How to correctly find a butterfly .... : Catching butterflies I

Again ... due to the unending questions I get on this ... thought of a putting up a post on this. So that everyone can get something out of it (if it does by any chance).

Excuse me ... do you get questions on catching butterflies .. r u nuts .. yeah can be coz u can go crazy during late  (i mean very late) nights. I do catch butterflies part time here coz I some how need to cover up my expenses ... lol 

In my previous post (which is some what mysterious) I talked about how you feel when you find the reality of your dream (now for god sake do not go and look at it now please finish reading this). Here I am talking how to achieve that goal. I mean how to correctly pave the path to that. This will be the first of the series of posts that is to be followed addressing different aspects and stages of this process.

Yeah finally I am going to talk about the my experience on applying to grad schools along with the things that I should have done while applying. Even though I am in one of the prestigious universities in the world ( lol ) .. there were lots of things that I missed while applying.

Let me first talk little bit on who should catch butterflies and why ....You have to figure out why you want to do it ... there are so many butterflies out there but do you see a point catching them .. or you just want to do it coz others are doing it ... what are you going to do once you catch it ... The life you gona spend in the grad studies is the most precious part in your life as a young adult ... you sacrifice lots of things in your life and if you feel you have lost all of these for nothing you will suffer for the rest of your life ... so there are few qualities that I see, that should be in a prospective grad student .... The most important thing is you should love and believe in research ... it means you should be able to work in something in which you do not see a solution coming anytime soon but believe in it that there can be a solution and still you should be able to accept that non existence of solution it self is a solution. You should be able to take challenges ... sometimes you get work that you never had heard of it but still you should do it ... and to be able to become a successful grad student you should be able to think differently and should see everything in a conceptual manner not in the concrete level. There will be a separate post on this topic ...


Before start doing anything you should first do the GRE and TOEFL. I know that you all have just done the GRE and you do not have to tell me the peaceful feelings you have after the GRE exam coz I too went through it. Best thing you can do is just forget about what has happened there and just concentrate on the TOEFL. TOEFL is way far easier than GRE but you have to keep one thing in your mind i.e. TOEFL is the most important score than GRE. You can still get through the selection process with out a good GRE score (like me) but you can not make it through with out a good TOEFL score. If you can get something above 1000 for GRE you are safe but I have seen people who have got into the universities even without that mark. However for TOEFL different universities have different values for it, this can range from 67 to 100 (in IBT) so if you can score above 100 (which is not that hard in IBT) you are safe. Each university has information about its pre-requisites yet you can email them and get clarify your self on them. For most of the universities, it is quite safe to just mention that you have done the exam and the score is pending in the application and instruct the ETS to send the marks to the respective universities ASAP.

Then you should move into picking up the correct university to apply (you should at least start this by now). Successfully applying to Grad schools mean applying the CORRECT university with the CORRECT approach. How do you find the correct university ... hmm that's a tricky one. How would you find a the correct university to apply ... Before selecting the university you should have the slightest of ideas of what are you going to do in the grad school .... There are couple of ways you can approach this ... You can go search the universities that do good research in your areas of research interests. You can search ACM, IEEE, USENIX .. etc for top tier conferences and workshops in the respective area of interest and see which universities have published their work in that. Most of the universities have posted so many research information on the web but if they have not published any work in such conferences, it means that they have not done any thing notable. Then why do you want to apply such a university. So do not fell into fancy research projects posted on the web unless they have some good papers published. 

At the same time some of the universities may not have all the projects posted on the web. So what can you do in such situations ? .... Well all of the universities have a list of the graduate students studying in their respective departments and mostly they have their own web page. That is a good starting point. You can get most up to date information from these sites. You can write to them and ask about it .... They might give valuable information about the projects that is being carried out but not posted in the web. Ask them about the projects that they are looking for new people to work. Then you can be bit smart .... how ? You can then write to those professors asking more information about them and how would you like to join those projects. However before doing that ask the grad student whether it is ok to do it or not ... Do not worry whether a particular project is over or not because if you have a good idea on improving that project further more, you can still write to them and they will definitely consider your idea on it.

