4 ms·
> there’s increasingly an expectation that students should come into a PhD program with one or more publications already under their belt. For top programs idea
by sage76 3y ago
> there’s increasingly an expectation that students should come into a PhD program with one or more publications already under their belt. For top programs ideally these should be first author (not yet an absolute requirement but it’s more important each year).
This is something I discovered pretty late in my life. The web pages maintained by profs barely have any info.
I have come to hate the whole "everybody looks for different things" type of answer when it comes to PhD apps. I wish profs would just spell it out on their site in concrete terms what they personally look for.
- currymj 3y agoat least in computer science, this document is from CMU and tended to get circulated pretty widely, although probably not widely enough. every field ought to have something like it. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~harchol/gradschooltalk.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~harchol/gradschooltalk.pdf
- sage76 3y agoI have seen that, and it was helpful. But at least in machine learning and AI, if you want an admit into any top 10 US PhD program, you need a publication or 2 in a top tier venue, preferably first author. In other fields and lower ranked programs, again I wish profs would be explicit (since publications might not be expected). Like this guy:http://math.stanford.edu/~vakil/potentialstudents.html http://math.stanford.edu/~vakil/potentialstudents.html "So before I take you on as a new student, you should be comfortable with the foundations of the subject, which means having done the majority of the exercises in Hartshorne or my course notes, and being able to explain them on demand." That is very explicit and sets clear expectations.