akrish

This week was marked by two momentous events: 1. My department had our admit visit weekend and 2. I played in my first college ultimate tournament since January 2010.

The two events clashed a bit, so I ended up missing about half of the visit weekend so that I could go to Virginia for the tournament. The parts I was around for (Thursday night and Friday during the day) went smoothly and were very fun. The department held a reception for the prospectives on Thursday night so that the new students could meet each other and also meet some faculty, staff and current students. I got to meet a bunch of prospectives who seemed pretty excited about CMU and my department. On Friday I had to do a bunch of homework, so I didn’t spend too much time with the prospectives but I ended up meeting a couple others and also presented a poster at our department poster session. I presented some work I did last semester about high dimensional clustering using Gaussian Mixture Models with sparse inverse covariance matrices (See here for details).

After the poster session I met up with some of my teammates and we headed to the ultimate tournament, Hellfish Bonanza. As I said, this was my first time playing real competitive ultimate since getting injured last February, so I was pretty excited. In terms of training, my team had a pretty decent winter, but I think we were all itching to get outside and play. We came into the tournament seeded 6th (second in our pool) and played Richmond, Georgetown, and James Madison (the hosts) in our pool on the first day. We came out a little soft and shaky, but beat Richmond. For the Georgetown game, the wind started to pick up and we played really miserably, costing us the game. We also lost to JMU in another really windy game. We played a really good crossover game against Maryland, squeaking away with a universe point win to put us into the championship bracket on Sunday. We came out pretty strong on Sunday, beating Towsen to make it to semi’s, but then we lost to Virginia Tech and JMU to end up taking fourth overall in the tournament. I thought we played pretty well all day on Sunday, just that we tired out towards the end of the day and didn’t have enough juice to really bring it in the third place game.

Personally, I was relatively happy with my performance, especially considering I hadn’t played competitively in awhile. That being said, there are definitely things I need to work on. I’m feeling really unconfident about my flicks, especially in the wind (because I don’t grip the disc firmly enough), and this did show up a couple of times during the weekend. I did feel like my marks, and dump defense were pretty solid, which is the thing I’ve been focusing on in practices, but as always, there is room for improvement. We’re going to another tournament this week (in Georgia!), so I’ll be looking to improve on some of these facets of my game then.

Ok so as usual I haven’t written in here in awhile, but I thought it would be a good idea to (attempt to) start something that I’m going to call “Week in Review.” Essentially, the point is for me to write just a small post about whatever I did last week, and the point is that I do this every week, hopefully every Sunday evening. So without beating around the bush, here we go:

I kind of think about my life in three separate categories: school/work, ultimate, and the rest so I’ll break these into those three categories as well.

School
First, last week a spent a bunch of time thinking about a course project for my statistical machine learning class. I read a couple of papers about matrix completion, clustering and related topics, and eventually settled on a project about multidimensional scaling, which is a dimensionality reduction technique. At a high level, I plan to study MDS in noisy conditions, and hopefully I’ll find some interesting results about when MDS works and when it doesn’t. I also volunteered to present a paper at the statistical machine learning reading group, so I spent a bunch of time early in the week preparing for that presentation. I presented a paper by Tsybakov (You can find it here) which studies nuclear norm penalization for matrix completion, and gives both upper and lower bounds for the problem. The paper is pretty technical and I didn’t understand all of it, but I thought I did a good job of figuring out what was important and presenting it to the group. I was relatively happy with my presentation, shows what you can do with a little preparation.

In classes, we talked about minimax theory, which I think is really interesting, but also kind of a black art. I borrowed Tsybakov’s book from the library and I want to read it to learn more about these lower bounds. Hopefully I can find some time to read it. In algorithms we spent the week talking about the Planar Separator theorem, but for the most part I was thoroughly confused. I also made “reasonable” progress on my research, and I’m starting to get a much better idea of what is actually going on.

Ultimate
Last week was a pretty great week for ultimate. We had a couple of warm days and finally managed to do an outdoor track workout and have outdoor practices which was amazing. These were basically my first full practices in over a year, and it felt really great. On Wednesday we ran a pretty brutal track workout (8×150, 8×100, 8×50 with 60/45/30s rest between reps) and somehow I managed to keep up my speed through the 100s and the 50s, which made me happy. On Thursday we practiced outside and while things were a little rusty, I was pretty happy with my downfield defense, although my flick hucks were really terrible. Saturday was super windy, and we had another outdoor practice which was quite challenging. We spent most of the time working on zone-O/D. On the defensive side I mostly played in the middle of the cup and was relatively happy with my performance. On offense I was really disappointed. My flicks are terrible in the wind and this is completely inexcusable.

