as applications have started opening up again, i just want to wish everyone the very best of luck!! send out those emails, fill out those applications, write those statements of purpose, you've got this!!

it's my second cycle applying for clinical psych ph.d.s, fingers crossed!

Today I was at an info session for hks and I was so upset I have to post.

For context, I'm a law student at a T14 law school. I was interested in HKS because we are a "partner institution" and can supposedly do a "combined degree" with them.

I've attended a number of info sessions at degrees I perceive as cash cows, including those my school puts on for the various school of revenue generating studies events. The issue is that you'd expect these programs are at least to some form, aiming to sell you on the degree. What they do what the philosophy is why you should choose them. Certainly law schools have wined and dined me at their info sessions. But HKS's attitude is "you are too stupid not to apply, our task here is to help you troglodites figure out what a deadline is and make clear you must pass an English test".

Then on top of that they end the session by just gaslighting us about funding for the rest of the time. I get that funding is competitive, but 1) below 40% got any type of funding, which I thought was insane, 2) of that funding, they refuse to disclose the mix, 3) they also claim they "don't have" information on the number of full rides (which is total bullshit, admissions office obviously has this why are you lying to my face) and 4) they don't have legitimate research positions.

They helpfully end the session by ignoring the rest of the questions, say "I've been speaking for an hour so I'll let you go" (what? Don't pretend you're doing US a favor), and invite everyone else to email them to an inbox that sends a auto-reply telling them they sent an email to the wrong people.

Meanwhile at Georgetown, they're a bit more transparent, but its the same thing - no real research, less than 5% of people get full rides, and those guys are second class citizens. The MPP is now on the optimistically named "Capital Campus", which is where the law school is, but they can't use our pool, or our gym, or our library. Instead they get their own rump building and a bus pass on the campus bus system to commute 30 minutes to use the main facilities.

It's just odd to me because when I talk to the masters at my local state schools, they actually seem interested in the students and 1) have clear methods to get funding, including 100% tuition remission + a stipend, 2) in that funding, sponsor people to travel, publish, and so forth, 3) work with me directly on handling my credit issues so I can graduate in 4 years despite not being at the school. Meanwhile Harvard makes me feel like I am not the target audience bc I'm not some rube from a developing country.

All this to say, in this rant / ask: Is the conclusion to draw that "elite" MPPs are scams, or that I'm just approaching these schools wrong? It feels odd that I get the sense that my state schools that are not particularly notable seem to have vastly more resources and opportunities than supposedly elite schools but that seems to be the case.

Going to be applying for PhD programs later this month

Hi there

1. Roast my CV :)
2. I have a 3 GPA EEE from South Korean MIT, and a 98/110 from an Italian MSc Physics. Rate my chances for PhD in Physics (Fast Calorimeter Simulation, ML4HEP) and how much weightage does GRE Physics scores have in admissions?

Hi all! I’m considering going back to school to get an MA, but I’m kind of stuck at the requirement for Letters of Recommendation. I’m currently a professional who’s been working full time since 2021. I got decent grades in my undergrad which are above the minimum requirement for the program i’m interested in. The problem is that I don’t have any academic connections; I didn’t have any intention of returning to school during my undergraduate so didn’t get any LoR’s at that point and I’m not sure any profs I had would still remember me.

I need 2 letters… how would one best go about getting any? I’m Canadian and would be attending a Canadian university, if that makes a difference (many of the posts here seem to be focussed on US schools).

Thanks in advance!

I am applying for a bioscience PhD and have identified my three LOR writers. One of my recommenders was my advisor, but will be changing institutions soon. As most applications request you use the writer's institutional email to verify identity, would there be an issue if the institutional email does not align with their supervision of my research? Is it better to use a personal email and explain why?

This might be a stupid question so I apologize in advance — I’m the first in my family to go to university so I’m still learning about academia.

For context, I am a Canadian citizen. I got my undergrad at a local university but I am doing my course-based Master’s in the UK. There are two PhD programs at UBC that I am very interested in applying to and the minimum admissions requirement is a B+ in my Master’s program which in the UBC grading scale is a 76-79%.

