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> If someone had a good idea for improving the error terms in the Davenport-Heilbronn theorem, clearly understood the related literature, and brought this to my
by woofie11 6y ago
> If someone had a good idea for improving the error terms in the Davenport-Heilbronn theorem, clearly understood the related literature, and brought this to my attention -- then I'd cheerfully work with them, even if they were an unemployed high-school dropout. But in practice this does not happen.
Yes, it does. That's the exact approach I used to get into grad school, and what I encourage others to do. Find a professor you like. Read their literature and get up-to-speed on their field. Engage with them around their work.
It's rare for people to do this, but it works. Sometimes you might need to do this with 2-3 professors to find one who is hiring grad students that semester (and be careful about programs where one professor can't hire but students are brought into a program), but it's a much better approach than spending a decade optimizing to GPAs, GREs, and what-not.
When someone does this, professors can have complete confidence the candidate can do the work, since they already are...
- impendia 6y agoCan I ask what field you're in? In mathematics in the US, "hiring grad students that semester" is not a common thing, and "programs where one professor can't hire but students are brought into a program" describes every program of which I'm aware. But, I stand corrected that my experience doesn't generalize as extensively as I had imagined.
- woofie11 6y agoI'm in electronic engineering, but most of the experience is from computer science departments. There are programs like Caltech where students do rotations and aren't admitted into a lab. But for example, at the MIT Media Lab, a professor can explicitly pull in a student for their group (and it's bloody hard to switch, if there's an advisor-advisee conflict). And some departments are a hybrid, where a professor can pull someone in by writing an appropriate recommendation note to the admissions committee. If a professor says in a rec "I've worked with Alice for the past few months. If you admit Alice, we have a project defined together, and I have funding to pay for it," that's more-or-less an automatic admit, barring exceptional circumstances.
- impendia 6y agoInteresting. My guess is that in EE and laboratory-based CS, professors have a lot of work that they can readily farm out to people working under their supervision. This is less true in math, where it typically requires a big effort to get a student up to speed.