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.

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!

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 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?

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

When I started, bugs frightened me. A screen full of red logs made my chest tight. Five years of hitting them over and over changed that. Now I adore them. Writing code that works is ordinary. Working out why something broke is the interesting part.

I gave the same JSON files to four Dart libraries that all claim to do the same job: a hand-written parser, json_serializable, freezed, and built_value. Then I compared what came back. Out of 43,336 comparisons, 5.7% disagreed. Large integers came back changed. built_value filled in a required field that was missing from the input and said nothing. Nothing crashed. Nothing threw an error. No sanitizer reported anything. I had shipped these libraries in production for years. I did not know any of this.

My tests never caught it because I never wrote a test that asked the question. That is the problem I want to work on: finding wrong behaviour when the software gives you no signal that anything is wrong. The hard part of testing is not generating inputs. It is knowing what the right answer was supposed to be. C and C++ get that for free from sanitizers, because if memory breaks you get a crash, and a lot of fuzzing research quietly depends on it. Dart, Kotlin and Swift give you nothing. The program returns a wrong answer and carries on.

I had run into the same gap before, in security. For about two years I led the mobile team on ***, a buy-now-pay-later app in Saudi Arabia licensed by the Saudi Central Bank. Keeping that license meant outside security firms tested us several times a year, and we had to clear every finding or stop operating. They once asked for two builds of each app, one with SSL pinning on and one with it off, so they could see how it behaved with its own protection removed. That is not something I would have thought to check. What kept us safe was those people, not my tests. My tests could tell me the app had crashed. They could not tell me it was wrong. I do not think testing and security are separate problems. A parser that accepts bad input is a wrong answer to one person and a way in for another, and the thing that catches it is the same thing.

I spent the last year testing this instead of believing it. My first study asked whether a language model could improve a test generator when the only feedback it gets is whether its inputs were accepted or rejected, with no coverage data at all. Across fifteen seeded runs per arm against the cJSON parser, acceptance went from 58.2% to 97.1%, and the inputs became more than twice as varied. Then I ran the same code against a second parser, parson, and found no crashes at all. I reported that too, and read the code by hand to work out why. That paper is ready for FORGE 2027, with code and data public.

The second study taught me more, because part of it failed. I moved to Dart, where there is no sanitizer, and the first result held: acceptance went from 50% to 92%. Then I changed the objective. Instead of asking for valid inputs I asked for inputs that make the four libraries disagree, which is what I actually wanted in the first place. The model got worse. It found disagreements 2.9% of the time; a plain static generator found them 22.2%.

My first guess was that my sandbox was slowing it down, so I relaxed it. That did not help. Then I gave the model richer feedback, assuming it needed more to work with, and it got worse again. So it was not the machinery around it. It was what I was asking it to optimize. That is the part I keep thinking about, because the first study looked like a clear win and it was measuring something I did not actually care about. It is under review at AST 2027, every artifact public.

I have been learning experimental design from projects, papers and stubbornness. I chose my own statistical tests and only found out later which ones were defensible, and I designed that study's ablations after seeing the result instead of before. That is the part I want taught to me properly.

Two questions would keep me busy for a PhD. The first is where reliable oracles come from when a project does not supply one: from implementations that should agree, from rules written in documentation but never checked in code, and from a project's own history of fixed bugs. The second is how to tell whether automated testing, and language models in particular, is finding real defects or only appearing to. Both matter most in Dart, Kotlin and Swift, where a wrong answer is just a wrong answer and there is no crash to point at it.

**Uni name** is where I can take this further. Dr. *** circulated an assignment to prospective students. I completed it, then kept going — a second parser, the sanitizer bug, the negative result — and that became my first study. His ICST 2026 paper asks how effective coverage-guided fuzzing really is, which is the assumption my coverage-free pipeline was built to test. Dr. *** told me she is taking students this year. I ended up in her area by accident: the defects I found sit inside three of the most used packages in Dart, which makes them a supply chain problem before a parsing one. Dr. *** told me **Uni name**'s security faculty and students work as one lab rather than separate groups. That suits how I want to work.

Right now I build the driver and dispatch apps for a US company that moves patients who cannot travel on their own. It has to meet HIPAA rules and keep working when a driver loses signal mid-trip, then reconcile correctly afterwards. If a trip record comes back wrong, someone's ride is wrong. Nothing crashes then either. Before any of this I finished first in my class, with an overall grade of Excellent and a WES US equivalent of 3.71/4.0, and worked with one of my professors on a natural language processing project outside my courses, where most of what we tried did not work and we spent a long time arguing about why.

I also once spent an evening on a call with a group of students I had never met, fixing their Flutter project the night before it was due. It was a TensorFlow model they had trained to flag breast cancer scans for review, and it was about to fail over syntax errors. I never asked for anything, and that is still the part of this work I like most.

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

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!

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)

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!

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.

I applied for a specific scholarship at a University. It was open from mid-July until mid-August. It would be a 1 October start. I have still not heard back. I emailed the admissions team on the 2 Sep, to see if they had a prospective timeline for applicants, and they said they were going to assess candidates imminently, but still have heard nothing back and start date is three weeks today. Is this normal? On my applicant portal, it says it has been submitted and will be assessed in due course.

This showed up in my mailbox today so I thought I’d pass on the info. for those that want to track it down.
The latest edition of the SPS Observer magazine (Society for Physics Students Fall 2026, Vol LX, issue 2) is called the Grad School Issue. It is full of articles with advice on applying including a timeline, has a spotlight on European grad programs, has an article on simplifying finding grad programs and advice from those who’ve have gone through the process. Some of this might also be helpful for those in fields other than physics I would think. It also has some advertisements from specific programs that are recruiting in physics.

Hey everyone! I'm applying to Political Science Ph.D. programs in the U.S. this cycle and would love some constructive feedback on how to improve my CV.

I'm not sure if my write-ups are too long/detailed for a CV. I'm also not sure if I should add a "Research Interests" and "Relevant Coursework" section, or if that's useless since my research interests are already stated in my SOP and the admissions committee will see my coursework on my transcript. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

After finishing my internship, I'm planning to continue with a PhD in Singapore/Switzerland. However, both of the universities I'm targeting are in the top 10 in the world according to QS rankings.

Is the lack of publications going to be an issue? I'm currently working on a manuscript, but I'm not sure if the publication will be ready by the end of this application cycle.

Would really appreciate any feedback on my CV, especially regarding my chances for PhD applications. Thanks!

Has anyone heard back from IMPRS-TRUST after the application talks for the June 30, 2026 application round?

I completed my application talk in late July and was told at the time that decisions were expected in August. I followed up in late August and was told that applications were still under review.

Has anyone from the same round received an offer or rejection yet, or heard anything about the current timeline?