Graduate School at Princeton

I apologize in advance for what may seem an overly pedantic tone. However, I can quite honestly say that every point mentioned on this page is here only because I have received multiple e-mails on that topic. Much of this page is basically common sense coupled with some general instructions.
 

Are You Taking New Students?

I admit a small number of students every year, and have done so almost every year since I joined Princeton. The areas of my research are described on my home page, and my current research is some extrapolation of what's written there. I am only interested in PhD-track students - if you want a MS only, I'm not the right choice for your advisor. When I state that I am accepting students, this does not imply that I admit anyone directly. So, the process of becoming my student is the following: apply to the graduate program in general, get accepted, perform well in your first year classes and exams, and at some point in your first year, discuss what you're interested in doing. As I've written above, do not send me your application and resume right now. I won't be able to act on it, and it doesn't really help your case.

Why Have This Page?

Every week, I receive a few letters about graduate school at Princeton. If I had the time to answer all of these letters in great detail, I would. However, that's not really possible for a variety of reasons, so I've put together this page to save me (and you) some time. Having read this page demonstrates that you are serious about your inquiry, and I'm much more likely to respond to your e-mail. In grad school, you're encouraged to help yourself and push your own progress. Nobody wants to nag you weekly or chase after you to get things done. One good way of demonstrating that you've got the right mindset is to find all of the resources we make available for grad applicants and use that. You might think that it's a waste of your time to search for application material that professors or admins might be able to find much more easily. That would be true if you were the only student applying, but the numbers just make this unrealistic. I'm happy to spend some of my time to help the grad students here or the undergrads here, but those are smaller populations. The number of applicants dwarfs those two populations. The other observation is that if you act like your time is more valuable than everyone else's when you're just applying to grad school, what will you be like if you actually show up? Note that the point of this page is not to brush you off or discourage you from applying. In fact, chances are that if you read this page, you might actually improve your chances of being accepted. While there are a lot of "don't do the following" kinds of advice, there's also some information about what helps your application.

How Do I Start The Application Process?

Believe it or not, the Princeton CS department has a fairly well-written page that describes the process of applying to graduate school. It's available from our department's main web page, under the "Academics" heading, linked as "Graduate Program". I won't provide a direct link here since it's subject to change and I hate broken links. However, it's relatively simple to find, and it is quite comprehensive as of this writing. In fact, it contains answers to the questions most people send me via e-mail, such as what about financial aid? what are the minimum GRE scores? is the subject test required? What you should NOT do is often as important as what you should do. Please follow the guidelines in the pages I mention above. Princeton has a fairly well-established orderly set of procedures in place to process graduate student applications. It's pretty hard to successfully pull an "end run" around this process for a variety of reasons. The most important reason is that each grad student that any member of the faculty wishes to admit is reviewed by the entire faculty. So, the possibility of an end run around the system is close to nil. In particular, there are some things that you should not do: do not pit professors against each other - Too often, some applicant decides to ask several professors leading questions and then tries to compare their responses. It's usually considered impolite at the least, and manipulative at the worst. Put another way - if you don't act in good faith during your application process, why should anyone believe that you'll be any better once admitted? do not pit schools against each other - If you ask me for an opinion about our program versus another one you're considering, I may give it, with the intent of providing information that may not be easily obtainable otherwise. If you decide to then forward that message to someone at that school and ask for their rebuttal, you'll have two annoyed professors on your hands. Again, this goes back to the issue of acting in good faith. please do not send me your application, resume, application materials, etc. - I have no power to do anything in between meetings of the graduate admissions committee, and even if I did, Princeton's CS department does not accept graduate students mid-year. To avoid confusing the process, the simplest approach is to send your application along with supporting documents through the official channels at the appropriate time. If you have a specific question you'd like addressed, ask it. However, if you just send along a resume, I have no idea what you want done with it. If you want to know what your chances are of getting into Princeton, see the answers below or read the FAQ mentioned above. do not send me large attachments in e-mail - as stated above, I can't do anything with your application material anyway. I have no means of entering it into the online system that's used for the graduate admissions process. In fact, that system is centrally managed outside of our department. If I really need to see something to give you an opinion about something, I'll ask for it.

How Do I Get Further Information?

The answer to this one is "it depends" - if you want further information about a particular professor's research, write directly to that professor.  If the information is about the program itself, write to the department's graduate coordinator. At the time of this writing, that person is Melissa Lawson. Be nice to her because she wields a fair bit of power. If you show up at Princeton, she actually holds an enormous degree of control over how smoothly your life progresses in graduate school. If you want information about the process at another school, please write to that school. The process at each school differs enough that you really should get the information directly from someone at each school.

What Are My  Chances of  Being Accepted?