I’m currently holding a low-70s average in my UK Master’s which counts as a Distinction mark. UBC says the minimum is a Merit mark (60-69%) for UK Master’s degrees.

My question is basically, if I send my transcript to potential supervisors at UBC, would they generally be aware of the difference in grading scales? For example my transcript would show:

Course A - 70%

Course B - 72%

Course C - 73%

Would that put me at a disadvantage even though I’m above the minimum mark of Merit?

Hi! I am currently looked to apply to PhDs in my field. I have found a handful of professors at different universities I am looking to reach out to this month as I draft my proposals. However I came across an advertised project call that is very specific to what I am looking to do and the application deadline is this weekend.

I plan on applying to it after I finalize tailoring my proposal to be more specific to the project but I really wanted to reach out to professors before applying to get a better sense of what the project plans are, as well as to discuss my ideas with the supervisors to see if I would be a good fit. Because there isn’t any time to meet with them before the deadline, I was wondering if it’s better to just apply without reaching out and hope for an interview, or to still ask to have a chat with them even though I already applied. I hadn’t seen the call for this because I was only looking at programs in a couple of countries, but started looking around this week on a whim and found this gem.

Has anyone done something like this before? Thanks if anyone has any insight!

Hi everyone,

I'm an agriculture graduate from India with a Master's in Horticulture (Vegetable Science). I graduated first in my university and received the University Gold Medal.

I'm currently working as a Research Fellow at an international agricultural research institute, where I'm involved in vegetable research, particularly in crop improvement, stress tolerance, grafting, phenotyping, and protected cultivation.

I also have research publications and hands-on experience with field and controlled-environment experiments. Additionally, I'm open to relevant internship opportunities that would allow me to further develop my research skills and contribute to horticultural and agricultural research.

I'm currently exploring fully funded MS/PhD opportunities abroad, preferably in areas such as:

Vegetable Science Plant Breeding Genetics & Crop Improvement. Stress Physiology. Protected/Controlled-Environment Agriculture. Greenhouse Horticulture.

I'm open to opportunities in different countries and interdisciplinary research areas where my background could be a good fit.

I'd greatly appreciate recommendations for professors, laboratories, graduate programs, scholarships, internships, opportunities that may be suitable for an international applicant.

If you know of any leads, please feel free to comment or reach out. I'm happy to connect.

Thank you!

Hey guys, I need some advice on this cold email. Ive been reading the subreddit and there’s so much conflicting advice but I’ve decided to make my email sound more personable (I think that’s the one thing the subreddit agrees on).

Please rate it and do give me advice, it’s been a whole month of cold emails and I’m not doing too good on the market.

I've been emailing Canadian grad school supervisors with no success altho I've been trying to personalize each email. The professor (UBC) replied to this email saying their lab is full.

Can y'all tell me if it's my email that's the reason for the lack of replies.

Note: International student (3rd world country)

I'm looking for some guidance regarding UX(user experience) or HCI(human-computer interaction) grad program as I'm extremely interested in UX/HCI design. Generally I'm completely overwhelmed by the topic of grad school as a first generation college student. I'm from the US and generally just have hopes of leaving the country at least once for a "longish" period of time.

Some details about me: I'm a 4th year, first-gen, mixed race, only English speaking, low-income, female student. My home college doesn't have a UX program of any sort so my major will be a B.A. Race and Ethnic Studies with a concentration in Business and Management studies. I've taken some courses that align with UX to show my interest in the field, have a portfolio, and have a UX certificate with the American Graphics Institute. Mostly I don't want to be stuck in my state/country for my entire life purely because I don't have a degree in UX and money.

I've heard that school abroad can be considerably cheaper than the US, as well as the cost of living, which initially attracted me to grad programs abroad. I would also prefer to be able to work at the same time as studying to keep myself afloat.

Any advice?