On saturday night we had two winter league games against the other two CMU teams. Winter league has been really fun and both games we played were pretty competitive. In the first, we scored a buzzer beater to take the game into overtime but then lost. The other game we lost by a couple. After getting home at 2AM on saturday night, we had another practice at noon on Sunday, and I was already pretty exhausted. To top it off, a couple of Corey’s buddies (who happen to be really good at ultimate) were coming to guest coach. We spent most of the time working on defensive positioning and physicality; most of the time focusing on shutting down the under cut while being able to catch up on the deep shot. I felt like I did a good job in the drills, but didn’t carry that over to when we scrimmaged. I guess part of it was that I was super tired, but I definitely did not play well when we scrimmaged. I thought the practice was really productive and felt good (albeit extremely tired) afterwards. I need to learn how to lay out and do it more.

Life
Life was pretty eventful this week. Ravi is still really excited about Settler’s of Catan, so we played two pretty epic games on Thursday and Sunday respectively. Both games had several people at 9 points and I’m happy to say that I was really close to winning in both games. In one I actually had 10 points but it didn’t get around to my turn, which is really annoying. On Friday, Google hosted a TG (happy hour thing) at their campus, and I won a Nexus One in their raffle, which I was excited about. Unfortunately the phone doesn’t work on my provider, so I think I’m going to sell it.

My parents visited this weekend and my mom cooked a bunch of food for my roommates and my brother. This was really great, especially since Robbie and I were really exhausted from practices. On Sunday we came home and practically ate everything my mom had made. My family went to the Strip District on Saturday to check out the market, where there is actually a lot of really good stuff. I tried some really tasty jams and we also bought some pretty good donuts. I should go there more. It was pretty unfortunate that while my parents were here I had some much ultimate stuff going on because I didn’t really spend too much time with them. On the plus side, my freezer is filled with leftovers so I won’t have to cook for the week!

Now that you’ve visited all of the schools you’ve been admitted to, it’s time to make a decision. For some people, this is a really easy process, for others (like me) this is incredibly difficult. A lot of people that I talked to made their decisions for various factors that didn’t really apply to me (i.e. family, girlfriend, etc.). If these “external” factors apply, then you’ll probably look at things like research and prestige.

Note: This article will be predominantly about my personal experience. I don’t really have any experience to talk about anything else. However, I think there may be some takeaways that are more generally applicable.

Disclaimer: A lot of this article is about my perception of graduate schools based on very short visits. At this point, I have no way of confirming these perceptions and I encourage you to make your own observations and come up with your own perceptions. I also do not intend to offend anyone at any of the schools I write about.

For me, the decision was ultimately between Carnegie Mellon University and MIT. While I visited both Princeton and the University of Washington, and both are excellent schools, I decided not to consider them for various reasons. I felt that I would not be happy at Princeton because there isn’t really much around except for the school and I felt that the students lived almost like undergrads, which I definitely didn’t want. At UW, there was only one professor who I was interested in working with and I felt it was kind of a risk to go to a school where there was only one potential advisor.

I really enjoyed my visit to CMU. First of all, my brother is a grad student there, so I got to hang out with him and meet a lot of his friends. I think part of the reason that I liked it so much was that his friends and the other students made me feel really welcome. Of course, I got to meet with several faculty members that I am interested in working with and I felt that I connected with some of them as well. It seemed like a much more friendly place and consequently, I left with a really warm feeling about the place.

I also enjoyed my visit to MIT but definitely less than the CMU one. The visit was less organized, which lead me to believe that they didn’t care as much about their admits (and consequently their students). Further, I didn’t get to interact with nearly as many grad students as I did at other schools, and this lead me to believe that the students were not as social as at other schools. At the same time, I met with a couple of professors that I was excited about working with, and of course, people are doing amazing research there. Ultimately, the social stuff doesn’t matter as much as the quality of research that I’ll be doing and I felt that at going to MIT I would have the opportunity to do really interesting stuff.

As a mentioned, I had a really hard time deciding between CMU and MIT. This was mostly because my intuition was telling me to choose CMU, but almost everyone else I talked to pushed me towards MIT. Usually, what other people think doesn’t really concern me, but for some reason this time it really made me doubt my gut; I think part of this was that my roommates were relentless in convincing me to choose MIT.

Ultimately, I decided on CMU for several reasons. For one, after reading several computational biology papers, I started to feel that I was more interesting in the methods side of the field and less interested in the data side. The research going on at MIT is definitely more data-driven, whereas at CMU there are people interested in biological results as well as methods. In terms of methods, I’m interested in machine learning approaches and CMU is basically the place to be for machine learning research.

