How to pick a grad school for a PhD in Computer Science
TODO:
- Create a table with each metric and their importance weight
- Create an entry for each school/supervisor that I get an interview
Consider important factors you think you care, e.g., city, group culture, etc. For each school give them a score between 1-10 and update it as you get to know the school more and more.
The factors
| Factor | Description | how to figure it out |
|---|---|---|
| Advisor Personality | This is the #1 thing you should be looking for. If your supervisor is not awesome, you will be miserable, and likely drop out or do a bad PhD. | - Talk to their students - Talk to other students in their department who don’t work for that professor ⇒ infer it from lack of enthusiasm. |
| Advisor Enthusiasm | A PhD is apprenticeship. As such, you want your advisor to be enthusiastic about taking you on, and they should absolutely be reaching out and encouraging you to join their group. I do not recommend joining departments where you are just a head count | you should start a PhD only once you have an advisor lined up. ⇒ Email professors and only apply if they are pushing you to apply, not just suggest (like Alec Jacobson that didn’t even show up and cost me $200). Someone like Cedric Zanni that was supportive and cared about my personal life too. |
| Advisor-Student Personality Match1 | One needs constant attention, and other needs independent work and sometimes a bit of calibration. | Make sure you and your potential advisor are on the same page as to how much time they can spare for you. ⇒ Given I like independent work, I should see to that. |
| Research Group Culture | Collaborative or Independent? warning: Every research group will claim to be collaborative; | - look for evidence based on shared authorship of papers, - collaborative on-going projects - whether the students seem to be friends with each other (versus merely tolerating each other) ⇒ Look for a group that everyone is interested in sharing ideas, even when there is no incentivization for it. |
| Location | The most productive PhD students I knew also had a healthy life outside the research lab. Your hobbies dictate your location. This will contribute heavily to your happiness. See Variability | ⇒ Check the stereotypes of each city; the best metric of a society are the jokes around them. ⇒ I prefer small, rural cities with less illegal immigrants. |
| Weather | Sunny? cloudy? rain? Don’t disregard the impact of weather! | ⇒ I like sun but a lot of rain too. I can tolerate temps below 40 centigrade easily, but prefer 18-22. |
Pick the HAPPY place
I can talk about it for hours, but historically speaking, it is not a sound idea to spend best years of your life, getting frustrated to have fun later on. Journey must be intense yet enjoyable..
Coolness; when in doubt!
Pay attention to the grad students there. Are they cohesive? Honest with you? Happy overall? If programs are comparable, pick the happy place.
How to know? if they are cool and honest with you.
If you can't visit, ask questions from students
You can email, previous or current student and ask them the same questions you would naturally ask if you were visiting the school.
bothered to answer your questions, there is a lot to say probably.
If they are
Question
- how the adviser responds when told about a failed experiment
- what do group member do in their spare time? do you go hiking, lunch, etc?
- does the advisor help with grant writing?
Funding
One way to compare is whether everyone is funded. If they are, there should be less competition over resources and they should be happier.
Ref:
- https://vijayc.medium.com/how-to-pick-a-grad-school-for-a-phd-in-computer-science-a5ce7dceb246
- https://cen.acs.org/careers/graduate-school/Choosing-graduate-adviser/99/i33
Footnotes
-
Ask this as one of the questions for your interview. If they like independent work and how much time they would allocate. ↩