Hello everyone,
I will be a freshman this fall, in the University of California, Berkeley. So at the moment I haven’t even graduated from high school but I like planning my future, so I can do things the way I want them to be. My question is about graduate schools.
I want to study Computer Science and/or Mathematics and want to pursue an academic career. For grad schools, I started to research the PhD programs of the universities I’m interested in. According to UsNews (for grad schools) Berkeley is in top 3 for both of these fields (especially in Theoretical Computer Science it’s not even tied to #1); so I am still considering Berkeley for grad school. How realistic is it for me to get into a Berkeley PhD degree if I become a successful student in Berkeley? Is my chance better at other universities?
Not necessarily. Many programs tend not to recruit their own graduates. This is not a rule but it is usually a good idea to change scenery for a graduate program. Particularly if you are seeking an academic career, having experience at more than one university is important.
Thank you @xraymancs it makes sense to experience more than one university for an academic career. I understand that. Thank you for your reply.
It’s way easier to get into a school like that for undergrad than grad. Take tough classes, maybe some grad classes, do well, take the Putnam, get involved in research, get to know your professors. (Do some programming projects of your own on the side, too.)
@mathandcs thanks a lot for the insight! That brings another question (about double-majoring) but I’ll post that as a different question (so nothing will be confusing).
I want to point something out. In this similar (but not same) thread: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/graduate-school/1769348-undergraduate-master-and-phd-from-the-same-college.html#latest
@juillet wonderfully explains that it may be ok to study in the same university if that university is already one of the top schools in the area (as I explained, my case is similar). But my question was a specific “Can I get in / what are my chances?” type of question. So thanks for your answers!
For a PhD, the overall strength of a particular department is not as important as the specific faculty advisor you’d like to work with and how well their research interests match yours and whether their resources would permit you to do the type of work you’d like to do.
With Math, there’s a bit of an exception. You’re not really supposed to know what you want to study. It obviously helps to have research experience going in, but most undergraduates know very little about math (grad school is where you learn it), and many do complete 180s, for example loving algebra throughout undergrad but finding analysis boring, then deciding to study functional analysis in grad school. There’s just no way as a senior in college you’re going to know whether you intend to study p-adic L-functions or the Arf-Kervaire invariant. (You’ll still need to write about some research interests in your SOP, but that’s a different issue.) That said, it seems unlikely a top 10 school in either Math or CS won’t have anyone working in areas you find interesting, should you get accepted at these schools.
Other fields seem to expect you to really know what specifically you want to study at the time of application.
I would say that’s not entirely true. Your faculty advisor is very important, but your department is too, and how much they are each important varies depending on the kind of PhD. For the sciences and some social sciences, advisor/PI might be more important because they have much more control and direction over your program; for the humanities fields (and some social sciences), you work more independently and your department’s strength might be more important than the one person you work with. Besides, you don’t want to be with a strong advisor in a weak department, because that will also affect the coursework you take, your peers, and the resources available to you.
And yes, I would say that my field and most other social and natural sciences expect you to have a specific area of study in mind. That doesn’t mean that you can’t change it (slightly) over the course of your PhD, but you do need to have a general broad area picked out. I’m not sure about computer science, though.
Well my dd applied to grad schools for theoretical CS and for the most part picked departments where they did such work and even specific research groups within that field were the ones she was most successful at. But the uni she was at does allow you to change areas and she did change to Machine Learning.
I agree with the above: it is not a written rule that you attend a different university for your PhD, but it is typically advised to go somewhere else. And I think you are not yet in a position to be concerned about this; if you perform well during undergraduate, your concentration, and the respective PhD program strengths will become more apparent to you. Undergraduate faculty advising will help you determine the best options. You may end up submitting an application to Berkeley for graduate school, but you will certainly be submitting applications to other programs.
The old thinking is that the grad department of a school doesn’t want to accept undergrads from the same school. It’s been changing; the world is much smaller now.
A few months back, I had a conversation on this subject with two friends of mine, one being a world-famous EE professor at UCB, the other currently a researcher at UCB (I’m not sure of his title, but he’s not teaching and way beyond post-doc), both having volunteered in ad com at UCB CoE for a number of years. While admitting to the so-called “common wisdom,” they told me that there were many much more important factors in grad admission than “being undergrad from the same school.” They also told me that they had never seen a candidate being rejected for the reason of being undergrad at UCB.
PhD students these days have a lot of opportunities to work with grad departments of other schools. Also, what’s wrong with having an undergrad degree from the best undergrad school and also having a grad degree from the best grad school? The best undergrad school and the best grad school happen to be the same, so what!
I personally know at least two undergrads at UCB currently doing PhD at UCB, one EE, the other CS. They were also admitted to other grad schools, but chose UCB partly because UCB was simply the best in the fields they wanted to study.
Case in point: Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu received the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University (you should know Prof. Liu if you’re going to UCB).