Additionally, I mentioned that I felt more welcome at CMU and along with this, I felt that I would fit in better socially there. I don’t think this should be discounted, because I’m going to be a grad student for several years; if I’m unhappy, I’m very likely to quit or leave with a masters, which is not my goal. Obviously, it’s hard to determine where you will be happy from just a visit weekend, but it’s still something you should think about. Anyway, when making a decision between similar programs (in terms of research), you may want to think about your expected happiness.

One reason that a lot of my friends pushed me towards MIT was this prestige issue. Certainly, MIT has a better reputation that CMU in the eyes of the general public. However, in the CS community, both schools are pretty equivalent and in the machine learning community, I would argue that CMU is a little more prestigious. I think a lot of people are inclined to think about this because attending a prestigious institution will open doors for you later on in life. For most degrees, I agree; however, for PhD. programs, I’m not sure how true this is, especially when considering schools like MIT and CMU. Once you finish your doctorate, doors are going to open for you depending on the quality of your publications; your graduate institution will only help you in so far as it will influence your research.

One thing that helped me out a lot was talking to a bunch of people all over the place. I talked to my brother and a friend of his at CMU, friends at Berkeley, and people I knew at MIT. I also sent emails and had phone conversations with professors and other researchers at both CMU and MIT to get a better feel for what the environments were like at both places. Don’t hesitate to do this, but be aware that no one is going to make the decision for you. Most people you talk to will say something like, “Well you’re in a good place because you can’t go wrong.” While this is reassuring, it also doesn’t really help you in making a decision.

Finally, go with your intuition. That book “Blink” would recommend the same thing (I think). When you’re faced with a decision like I was, you really can’t go wrong and there are obviously some reasons why you’re tending to a particular place. Just go with it, I’m sure you’ll be happy.

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I guess that’s the end of my series of posts on graduate school. I’d be really happy to hear wether people are finding this useful or not. Also if you have any comments or disagreeing opinions, please let me know.

Sometime in February or March you’ll start hearing back from schools. Unless you are incredibly brilliant, you’ll probably get into some and not get into others. If you only get into one school, and you’re set on going to grad school, then you don’t really have much of a decision to make. I guess you could decide whether that school is good for you and if it isn’t look for a job or something. This article won’t talk much about this scenario because I don’t know anything about it.

If you got into more than one school, you have to decide amongst them. In computer science, most schools will invite you to visit for a couple of days (usually a weekend, but not always) to check out the school, the department, and meet with students and professors. I highly recommend going to these visits. First of all, they are really fun, you will meet a lot of new people, include new admits, and you will see the admits over and over again at all of the schools you visit. Secondly, they really help you in choosing schools; if you’re going to spend the next 4-n years of your life somewhere, you don’t want to be making a blind decision. Third, I was mostly done with my undergraduate degree, so academic commitments weren’t really an issue. If you are taking a heavy course load (or otherwise busy) find a way to get your work done so that you can make it to these trips. In other words, don’t use school as an excuse for not going.

I think you should prepare a bit before you visit schools. You’ll probably be meeting with faculty, and you’ll want to get the most out of these meetings to help you make an informed decision. You should be at least familiar with some of their research (read their papers) and prepared to talk to them about it. What you’re really trying to do in these meetings is see if the faculty member would make a good advisor for you. This means you’ll want to be interested in what they’re doing in terms of research, but you’ll also want to connect with them on a personal level. I found that I could connect with professors better if I knew about the work they had done so we had something interesting to talk about. Faculty meetings are probably the most important part of your visits. Really, as a grad student, everything except your research is kind of secondary to your research. And the person guiding your research will be your advisor, so you want to make sure that you choose a good one.

However, other things are also pretty important. I cared a lot about whether I would be happy at a school or not (seems reasonable right?). At some schools I got a lot much better with both the current students and the admits than at other schools, and some schools seemed to be a much better fit for me personality-wise. You should think about these things too, ask students what they do for fun, whether they play sports, etc? If you’re interested in something (like a sport) and want to continue it, see if you can find people interested in the same thing at the schools you’re visiting. These things shouldn’t make or break a school, but if you weigh two or more schools the same in terms of research/advisors, these issues may make a difference.

Another thing you should do is talk to other admitted students in your area. See what they think about the school and if they are considering accepting. This is important because they are all going through the same process and maybe they can contribute some information about something you haven’t realized or thought about. Also see if you get along with those people. This is important because you’ll spend a lot of time interacting with those students and you want to like them.

Some people told me to make lists of the things I found important and be really systematic about my decision making but I decided not to do that. I visited schools and kind of went with my gut to formulate an opinion about them. I can’t really say anything about the systematic approach, but I didn’t really have any issues formulating opinions without it.

