Grad School Stuff I: Deciding to go to Grad School
For those of you who don’t know, I just finished applying to grad schools and am currently in the process of deciding where I want to spend the next 4-n years of my like (where n >=4). I’m applying for a Ph. D. in computer science and my research interests are in Machine Learning and Computational Biology. During the whole process I got a lot of help from Philip Guo and Jean Yang, so I thought I would do a brain dump of my thoughts on the subject.
Naturally, a lot of this will be about me (for example this post will be about why I decided to go to grad school) but maybe some of that will be useful to you. To get some other data points about it, read what Philip and Jean have to say. Ok here we go…
In a nutshell, I’m going to grad school because I like to do research. I figured out that I like doing research by, well, doing research. As an undergrad I’ve been researching for a couple of years with David Wagner and I also got to spend some time working with Ron Shamir. Before starting to work with Professor Wagner, I really didn’t think I’d be interested in research, and honestly, I didn’t really know much about the academic environment and research at all. I was really excited about entrepreneurship and wanted to start a company, but one of my goals in college was to try a lot of different things, so I figured I’d give research a shot.
Another reason why I got involved in research in my sophomore year was that I didn’t like the internship I did the summer before. I worked for a fairly small company (~300 people) but I felt like I wasn’t doing anything important and I wasn’t really doing work that I found interesting. After my internship, I thought that maybe industry wasn’t for me, and the other natural thing to try was research.
So I got involved in research and discovered that I liked it for several reasons. (1) I get to work on really cool problems, (2) I get to think very hard about all sorts of possible solutions, and (3) I have the time to find and work with the best possible ones. Also, (4) I get to be (fairly) independent and (mostly) in charge of my work, and (5) I (for the most part) don’t have to do things that I don’t feel are important. In my internships, a lot of these factors weren’t there, although I do think that this may have been a product of my specific internships. I know people who do really exciting work at all sorts of companies, I just personally haven’t experienced that.
Given that I like research, the best place to go is graduate school. So by the end of my junior year, I knew that was what I wanted to do. I somewhat arbitrarily decided that I wanted to research in compbio and machine learning. A big factor in this decision was my summer research in computational biology. I got to design and implement really cool algorithms and I realized/discovered that there were tons of super-interesting problems in biology that could only be solved by computational methods. I got to read a ton of papers about these problems and found that often times there were elegant solutions to them. Moreover, I was part of a great group that involved me in their projects and told me about the awesome work they were doing. All of these things influenced my decision to go to grad school and helped me decide on computational biology as a research field.
I applied to many (9) schools. This is in many cases more than a lot of other people I’ve talked to. The two reasons for this were that (a) I didn’t have any existing job offers and (b) I didn’t think I would be happy in industry. I personally would have preferred to go to top-20 grad school over getting a job in industry, and this is reflected in the number of schools that I applied to. I know a lot of people who only apply to 2-4 schools and also look for real jobs.
And that’s basically it. After deciding to apply and where I would apply, the next steps were to get my applications together, write some essays, and wait to hear back.
Tags: gradschool