A Bumper Crop of New PhD Students
This is CMU’s Spring Carnival weekend, the biggest annual student event of the year, traditionally the “real” homecoming for alumni. As a racing fan, I love watching the weekend’s buggy races. A “buggy” is a kind of wagon driven by a CMU student around a fast and somewhat treacherous course around Schenley Park. Check out these pictures to get an idea of the huge amount of technology that the students put into their race vehicles. The best part of Spring Carnival, though, is seeing lots and lots of old friends back on campus. Seeing our former students, finding out what they’ve been up to, etc. drives home the often amazing impact that their education has on the world.
In fact, this weekend is a kind of “old alumni, new alumni” weekend, as this is also the time when we wrap up our recruiting of the new crop of PhD students. This year, the School of Computer Science received over 1,400 doctoral applications — a record number. Out of this, for the Computer Science PhD program, we had a target of 26 new PhD students. Recruiting is a very, very serious matter for us. Roughly speaking, we want the same students that MIT, Berkeley, and Stanford want, and so we go to great lengths to get new recruits engaged in our research to convince them to study with us.
This year, our recruiting was enormously successful. We hit our target right on the mark, with 26 admitted PhD students accepting our offers (plus 3 additional ones deferring for a year). The pool of applicants was stronger than any I can remember in my 22 years at CMU, and the new crop of 26 is correspondingly strong. I can only begin to imagine the kind of impact they will have in the near future…
Peter Lee @ April 19, 2009