Don’t forget that visiting schools should be fun. Most of the time schools plan a lot of fun activities that often involve large amounts of alcohol. Enjoy all of the new people and the new places and keep in mind that you will be fine most places that you go.

next up… deciding!

Here’s what I did with regards to applying for graduate school. Maybe this will only apply for computer science PhD. programs.

First
I got involved in research at the beginning of my sophomore year. That year I didn’t really do much of what I would now consider research, but I showed my advisor that I was a good programmer and a hard worker. Starting in my junior year, he gave me a small research project with the goal of actually publishing the work. We actually submitted a paper and it was accepted to WWW which probably helped me a lot. In addition, I spend the summer after my junior year working full time on a research project.

Doing research asap is important because a. it makes your application look better and b. it helps you decide whether graduate school is right for you. If you’re still young, get involved right away.

The application
Once you’re preparing to apply, it’s kind of too late to get started on a research project. Instead you should focus on your application. Filling out the applications are generally pretty easy; the hard part for you is to write one or more essays. Additionally, schools generally care a lot about your grades and your recommendations.

Academics
Everyone I’ve talked to says grades are important, but your research is more important. Schools generally care to see that you are capable, but it’s not a big deal if you have weaker grades because you’ve been working really hard on research. While you should be getting pretty good grades, it’s more important that you are taking challenging courses and courses that are aligned with your research interests. Taking courses aligned with your interest is important because you will get to know professors in that area, which could lead you to interesting research projects or to good recommendation letters.

Also, if you can, I would recommend taking graduate courses. Generally, you will build a better relationship with your teacher (because classes are smaller) and you will often have a chance to do a research-style project. I asked a teacher from one of my graduate courses for a recommendation because I worked with him pretty closely on my class project. Another graduate course I took pretty much confirmed that I wanted to pursue machine learning.

Jean Yang mentions that if you do have weaker grades you should talk about them in your essays. Saying something about how you spent most of your time on your research would be good justification.

Recommendations
Recommendations are super important. When you think about it, if someone is willing to put his or her reputation on the line to vouch for you, people will take them seriously. Professors generally are candidly honest in their recommendations, because they don’t want to recommend a bad student, which could jeopardize their image. Consequently, if you can get three really good recommendations, then you may be golden.

Most schools ask for 3 letters of recommendation. First of all, recommendation letters should be from faculty members (professors); you want them to have to be accountable. Recommendations from graduate students or from industry (unless from a research lab) don’t really carry much weight. The best recommendations generally come from professors that you have actually done research with. They have the most to say about your research ability because they’ve seen you work. Teachers may not be able to add too much to your application if you haven’t interacted with them much outside of the classroom.

I think it’s pretty tough to get three recommendation letters from people you’ve done research with. Apparently so do people on admissions committees. It’s perfectly reasonable to have 2 recommendations from research advisors and one from a teacher that you had a more-than-normal interaction with. If you take graduate courses you will have a good interaction with your teachers and they will probably be able to write pretty good recommendations.

I got recommendations from my undergraduate research advisor, the professor that I worked with over the summer, and a professor from a graduate course I took. I think this was pretty reasonable.

Essays
Most schools only require that you write a personal statement. This isn’t a personal statement like what you wrote for your undergrad applications. It should really be called a research statement. Applications committees care about what research you did and why that pushes you toward graduate school. Therefore, you should talk about your research experiences and specifically what research you did.

I was talking to a friend of mine who’s thinking about applying in the fall and he was kind of worried that he hadn’t done any cool research. This is pretty normal for undergraduates; I think it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll be doing some cutting edge work. However, there are probably small things that you did that can show off your research abilities. For example, I spent a couple of days research various ways to randomize graphs, just to evaluate the actual algorithm we were working on. I talked about this in my essay and I think it showed that I had some intellectual curiosity.

Your essay should also include some school specific information. Spend some time figuring out why you want to go to each school you’re applying to and write that in your essay. Also look at people who you’d be interested in working with and talk about them briefly in your essay. If anything it shows that you care enough to do some homework on the school.

UC Berkeley also has you write a diversity statement. In this essay, you’re supposed to talk about how your background will contribute to the diversity at Berkeley. I found this essay pretty difficult because I’m an average Indian-American computer scientist. Given that, I talked about the summer I spent in Israel doing research and how I am motivated to collaborate with researchers locally and internationally. Unfortunately, I didn’t get into Berkeley so maybe this wasn’t the best way to go.

The Rest
The rest of the application stuff is straightforward. You have to fill out some personal information, send in transcripts and all of the usual stuff you did as an undergrad. Really at this point most of your work will be in writing essays. However, if you applied for fellowships, you should be able to take a lot of your material from there.

Next up… visiting and making a decision.