Ph.D. Student Recruiting Completed

News

We’ve finally wrapped up our recruiting for next year’s incoming class of new Ph.D. students. This is a very, very serious business for us. The strength of our research programs depends in large part on the quality of our doctoral students, and so it’s probably no surprise to you that the entire process is extremely competitive. In fact, I have a joke about this: If we recruited football players the same way we recruited new Ph.D. students, the NCAA would have banned us years ago!  ;-)

So, how did we do this year? We keep a pretty close hold on some of the statistics, but roughly speaking we hit our recruiting target pretty much head on. We started off with about 800 applications, give or take, and a recruiting target of 21 new Ph.D. students. (We usually shoot for about 25. However, last year our our recruiting yield was unexpectedly high and so to compensate I set a slightly lower target for this year.) Since we had two students from the previous year on one-year deferrals, and one student coming from the Portugal program, that meant a recruiting target of 18 out of the current crop of applicants. In the end, we ended up with 19 of our admitted students deciding to come to CMU, 16 for the CS Ph.D. program, 2 for the Robotics program, and one for the HCI program. Add in the two deferrals and the Portugal student, and we get a grand total of 22 accepting the CMU offer, 19 for the CS Ph.D. program. It is a very, very strong group. 5 entering students already have NSF Graduate Fellowships, and three others have other types of fellowships.

An interesting question is how did the competition do? There are, essentially, only three other programs of any note: Berkeley, MIT, and Stanford. In other words, these are the only programs that have any significant success against us in head-to-head recruiting. How well we do varies quite a bit from year to year. However, from a preliminary reading it appears that Stanford and Berkeley had strong recruiting yields this year, whereas CMU and MIT relatively weaker yields. In other words, in this year’s head-to-head situations, we roughly split with MIT but lost out to Berkeley and Stanford. This is somewhat different than the situation last year, but with such small numbers it is not surprising that the overall percentages might change a lot from year to year.

Finally, a word about the overall process. Every application was read carefully by a graduate admissions committee made up of a small number of faculty members and graduate students. They made a first cut, on a pure merit basis, to get the total number of applicants down to about 150 or so. These application were then shown to the entire faculty, to allow them to comment, express interest in working with someone, and other kinds of advice/input. With this faculty feedback in hand, the admissions committee then cut the 150 or so in half. It is then these final 75 or so that are presented to Frank Pfenning (the director of our graduate program) and me, to make the very final admissions decisions. It is only at this very last stage that non-merit based considerations are brought into play. Frank and I ask questions like: “If this person were admitted, who would want to work with her?” “Have we already admitted too many people with his research interest?” And so on. As each decision was made, I picked up the phone and made a quick phone call to let the applicant know about the positive decision. (I reached about half of the admitted students this way.)

At this point, the big recruiting effort began. We assigned a faculty member (or two) and a graduate student to each admitted student, just to make sure that there is a good contact with each one. Keep in mind that we are talking about very small numbers of highly elite people, and so it is important to have individualized attention to every one. We invited every admitted student to visit us, at our expense. Most opted to do that during our open house event, but a few came for their own day. We show everyone a good time, make sure there is plenty of opportunity to interact with faculty and students, and give at least a little glimpse at what life is like here.

I’d like to give a big thanks to everyone who was involved in admissions and recruiting this year. It is a huge amount of work but also among the most important things that we do. Congratulations to all, on a job well done!

Peter Lee @ May 2, 2008