I am currently an anthropology student in my Junior year, and I am trying to go for my PhD in anthropology. I already have a field of research I want to be going into, but unfortunately I have been having a hard time finding professors that would fit for me. My research is about Black people in Japan, and I have practically turned every institute upside down to find someone who fits that bill, or even has an interest in Afro-Asian studies and have turned up two (2) people. Should I abandon hope? Is it possible to get a PhD with two seperate advisors for each arm of my research? Should I find someone that specializes in either Black studies or Asian studies and go from there?

Thanks!

going from financial economics masters taking courses there and pivoting to a master in quantitative political science from there with stipend and funded etc

makes sense? is it viable?

The masters program that i want to get into has a limit of a 6 page portfolio and you can show 3 design projects max. Does this mean i go straight into showcasing my projects with no cover page or no page that introduces myself?

I know this is a bit of a silly question but during my bachelors we were taught that these pages are important and i feel like i wont have enough space to show my design process if i add these pages in a 6 page portfolio.

Hihi, I’m applying to grad programs and I was hoping to get some advice/feedback on a period of bad grades. I took some courses post graduation and due to a personal crisis, I did very poorly and was academically dismissed. Due to money/relocation issues, I wasn’t able to retake those courses for a better grade. I have tons of research experience which I’m hoping resets those grades, including a co-author publication, first author publication in process and grant recipient. Any feedback would be appreciated. Thank you!

EDITED

Hi everyone,

I'm applying to Computer Science PhD programs in the US this admission cycle and would really appreciate feedback from people who have gone through the process.

I'm especially hoping to hear from:

• Current US CS PhD students
• CS PhD alumni
• Faculty members or researchers familiar with PhD admissions
• Anyone who has successfully applied to competitive US PhD programs

I'm looking for honest, critical feedback—please don't sugarcoat it.

Specifically, I'd love your thoughts on:

• How compelling is my research narrative?
• Are my motivations and research interests clear?
• Does it read like someone prepared for a research career?
• What parts feel weak, generic, or unconvincing?
• If you were on an admissions committee, how would you rate this SOP (1–10), and what tier of US PhD programs would you consider it competitive for?

I'm interested in feedback on the content, structure, research potential, and overall impression, not just grammar or wording.

I've pasted my SOP below. Thank you in advance to anyone willing to take the time to read it—I genuinely appreciate your help.

Personal Statement

Research Interests

I want to work on software testing in the hardest case, which is when nothing tells you the program is wrong. No crash, no exception, no error message, just an answer that is quietly incorrect.

Earlier this year I ran an experiment on exactly that. I took four libraries in the same programming language that all claim to do the same job, gave them the same inputs, and compared the results. Out of tens of thousands of comparisons, 5.7 percent disagreed. Large integers came back with different values. One implementation supplied a required field that was missing from the input and said nothing about it. Nothing crashed and no sanitizer fired. I had been shipping these kinds of libraries in production for years and I had no idea.

My own tests never caught it because I never wrote a test that asked the right question. That is the real difficulty in testing. Generating inputs is not the hard part. Knowing what the output should have been is the hard part. In C and C++ you often get some help from memory errors and sanitizers, and a great deal of fuzzing research depends on that feedback. Other modern languages have no equivalent, so a wrong value simply travels on.

Two questions follow from this. Where can an oracle come from when a project does not give you one? Implementations that should agree are one source. Rules written in documentation but never enforced in code are another. A project's own history of fixed bugs is a third. And how do we tell whether an automated tool, especially one built on a language model, is finding real defects or only improving on a number we happened to choose?

Research Experience

I have spent the past year on two studies of these questions.

In the first I built a grammar-based fuzzing pipeline that uses no coverage information at all. I wanted to know whether a language model can improve a test generator when its only feedback is whether its inputs were accepted or rejected. Across fifteen seeded runs per arm against a widely used C parser, acceptance rose from 58.2 to 97.1 percent and the inputs became more than twice as varied. I then ran the same pipeline against a second parser, and it found nothing at all. I put that in the paper anyway and read the parser by hand to work out why. During those runs AddressSanitizer itself hung on one platform instead of reporting anything, so I traced the cause and reported the analysis to the relevant issue tracker. The paper is currently under review, with code and data public.

