

6.893, Philosophy and Theoretical Computer Science, taught by Scott Aaronson.  I am *really* excited about this class!  I tried taking philosophy classes in undergrad and got really turned off, but I like the idea of approaching it from TCS.  In theory we rarely get to ask what this stuff really *means* and what its implications are to what can be done or known in the world, and I like the idea of indulging in that.  It's 3 hours a week of interesting reading and discussion, and it looks like Scott is going to record lectures, so you can listen in!

9.29, Introduction to Computational Neuroscience and 6.804 Computational Cognitive Science, taught by Michale Fee and Josh Tenenbaum, respectively.  People who study brains and AI here at MIT are starting to ask the big questions again -- there's a new Intelligence Initiative, bringing together people from neuroscience, cognitive science, computer science, economics, and biology to get at how intelligence works.  So interesting!  My background in physics and statistics is pretty terrible, so I don't think I'm going to take these classes for credit, though it's nice to learn a new vocabulary and see how other fields operate.

9.S915, What is Intelligence?  Are you seeing a theme here?  This course meets once a week and does a huge survey over all the areas mentioned above -- I'm skeptical about how valuable it will be, in the first class we spent two hours going over statistical learning theory really, really fast.  I still have no idea how to make a good learning algorithm.

6.853, Topics in Algorithmic Game Theory, taught by Costis.  I miss math soooo much, and I find game theory pretty fascinating -- in fact I wrote my NSF planned research essay on game theory, but then proceeded to do something completely different.  I'd like to think about applying game theory to security! There's a pretty cool systems security class being taught this semester too, but I think I might have picked up a lot of what's being taught in my past research.

After a long summer of trying to do one thing and not being very effective, I'm really excited to take classes, go to colloquia, and in general try lots of new things this semester.  It's funny how trying to force one project can be demotivating, devolving into a cycle of trying to work harder/getting less done.  One of my goals this year is to learn to work in a very minimal, effective way.  Last summer I remember being so sad when the days started getting colder, but this year I can't wait for fall.  It's seriously the best season ever (and we need something to brag about weather-wise on the east coast):

• trees exploding in color and crunchy leaves everywhere
• apple picking, apple pies, apple cider, and cinnamon in everything
• cozy sweaters and corduroy
• crisp mornings where you can see the steam on your coffee
• scarves
• the feeling of starting over you get with the new school year

It's funny, I'm actually starting to feel like I'm in the right place.  I've spent three years here unclear on what I was doing and worrying that I was missing the boat on other things -- being able to program and create products is a huge privilege and I worried I was wasting it.  I believe technology (in particular software and the internet) is the fastest, most powerful source of transformation we can harness, but the thought of spending my time on a local-mobile-game-coupon thing never seemed inspiring.  

So far I feel good about what I'm doing this semester.  It feels nice.

Edit:

• cider doughnuts
• boots
• new coats
• PUMPKINS (in all forms: pumpkin beer, pumpkin bread, pumpkin pie, pumpkin chai)

updates

I have been horribly delinquent on this blog but in order to push some of the other posts down I am doing this random list of thoughts:

1. MySQL is way faster when you take out the MySQL part.  And you can use it both ways.  So all you NoSQL people let it go.
2. I completed my master's thesis at the beginning of September (a system called Dixie), and submitted a paper to Eurosys which probably won't get in, but that's ok!
3. Despite that, I am not quitting grad school, so everyone stop asking me when I'm leaving.
4. I have seen the following artists recently:  Sinden, Rusko, Crystal Castles, Holy Fuck (twice), Caribou, the Drums, Sleigh Bells, LCD Soundsystem (twice), Four Tet (twice),  Miike Snow, El Ten Eleven, !!!, Die Antwoord, Deadmau5, and Connector (friends' band).
5. After months of auditioning, I bought a pair of kickass new speakers, a new amplifier and a DAC which probably deserves its own post.  I am officially an audiophile.  My soundsystem is amazing and I love it.
6. I just got back from a week long trip to SF and it was fantastic.  I stayed with Niniane which was awesome (slumber party!) and realized that I could live there again.  There are so many things I love and hate about San Francisco.  Hard decisions in my future!
7. I'm going to India for three weeks in November.  New Delhi for most of the time, Goa, and then either Rajasthan or Mumbai.  Advice on SIM cards and internet connectivity would be greatly appreciated!
8. I am trying to figure out what new computers to buy.  I want a very lightweight laptop, and am thinking one of the new Macbook Airs pending reviews.  But then I also want some kind of home server/media center, and I'm not sure if I should buy one of those little boxes or get a massively powerful linux server or what.