Dear excellent student,
Thanks very much for your interest in applying to do a Ph.D. or M.S. degree with me.
I receive many such inquiries, and apologize that I can't reply thoughtfully to all of them without taking too much time away from my current students. However, I hope your questions are answered below.
Best wishes to you in your application. I look forward to reading it this spring.
Q: Are you accepting new graduate students for next fall?
A: Probably. But note that admissions offers come from the department's admissions committee, not from me personally.
Each fall, several new students are accepted whose primary interest is in language and speech processing. They do not have to choose their dissertation advisor or topic immediately. Ultimately, probably one or two of them will end up doing their dissertations with me.
I do tend to interact technically with all of these new students, since we encourage them to try doing research with different faculty members. That is actually a requirement of the CS department. Furthermore, Prof. Yarowsky and I like to co-advise the new CS students, so that they will feel free to work with either of us or with other relevant faculty.
Q: Are you accepting new graduate students for the spring?
A: We rarely do so, but it is possible under special circumstances. You may wish to consult with our department's Graduate Program Coordinator, Cathy Thornton (cathyt at cs dot jhu dot edu).
Q: How do I apply?
A: The department has a page about how to apply.
Q: Is funding available? How does it work?
A: Yes! Ph.D. students in our department generally receive an offer of full funding (tuition, stipend, and health insurance) at the time that they are accepted. Typically, an NLP student would serve as a teaching assistant for approximately 2 semesters (during his or her first two years), and receive funding to work on research grants the rest of the time. We try to ensure that students have the freedom to pursue research ideas of interest to them, within the broad scope of a grant.
Many of my students have brought their own funding in the form of outside fellowships (NSF, Hertz, NSDEG, ...). We are grateful for such outside support, and we will usually augment your fellowship stipend a bit to reward you for securing such a fellowship.
Q: Can you read the attached material and evaluate my chances of admission?
A: I do welcome your application. However, reading hundreds of application folders in the spring already takes a tremendous amount of time. I can't read everyone's application in the fall as well!
Even if I could do so, my evaluation would not be very accurate without your letters of recommendation, or the ability to compare different applications and discuss them with my colleagues.
Thus, please just send your application materials through the usual channels. We have a low application fee of US$25. I look forward to reading your complete folder during admissions season in the spring.
As noted below, your application is allowed to include extra materials such as copies of publications or other work that you are proud to have written. This can be useful.
If you have a specific concern about your application, you are of course welcome to email me about it. The next answer may also be helpful to you.
Q: How will you or your department make the admissions decisions?
A: For the master's degree, the department's admissions committee reviews all applications and chooses the strongest applicants. I am usually not consulted. For more information, please contact our department's Graduate Program Coordinator, Cathy Thornton (cathyt at cs dot jhu dot edu).
Admissions are more complicated for the Ph.D. degree. If your application indicates a primary interest in Natural Language Processing, then your folder will be reviewed by a subcommittee consisting of Professors Eisner, Yarowsky, Jelinek, Khudanpur, Hall, and Callison-Burch -- that is, the CS faculty who are involved with the Center for Language and Speech Processing. (See below for other relevant faculty.) We read applications carefully and discuss them in detail among ourselves. Often we also interview the most interesting applicants by phone or in person. After we reach a consensus, we recommend the most promising students to the admissions committee. The admissions committee then independently reads the recommended folders from all subcommittees, and makes the final decisions.
Choosing a new Ph.D. student to work with for the next 5 years (and beyond) is a major commitment. These are the most important decisions we make and we have to get them right.
When studying your folder, we are primarily interested in your potential to do independent research:
Past research. This is the best evidence of research potential, so please let us know in detail about any original research that you may have done already. Emphasize what was new and important about the problem and what creative or unusual steps you took to solve it. You may wish to include copies of published or unpublished papers.
Intellectual qualities. We also look for other evidence that you are skilled, creative, and persistent at solving problems. We take letters of recommendation very seriously -- and if we are considering you seriously, we will probably contact your recommenders to discuss your intellectual qualities. Thus, the most useful recommendations come from professors or researchers who have discussed ideas with you and know how your mind works.
Of course, we also consider your grades, since most strong researchers are also able to do well in classes. (However, doing well in classes does not prove that you will have the creativity and initiative to find new problems and new solutions.) If your grades are mixed, please tell us why.
We don't like to rely too much on the GRE, because it is just an artificial one-day exam. Very high GRE scores are most useful if your recommendations and grades come from a lower-ranked institution: your high GRE will reassure us that you will shine as brightly here as you did there. Surprisingly low GRE scores on an otherwise strong application may just be a fluke, so they do not disqualify you, but they will make us check your application for other signs of weakness. Most of our applicants do not take the GRE subject test unless they want to establish that they know CS despite having a non-CS major.
Relevant academic background. We sometimes do take exceptional students whose interest in NLP exceeds their background in it. However, we are very interested to learn about your past coursework, class projects, or original research in natural language processing, machine learning (including data mining, probability, or statistics), linguistics, or search/optimization. A good background in any of these areas will help you start doing research here immediately, and will give you a useful perspective as you take classes in the other areas.
Technical skills. While recognizing that different people have different strengths, I look for evidence of certain skills that are relevant to research in my lab:
- Programming ability, part 1 -- strength at building complicated systems and otherwise making software work well.