In general, if you stand out among the various applicants, your chances are good. What makes a person stand out is some combination of the following: good scores - GRE, subject test, undergraduate, etc. recommendation letters - a good letter that proves the professor knows you is valuable experience - if you have some interesting experience that works in your favor, tell us few felony convictions - while jail time is always a crowd pleaser, so is stability following directions - really. An amazing large number of people can't seem to fill out their forms properly, and if you are one of the few who follow directions, you're already one step ahead of the game being specific - tell us what you like and what you want to do. Typically, some research area or professor is going to be making a case to admit you, and the hope is that you're going to work with that person. Saying that you're interested in all of our areas and all of our research projects actually works against you, since you'll typically get less consideration than someone who is more specific about what they want to do. Some of the things that don't help include cash - we don't care if you can pay for grad school, because we don't charge you for it certifications - most of the certification courses and exams don't really measure research potential. If you happened to get a certification through your employer, feel free to mention it. However, I've never counseled an applicant to spend their own money to get these. name-dropping - unless the people you name are writing your thesis, they'll be of little help in school being obnoxious - there's far too little time in the world to deal with truly obnoxious people. If you unduly harass the administrative staff, we will hear about it. If you harass the professors, ask yourself what you're trying to achieve. If you decide to nit-pick the e-mail responses from professors who answer questions about the application process, then you really need to rethink your approach to standing out. The two things that get the most review out of your application are your personal statement and the recommendation letters. Your exam scores are important to be in the right range, but a difference of a few percentage points typically does not make much of a difference -- if we see someone who is 90th percentile and someone else in the 93rd percentile, we typically treat those scores equally. We typically accept about one-tenth of our applicants, but not strictly on the basis of scores. How mandatory is the subject test? Yes, that question doesn't make any sense, but it's one that comes up often enough. Basically, if you're missing the CS subject test and the rest of your application looks strong, it likely makes no difference. If your background is not in Computer Science, it's really in your best interest to take the subject test and do well on it. This avenue is most appropriate for people who might have gotten a different degree but have been working in CS-related areas. In this case, the subject test provides a sense of calibration and reassurance that answers questions about whether you have enough ground in CS to make it through the program. In some cases, I've received responses that say something along the lines of it's not fair to ask someone to take the CS subject test when they don't have a CS background. That would be a fair observation if the person weren't applying for an advanced degree. If you can't do better than an average undergraduate on the subject test, it's hard to justify depriving someone else of a spot in the program to admit you.

What Is Your Ideal Student?

I'm not looking for slave labor, nor am I looking for programming drones. The ideal student for me is some combination of being bright and being hard-working. Coupled with this is the desire to actually pursue research, which is some catch-all term for investigating an area where you don't have all of the answers. I'd rather deal with someone who's willing to be a little risky and come up with nothing than someone who's willing to risk nothing and comes up with nothing exciting. Research by its nature is an inherent gamble. However, it's a risk that can be managed - if you aim for something ambitious, you may not graduate in four years. However, when you do graduate, chances are that you'll have far more interesting options than someone who just wanted to get out as quickly as possible. That being said, I also want someone who is practical - a working incomplete system is far more useful than a complete but non-working system. So, some amount of programming is almost always needed in order to get your PhD. In fact, chances are good that you'll do a fair bit of programming on your own projects. Such is life.

Gaming The System

Every year, some schools believe that you can game the system. One set believes that if you withdraw your application, we'll recycle that spot and give it to someone else from your school. That is incorrect - I have never seen us recycle a spot in that way. Over time, these attempts at cleverness actually hurt your school's reputation. In the extreme, I have encountered two students in two different years from the same school who applied with one intended area in their personal statements, but who had no intention of ever working in that area. Fabricating your research interest in such a way may work in the short run, but you'll enter the program with the reputation of being an untrustworthy and deceptive individual. Your school's reputation may also likely be affected.

What Really Helps?

Fair enough - you've spent this much time reading to here, so you should get some advantage from it. I look for three things in applications: Did you push yourself? Given the opportunities that you had, did you make the most of them? Did you take the hard classes your final two years, or did you pad them out with easier courses? If there were hard CS courses available at your school, did you take them and do well on it? The idea here is that if you took a path of least resistance, you'll probably spend a fair bit of time learning undergrad material while your peers are doing research. It also might indicate that if you don't have a history of pushing yourself to succeed, you may not develop one in time for a serious attempt at a PhD. Did you get noticed? This is harder to do at a larger school, or at a school where the professors do not interact much with undergrads outside of the classroom, but it really helps if you were able to do something to get noticed. That's what will make a recommendation letter have some concrete information that will stand apart from the other letters. Note that who you ask to write letters is also important -- if your letters all come from the people who taught you intro-level courses, and you haven't interacted with them since then, that's likely a problem. You don't need to get the most famous professor at your school to write the letters, but if you took some systems courses from professors we know, and none of them are among your letter writers, it will look a little odd. Are you interested in research? Does your personal statement make it clear what you're interested in doing, or what excites you? We get a lot of personal statements that start with some variant of "I've been excited about computers ever since I saw my first one at five years old", but given that you're applying to grad school, you need to demonstrate some interest in research or a research area. If you can say what you want to do and why you want to do it, you're automatically in the top half of personal statements. If you can avoid trying to tie your desire to go to grad school to Albert Einstein, that's also a good start. A personal statement can have some broad information, but it should also have some specifics. It does not (should not) have to be at the level of detail of a research paper, but it should give us some idea of what you want to do so that we can determine how you compare to the rest of the students in that area. If you don't give any areas of interest (or conversely, if you list every area of interest), you're actually lessening your chances of being accepted.