<p>I think these are very general questions, and I really think I and many undergraduate can benefit from this:</p>
<p>If I have an interest in a particular area (general enough, say, cryptography, or computational mathematics, just to name a few), how do you choose an adviser? When do you choose an adviser? </p>
<p>If you apply for PhD and if you are not accepted is it because the department rejected your application, or can it be the rejection from that professor even though the department may have accepted you?</p>
<p>Furthermore, I don't know if anyone has ever felt this way: you just have an interest in a particular area, but you don't know how to specify a particular topic: then how do you choose an adviser, and the right graduate program?</p>
<p>On one hand working for a year or two maybe the answer, but is there anything else I can do right now? I mean I can read articles and find potential advisers. </p>
<p>Note: this should probably be moved to the “Graduate School” subforum for more informed responses…</p>
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Assuming you’ve already chosen the school and department, get a list of professors, and cross off some percentage (e.g. 75%) that do research you’re least interested in. Set up some time to go talk to the candidates, and ask them questions about how their lab/group/team works. Some questions that I’d ask are: does the professor have lots of students or few students? does the professor expect students to come to the lab/office at regular hours (e.g. 9-5 when not in class)? does the group/lab/team have regular meetings? given my interests, what kinds of projects do you think you might want me to work on? etc. Ultimately, you’ll probably want to choose one of the best professors (according to these criteria) who agrees to advise you. After you have that taken care of, you can complete a plan of study and make it official (I think this is usually how it works).</p>
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Schools/departments will typically give explicit instructions on the deadlines for doing things. For instance, maybe you need to have a plan of study filed and approved by the end of the second semester in residence. You should ask the graduate program officer or graduate adviser in your department and/or the graduate school office.</p>
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Good question, and frankly I’m not sure, but my understanding is that the process varies but is usually fairly complex. For instance, the University may cut some applicants across the board based only on tests/GPA/credentials/etc. Then, professors in the department to which you’re applying will all look at your application and vote. If they say no, I believe a single professor can typically override the decision and have you admitted… but I’m not sure that it works the other way, i.e., the committee votes to accept you and a single professor overrides and has you rejected. Either way, if you’re good enough for the committee to accept, I find it unlikely that a professor will dislike your application so much that they insist you are rejected.</p>
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Departments are usually strong in a few areas, not topics. Just go to a strong school and make your best guess as to the area(s) you might be interested in. Once there, try to become familiar with a number of groups’ research - by reading papers, attending presentations/seminars, or even working in the group - and you’ll be sure to find something that interests you.</p>
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You mean to start in Fall 2011? Yeah, it’s probably too late to do much planning now. Maybe others will have creative ideas about what you might do.</p>
<p>Different departments have different policies. The better-funded departments don’t require you to pick an advisor until some time after starting the PhD, but for those that don’t enjoy surplus funding, they often require you to include which professors you’re interested in; if those professors have funding to support grad students, and the department accepts you, you’ll be tied to the professor who has the funding.</p>
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<p>Yes, the department may accept you, but the professor might not be available (say they’re going on sabbatical), or the prof might not have funding to take on new grad students. If the department requires you to have a prof at that time, you have to choose someone else to be your adviser (possibly switch if the other prof has funding in the future). If a professor says they want to take you on as a PhD student, though, you’ll nearly always get accepted by the department. It’s always a good idea to communicate with the profs you’re interested in before/while applying.</p>
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<p>If you have an interest in that area, then you should have some idea of what you want to research. You’ll have to create specific project proposals (both for grad school apps and fellowship apps), but you aren’t bound to do those. At the same time, you need to have a good idea of what research you want to do, so that you can pick out which advisors would work for you. If you don’t have an idea of what subarea you’re interested in, then it’ll be hard to choose an advisor. You don’t need to be super specific, but say the department is computer science: artificial intelligence would be too general, but say you were interested in the crossover between computer vision and machine learning? That’s a bit more specific and would allow you to pick out potential advisors. You don’t need to take time off, but it depends on how well you know your interests. I’d suggest you go to their websites (try to see if there’s a specific lab/center/organization for your interest, and find the faculty through there), look at their stated research interests, and most importantly look at their recent papers. You should know then whether their research interests you.</p>
<p>To both of you:
Thank you so much! My friend and I found your responses extremely helpful. </p>
<p>Yes. I do have some interests in cryptography and simulation; at this point I am reading journals and books on those two subjects and hopefully I can narrow down my interest. </p>
<p>I’ll be sure to come back with some other questions :] Thanks !</p>