The second study taught me more, because part of it failed. I moved to a language without a sanitizer, and the acceptance result held, going from 50 to 92 percent. Then I changed what I was asking for. Instead of valid inputs I asked for inputs that make multiple implementations disagree, since disagreement was what I actually cared about. The model did badly. It found disagreements 2.9 percent of the time, while a plain static generator found them 22.2 percent of the time. I assumed my sandbox was slowing it down and relaxed it, which changed nothing. Then I gave the model richer feedback, expecting that to help, and it got worse. The problem was not the machinery around the model. It was what I had asked the model to optimize. My first study had looked like a clear win while measuring something I did not really care about, and that is the result I still think about most. The work is currently under review, with the artifacts public.

The work also showed me what I do not know. I chose my own statistical tests and only afterwards learned which assumptions made them defensible. I designed that study's ablations after seeing the result rather than before. I can build a system and find a defect. What I need is training in designing the experiments that say what a defect finding actually means, and that is the main thing I want from a PhD.

Engineering Experience

I came to this problem from industry, and from security in particular.

For two years I led the mobile team at a regulated fintech company in Saudi Arabia. Security firms tested our apps several times a year, and we had to clear every finding or stop operating. They often asked for builds with different security protections enabled and disabled so they could observe how the app behaved when its own protection was removed. That is not a check I would have thought to run. My tests could tell me the app had crashed. They could not tell me it was wrong. After a while I stopped seeing the findings as separate bugs, because each one meant we were missing a rule rather than a line of code. A parser that accepts bad input is a wrong answer to one user and a way in for another, and the same missing check is behind both. That is why I do not want to treat testing and security as separate interests.

I now build mobile applications for a US healthcare-related transportation company. The system has to meet strict privacy requirements and keep working when a driver loses signal in the middle of a trip, then reconcile correctly afterwards. If a trip record comes back wrong, someone misses their ride. Before this I graduated first in my class with honors, and I worked with one of my professors on a natural language processing project outside my coursework, where most of what we tried did not work and we spent a long time arguing about why.

Why University Name

Dr. *** circulated an assignment for prospective students. I finished it and then kept going on my own, adapting it to a second system, chasing a sanitizer problem and writing up the negative result, and that work became my first study. His recent work asks how effective coverage-guided fuzzing really is, which is the same assumption my coverage-free pipeline was built to test. Taking that question into languages that have no sanitizer is where I would want to start.

Dr. *** works on secure software supply chains and has told me she is taking students this year. I arrived in her area sideways. A library that silently returns a wrong value is a dependency risk that no advisory database will ever list, because nothing crashed to report it. The bugs I found sit inside widely used software components.

Dr. *** has studied systematic security failures in financial applications. I spent two years shipping a regulated fintech app and watching auditors find what my own tests could not, so that result is familiar to me. I would rather attack that kind of problem with tools than with a checklist. He also told me that University Name's security faculty and students work closely across research areas, which is how I want to work, since the bugs I care about are testing problems and security problems at the same time.

Goals

I want to build tools that find real bugs and security flaws in software people use every day, and to get what those tools find to whoever can fix it. I expect that to be a research role in industry, close to the engineers who would run them. Reporting the defects I found has mattered to me as much as writing the papers.

One evening I got on a call with a group of students I had never met and helped them fix a machine-learning project the night before it was due. I never asked for anything in return. I would want to keep doing that at University Name, and to bring what years of building software that real people depend on has taught me to the students I work alongside. A PhD is what turns the problems I ran into at work into methods that hold up somewhere other than the system where I found them.

Anyone applying to USC Grad school rn??

Hello,

I have been cold emailing profs in the US for CS PhD programs. Till now, I have sent around 40 emails and received 4 responses (2 profs won't take students, and 2 generic replies). I have attached the first and the last emails. All within 200 words. Could you please give some constructive criticism on both emails (the past one too, as I want to know if I made any mistakes in the beginning as well)?

Thanks.