23 Feb 2021

Carnegie Mellon University

Computer Science, PhD (F21)

Interview via E-mail on 23 Feb 2021

Note

TTPB: While I agree with the person below about how connections matter and also about the second option of paying your way into a PhD by doing a masters at top 5-10 CS schools, I don't see connections playing a factor in the process being unique to CMU and not every school. Fuck it, not even grad schools, industry is the exact same: connections and your network matter. I would say that most people realize that after a couple years in industry but for those applying to grad schools right out of undergrad, they get to experience earlier than their peers who went to work instead of grad school. And cause of ML/AI hype, the number of applicants is so much that a person who would have been a star candidate 5-10 years ago does not get accepted this cycle or even interviewed. and to the post further below about deferrals, from every school I have interviewed with, the idea that everyone isn't getting cause of people deferring is bullshit. You just have to come terms with the fact that ML hype has made CS exponential crowded and instead of 1-2 extremely overqualified applicants (ie: 4+ NIPS/ICLR/ICML papers), you now have 20-30 of these applicants resulting into the minimum bar to get in increase dramatically. Really the only question left to see is that if this cycle was a 1 time thing or is the bar just going to exponentially increase. Here's to hoping for AI winter #3...

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