Note to prospective PhD applicants

In the 2015-2016 application cycle, I am interested in taking students, but I've found that it just doesn't work for anybody if I reply to emails from prospective applicants. I know that sounds kind of weird, so let me explain.

First, I want to say off the bat that I have been truly, incredibly lucky to have been granted the opportunity to work with each of my students and postdocs. It is my dear and sincere wish that my luck will hold and I'll continue to find awesome students willing to work with me (and, truth be told, put up with my idiosyncrasies, of which there may be one or two).

So as to help attract awesome students, I used to (eventually...) always reply personally and individually to emails from interesting-sounding people who asked about graduate study with me. But one recent year, I checked up and discovered that not one of the people I answered ended up applying.

This really worried me, and I asked quite a few people what I was doing wrong. Eventually, I arrived at the conclusion that I'm terrible at conveying my actual excitement regarding new research opportunities with new students. (It has been hinted that maybe my tendency towards overly long sentences and parentheticals might have something to do with it.)

So let me just say this: if you've made it to the end of this message, and looked over my papers, research summary, and recent graduate course and still think that working with me might be a good idea and even kind of fun, please just apply!

...oh, actually, I should say some things about my style.

...and one more addendum. Sometimes people ask, should they apply to Cornell's computer science or information science PhD program? I don't think there's an obvious answer to this question. I do think that at the end of your PhD, you'll be evaluated by others by what work you did much more than what department you did it in, so you should pick whatever department you think will lead to your doing the best work that's most fulfiling and interesting and important to you. Take a look at what each department's graduate requirements are, what their faculty are doing, and what their students are doing (keeping in mind that there's grad-student and faculty collaboration across the departments). And, write a statement of purpose that describes who you are and what you want to do, not what you think one department or the other wants to hear --- in fact, we sometimes move applications from one department to the other if it seems like there's a better fit that way.


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