These are various application materials from when I applied to grad school, openly published here to encourage and assist others when doing the same. Feel free to use my LaTeX source files to generate your own documents if you would like.
Statement of Purpose
Endless thanks to Ethan Fast for his blog post State Your
Purpose and Jean
Yang for publishing her statement of
purpose. I
found both of these very useful for understanding the tone and content of an
effective statement of purpose.
PDF ·
TeX
Transcripts
I’m told that my 0.71 GPA from RIT set a low score record for accepted CMU ISR
Ph.D. students; I find endless amusement in this. Lesson: there is very little
that you can’t recover from, worry about what you’re doing now rather than
what mistakes you may have made in the past. My UVA grades were also not
fantastic, but at that point I knew that developing and demonstrating research
skills was more important than perfect academic performance.
UVA ·
PVCC ·
RIT
Resume
This is the resume that I sent out with my applications (except the address and
phone number have been changed). This is not my current resume, but it should
give you an idea of what worked for grad school.
PDF ·
TeX
GRE
Important update for 2020: Many schools are starting to drop the GRE requirement (including CMU ISR). Make sure you check to see if the schools you are applying to require them, if none of them require it I advise not even taking it.
I didn’t study at all for the GREs and went in completely cold. I pretty much bombed the writing portion, but it’s pretty clear that having a coherent statement of purpose and/or having written a paper is more important to admissions committees than standardized test scores.
- Verbal: 162 - 91st percentile
- Quantitative: 169 - 96th percentile
- Writing: 3.5 - 41st percentile
Schools
Here’s the list of the schools I applied to and their response:
- CMU - A
- Cornell - R
- Princeton - R
- Georgia Tech - A
- University of Maryland - N
- Harvard - R
- Duke - R*
- UNC - A
- UVa - A
- NC State - A
- UMass Amherst - A
- SUNY Stony Brook - A
- Penn - R
- Michigan - N
- Delaware - A
Key:
A: Accept
R: Reject
N: No Response
*Duke does a strange thing where you’re first invited to a pre-admission visit and that serves both as a visit day and an admission interview. I spoke with two different professors over Skype and am pretty sure that they would have admitted me had I gone to the visit.
Application Fees
Applying to as many schools as I did was very expensive (approx. $2,000). Do not let this discourage you from applying. At the time I did not know about application fee waivers, which I likely would have been eligible for. Most schools offer these, and from what I understand they are usually generous about them. If you think you’d be eligible, you probably are.