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Can 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 h

• woofie11 6y ago
  I'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 ago
    Interesting. 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.