- Programming ability, part 2 --strength at designing new algorithms or data structures.
- Mathematical ability -- strength at formalizing ideas, proving theorems, and reading mathematically dense papers. This may be indicated by strong grades (or advanced coursework) in pure or applied math or theoretical CS.
- Linguistic ability and interest -- a sensitivity to the nuances of sentences or words (their internal structure, meaning, and sound or written expression). This may be indicated by coursework in linguistics, a serious interest in writing, knowledge of multiple languages, etc.
- Writing, speaking, and teaching ability -- Basic skills that you will need to succeed as a researcher.
Quality of technical discussion. If I'm your advisor, we'll be having lots of intense technical discussion over several years. Many of your research ideas, as well as mine, will be born in such discussions. Furthermore, I'll probably ask you to write them up afterwards in an email.
You will also spend a lot of time throwing ideas around with the other grad students. So it is important that you are articulate (in English), energetic, and interesting to talk to.
Therefore, before recommending you to the admissions committee, the CLSP faculty will want to spend several hours talking with you, either in person or (for foreign students) over the phone. We want to see that you will pick up new ideas, draw connections to things you already know, ask good questions, and reply with ideas of your own.
Q: What is the relationship between the master's degree and the Ph.D. degree?
A: The master's degree here consists of 8 courses plus a research project (or just 10 courses, if you prefer). The Ph.D. begins with the same 8 courses plus 2 research projects, and continues with an oral examination and a dissertation.
The requirements therefore make it straightforward to switch from the master's program to the Ph.D. program. However, this would require a separate application. A few master's students in CS have managed to transfer into the Ph.D. program; they were doing research as well as the best Ph.D. students of the same year.
You should decide before applying which degree you are interested in. (If you would prefer a Ph.D., but would consider our master's program as a second choice, then please say this explicitly in your application.)
If you already have a master's degree and come here for a Ph.D., you may be able to count some of your previous coursework toward our requirements. Detailed information about our graduate requirements is here.
Q: Which department should I apply to? Does it matter?
A: Yes, it matters. If you are in the CS department, you will be required to take CS classes and write a dissertation with substantial computational content. You are also more likely to end up with a job in a CS department after graduating. It is okay if your undergraduate degree (like mine) was in something else, but you should know enough CS to do well in this department.
If you are an electrical engineer or linguist without much programming experience, then the ECE department or Cognitive Science department may be a more natural home. You will still get to talk to me, since there is much interaction among all the faculty and students in the Center for Language and Speech Processing.
If you are interested in speech or signal processing, then Profs. Jelinek or Khudanpur would be a more appropriate advisor than I would. Although they are in the ECE department, you are free to apply to either ECE or CS as you prefer, since they also have secondary appointments in CS and can advise students in either department.
Q: What kinds of problems do you work on? What is your approach?
A: That's no secret: you can find plenty of information on my home page. I do have broad interests and can get excited about problems in almost any area. Technical correspondence is welcome.
Q: What are you like as an advisor?
A: My students are my closest collaborators, and my goal is for them to be equal collaborators as soon as possible, both in finding problems and in coming up with solutions. My personal style is therefore pretty informal and centers on technical (and social) discussion. I do ask that the work should move along quickly and be of high interest and high quality. I take my students seriously, like them personally, and try to find interesting problems to work on with them. In general I try to give them the attention, technical help, and career advice that they need. I also believe that people should behave decently toward one another.
Q: Who are other relevant faculty at Johns Hopkins?
A: Quite a number of faculty are part of the Center for Language and Speech Processing. Click on their webpages below to read about their interests. We work together in many ways, including with one another's students, and most of us will soon be housed together in the new interdisciplinary Computational Science and Engineering building.
- Computer Science department:
- Electrical and Computer Engineering department:
- Fred Jelinek
- Sanjeev Khudanpur
- Damianos Karakos
- Jim Baker
- Cognitive Science Department (which includes linguistics):
- Other potentially relevant faculty:
- Justin Halberda (Psychological and Brain Sciences)
- Steven Gross (Philosophy)
- Rao Kosaraju (Computer Science)
- several other ECE faculty interested in speech and audio processing
- several other CogSci faculty interested in human language processing
- several other Applied Math & Statistics faculty interested in machine learning, mathematical modeling, data mining, optimization
- Center for Imaging Science (includes machine learning folks)
- Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics
Q: Dear Professor: My interest is in radiotopic barbavision and I think you would be the perfect advisor for me.
A: Please do not email all of the professors in the United States. Spam wastes everyone's time.
Q: I have unusual circumstances, or have a comment on your research, or my question is not answered above. May I email you?
A: Certainly. Sometimes I am slow about reading or answering mail from new people, but I will eventually reply. You may first wish to consult this advice from another professor.
If you have an adminstrative question about our admissions procedures or your application, please instead contact our department's Graduate Program Coordinator, Cathy Thornton (cathyt at cs dot jhu dot edu).
http://cs.jhu.edu/~jason/advice/prospective-students.html
| Jason Eisner - jason@cs.jhu.edu (suggestions welcome) | Last Mod $Date: 2007/10/07 16:52:35 $ |