11/28/24

The PhD Application from a Faculty's Perspective

tldr; to avoid wasting time (your own and faculty’s), it is helpful to understand the basic incentives that inform a faculty’s PhD recruiting decisions.

The PhD admissions process at top CS departments is highly competitive. I think it is helpful to understand the PhD admissions process from the faculty’s perspective, and what is prioritized. It assumes a department where students are admitted by specific faculty rather than to the department as a whole. This is from my perspective based on what I see. It may not be representative and you may disagree.

Basic Facts

• In round numbers, a PhD costs $100K/year over 5 to 6 years, or a total of $500-600K.
• The faculty member pays for the PhD.
• # applicants grows each year; # applicants » # PhD spots.
• Broadly, the goal of research is to make the highest impact on the world by creating new knowledge.
• Every lab has different definitions of what impact means.
• Research involves many skills including:
  • understanding literature
  • identify and communicate value
  • formulate problems
  • design, implement, evaluate novel solutions
  • ability to write

Basic implications:

• Every year, a faculty member has less time per application.
• The PhD application is a competition.
• Funding a PhD is an investment in time and money with the goal to maximize future research impact.

Thus, the purpose of the application is to quickly convince the faculty that you will maximize their lab’s research impact as compared to other applicants.

What the application is not:

• participation on projects
• a list of what you have done
• interest in a faculty’s research without action upon that interest
• your life story

What the application is demonstrated evidence that you will be the best at conducting research in the faculty’s lab under their definition of impact:

• which of the above skills have you gained and at what level of skill?
• how reliable are you?
• can experts attest to these facts and are they happy to?

What about using AI for your application?

• The odds are low, so there is pressuri on applicants everywhere to apply to more places. Given finite time, AI appears to make writing eaiser and faster so you can scale the number of applications you create and submit. Keep in mind…
• AI masks your voice and thoughts with the LLM’s
  • This increases uncertainty of your quality
  • It provides evidence that you can’t distinguish quality and are OK with sending content that is not your own
  • It asks the faculty to do extra work to extract signal
• Given that the faculty only sees one application from you, if you didn’t put in time, the faculty is not incentivized to either

Further implications and how they apply to a PhD application is left as an exercise to the reader.

Some basic tips

• Understand some research project in the lab. Have something to say about it
• Understand how to approach the application
• Questions about the lab? Ask the faculty’s PhD students.