You will always have an edge when you write to a professor with an idea what is he doing at the moment and even better if you have a idea as well how to make it even interesting (but its not mandatory). Tell him / her why you are interested in that particular project and convince him that if he takes you in, you can really shape up the current project (but do not convince him other wise like if I take this guy in that will be the worse decision in my life ..). Do not try to show off your colors , be humble. Convince him that you have a good research capacity. I will talk more on this when I talk about the SOP.

After all, please do not worry too much on the research area that you want to do before applying .. I have seen people who have changed their research interests once they came in. So there is no hard rule on that. You can change it anytime you want but when you are looking for a university just keep your options available. But when you applying for the PhD directly then this will be bit different in some universities.

At the same time there are world university rankings ... Times higher, QS university, US News, etc. You can get the overall rating and the subject wise as well. Now do not go and get the top 10 universities there and apply to those ten. Chances are really really low that you get a positive response from them. There is a catch in these ranking systems (from what I see and what I heard from people), there are certain criteria that they used to calculate the rank, so you have to be conscious that, are those criterias important to you in making your decision. I believe those ratings do not represent the full picture. There are some good universities that do brilliant research in your area of interest but not quite good in rankings, whys that ... they might not have a good medicine faculty .. or they have something missing compared to other universities which are totally unrelated to your area. However this rankings do show you an important factor before deciding to apply.

Then why do we need to look at the ratings ... There are couple of answers to this. The acceptance rate of the universities is an important factor you should look into before applying. Now you can use the ranking for that. Higher the rank lesser the chance acceptance rate because then majority of students will be applying to those universities. If you are specifically looking at US universities look at the US ratings only. Because getting into a US university which is ranked 20th in the world ratings might be harder than to get into non- US university which is ranked among top 10. At the same time, if you find a good university and that university does not even have a rank then you should think twice before applying to that university.

Now you have a bunch of universities who does interesting work in your interested research area. Then look at their ratings before deciding which to apply. I do not see applying MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Cambridge at once. I would pick only two of them to apply coz all are in same tier and for the rest I would pick some more lower ranking university which has good research work that is suitable for me. This is how I approached it, categorize your final list of universities into three categories based on the rank. Top, middle and low. Pick two most appropriate universities from each category. Then you have two very good universities, two middle level universities and two lower level universities. Then how would do you define the border ... how would take middle level ones ... is it below 50th or 30th and what about lower level ... is it below 100 or the universities that doesn't even exist in the rank. It is totally depend on you. If you are a brilliant student who has publications then I would say take middle as below 30th and lower as below 60th. But if you are on the edge ... not sure how will it go ... then you should go bit more down defining middle and lower ... so then again it is totally upto you decide on that. Finally have some fall back options as well. Apply to one or two universities knowing that for sure that you can get acceptance from them. 

There are some other factors as well that you should think before applying. You should think about how well are you going to blend into those university environment. Are the people friendly there ... are they violent ... how is weather (if you are not good at the cold conditions then you should be more concern about it). All these are important as well because you are going to spend 5- 7 years in that so you better know it before its too late. So how can you get information about them ? ... You can ask the grad students, most of these sort of information can be easily be found on the web as well.

Lastly, contact your lecturers in the university. They always know better than we do. Get their opinion on different universities. I would not have applied to the university that I am in if it wasn't for my supervisor in the university which I did my bachelors. They can guide you very far in this matter.

Final remark that I want to emphasize is, applying the CORRECT university will take you half of the way towards the goal. No matter how brilliant you are, if you apply a wrong university with an inappropriate research interests then story ends there. Make sure you pick the correct university to apply.

If you are interested in Computer Systems (Operating systems, Distributed Systems, Parallel Computing, Virtualization, ) ... then you can contact me to get more information. If you are not still you can contact me I might be able to give some guidance.

To Be Continued ... Await for the Catching butterflies  II