Another Financial Aid Post

Harsh recently asked in the comments about financial aid. I think this requires a fresh post outlining my experiences and observations from a few years ago.

In the years I was at UW-Madison (2002-2004), most Indian grad students in ECE at UW-Madison didn't get funding from the department along with admission. This was something I faced back then too, and honestly it was discouraging enough for me that I was even considering not enrolling at all. My parents were professors at a medical college in India and $12,000 in tuition every semester was a very large amount in rupees for us. They could support me for a year without funding, but somehow I felt terrible about spending so much out of my parents nest-egg on my education.

2002 was a tough year for jobs with the 2001 recession still looming large. Many employers in India, such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro had deferred their offers for the 2001 batch. Many smart seniors were killing time at home without a job for a whole year at times. That did affect grad school admissions too and I think admissions in 2002 were a lot tougher than 2000/2001 (based on the GRE score + academic profiles). For Electrical Engineering nobody I knew got accepted at any top 10 schools apart from some at University of Michigan.

Anyways so when I arrived in Madison, I was a practically peniless and even a $5 sub seemed expensive in rupees. I was planning to save every penny in order to avoid asking my parents for a lot of money. Most of my seniors in Madison were funded and they were very helpful. My hosts, Rajas, Amar and Manoj gave me a lot of ideas on how to go about looking for positions. About 11 days after I arrived I obtained funding for a programming job in the Physics department. I had heard about a couple of seniors who were teaching assistants in the Physics or the Math departments. There were some seniors who were working at the library on their IT systems. Some seniors were also TAs in ECE itself. The short answer is that there was a lot of demand for programming skills all over the campus. In my second year I luckily got an Research Assistantship in ECE itself. I interned at GE for a semester and beyond that point I was fairly rich for a student. I bought a car, a laptop, a camera... so most of my needs were satisfied.

TAs were usually 33% (or 13 hours a week) appointments and earned about $800 a month. Some 50% appointments (or 20 hours a week) as RAs earned about $1500 a month. This includes a complete tuition waiver and health insurance.

So my thoughts on funding:
- As much as I could tell it used to work out. People in those days paid tuition for a semester and were able to find funding within one semester. My ex-roommate didn't get funding in Fall 2002 itself but was later able to find a job somewhere recording video and burning CDs for some department related to African history.
- Programming is a really good skill to have for such jobs. Another friend I knew used to write Perl code to maintain a website for some department. And that paid for his tuition. So managing websites and having some samples may be a good idea.
- There is no point worrying about this before you even have admission. Most of these jobs require in-person interviews. So there is nothing you can do about them until you arrive on campus.
- What impact will the drop in federal funding have on such jobs? I have no way to tell. People currently at the university are your best bet for these questions. Again if there is a dearth of jobs in the real world, students tend to stay longer in school and that could affect your chances of getting funding. So take the above statements with a pinch of salt. There is some likelihood that things have changed.

Stupidity in Scientific Research

A great article in the Journal of Cell Science talks about the importance of stupidity in scientific research. The important point to take home is that nobody knows the answers to some questions. Quoting:

My Ph.D. project was somewhat interdisciplinary and, for a while, whenever I ran into a problem, I pestered the faculty in my department who were experts in the various disciplines that I needed. I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize two years later) told me he didn't know how to solve the problem I was having in his area. I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Taube knew about 1000 times more than I did (conservative estimate). If he didn't have the answer, nobody did.

Another nice point:

Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time.

Times report on Graduate School applications

As expected the number of people applying to graduate school has gone up. What is surprising is that the number of people taking the GRE has gone down... Article here.

Questions from Harsh

Hi...first i would like to thank you for regularly posting on blogs and helping people like us who want to get into US.

I am currently in my final year of computer science and engineering. My scores are not way too good, my aggregate till now is 63%. I want to do a MS from a good university. By good , I mean top 50 universities. So, what else should i do to compensate for
my relatively lesser grades?. Actually, I am interested in Phd and research but, it is too time consuming and money is the major factor here to think about. So, at first I am going to complete my MS.

Also, considering the future, which is the most feasible field to choose for MS. I am particularly interested in Data mining, computer architecture and design, operating systems and machine learning. Other interests include artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. So which should i choose, or should i go for a generic degree in ECE?. I dream of working at google/Nvidia.

I have been a constant reader of IEEE papers and some works of professors from Berkeley and MIT. I also am thinking of some research ideas , but I need to get into one of the top 50 universities so as to make the best out of my career. So do let me
know your thoughts about this.

thanks
Harsh

Thanks for visiting my blog Harsh. I'm glad that I could help you in any way. You do sound pretty well-informed about most things. I think you should be able to make it into a top 50 university. 63% is a respectable score for at least the University of Pune.

Google
For a job at Google, data mining & operating systems probably are good areas of specialization. Google is working on Google Android actively, and pushing it into both the netbook and cellphone markets. So that is definitely a growth area for their company. I personally feel voice recognition (or natural language processing) is also a good area to be in. Microsoft made some announcements yesterday about how they imagine the computing world will be like 10 years from now. They talked about how we will all have personal assistants. If you've heard of a service called GOOG-411, it allows users to conduct searches providing voice input. Image Processing is probably a good expertise for them to deal with all those images for Google Maps.

NVIDIA
For a job at NVIDIA, computer architecture, VLSI design, operating systems, compilers are good areas of research. A big growth area for NVIDIA is CUDA. It is an API/Architecture for parallel computing, which exposes a C extension allowing users to execute parallel tasks on the GPU. On some apps users have reported a speed-up by a factor of 100. Even Intel is trying to get users to program for multi-core, which is a big area for research.

To improve your odds
- Like I have said in the past paper presentation contests, extra projects are a good way to get an edge over others. Academic scores are important but you can compensate at least a little by displaying some practical usage of your skills.
- For a computer science major, if you could come up with a simple idea for something like a useful website, a CUDA based application speeding up something simple like JPEG encoding or video encoding, contributing to some open source project like Linux are good ways to get an edge over your competition.
- If you are reading at least some IEEE journals you already have a head start.

Other pointers
- These are just my opinions.
- You'll have to focus on a couple of aims for now or at least focus on one aim for your applications. When you are at the university you can try out a few different fields and then choose what interests you. For applications I think it is best to express interest in one area.
- Just a pointer, if you do plan to go for a PhD you'll have to do an MS thesis. Keep in mind that if you transfer from one university to another for your PhD, all your MS credits may not get counted.
- Nanotechnology is a little bit of a hard-sell for CS majors because it is at the boundary of Electrical Engineering and Physics for most parts. It may not be the best use of your CS skills.

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