Suggestions for Students Wanting to Pursue Graduate Work

If you are interested in pursuing graduate work at Purdue, and think that my research area may be of interest to you, I offer the following suggestions:

• Read the Department Admission information, and how To Apply, available from the department graduate information homepage. If you ask me questions about the admission process, I would just look to those pages for the answer.
• Don't send me an email with your resume saying you are applying to Purdue and would like to work with me. I used to try to respond to these, until I realized the volume of messages and the amount of time I was spending responding - time that would otherwise be spent working with my current students. In fairness to the students who are already here, I now ignore these messages. Any information I would get from the email should be contained in your application, which I will see as part of the admissions process.
  If you do send an email, at best it will be ignored (and it will definitely demonstrate you have not taken the time to read my web page.) At worst it will make me question your fitness for graduate study (e.g., the person who wanted to work with me because of interest in high performance networking, or worse still the student who said I am thinking to come to Blacksburg.)
• Likewise, do not ask if I can offer you an assistantship. Funding tends to run in short (1-3 year) cycles, and my longer-term funding is probably already committed to current students. If I do have funding available for an incoming student, I likely won't know until well into the admission process, and I will look for appropriate students among those who have applied.
• Our admissions decisions are made by an admissions committee. I cannot tell you if you will or will not be admitted. Individual faculty do have input to the process, but we admit people to the department rather than to work with a specific faculty member. While do assign a faculty member as an initial advisor (largely based on student request), the decision as to my serving as a student's advisor is a joint decision made after a student has had some time on campus both to learn what is going on and show their interests and capabilities.
• Be honest in your application. Your area of interest should be what you think you want to do, not what you think Purdue is most likely to admit. Faculty often move into new areas, and may find your real interests a better match than if you copy from that faculty member's web page.

Specific questions about research are always welcome, although if you start with I am applying to Purdue I may quit reading before I see your question. Please make sure you are asking specifically about research problems/areas, rather than something that sounds like a request for insight into your chances for admission.

I am always looking for bright new students with the right background and interests, and look forward to reviewing your application.

This page last modified