What Happens After You Apply

Once you’ve submitted your graduate school applications, the waiting begins. In most cases, you’ll start to hear back from programs between January and March. Some schools will send direct offers of admission, while others will invite you to participate in an interview or visit day before making a final decision.

These conversations are your opportunity to learn more about the program and for faculty to assess your fit for their department or research group. Think of this stage as a two-way process: the graduate school is evaluating you, but you are also evaluating them.

In this section, we’ll cover what to expect during interviews and visit days, including how to prepare and what kinds of questions you might be asked, and how to decide between offers.

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Grad School Interviews You

After you have submitted your applications (usually by December 15th), you may start to hear back from schools or professors. In terms of timelines, this almost never happens over winter break directly (faculty committee members are on holiday), sometimes happens in January, and frequently happens by February. (Do not panic if you haven’t heard as early as some of your peers. See elsewhere in this guide for a discussion of risks and mistakes.)

In rarer cases, a school or professor may simply offer you admission into a graduate program. However, it is increasingly common, in PhD admissions, for someone on the committee or a research advisor to reach out to you to chat over a video- or phone- call. To avoid making you nervous, they will probably not refer to this as an “interview”, but it may be helpful to think of it as one.

The purpose of the interview is almost always to help the decision-maker make a final decision among the last few top candidates. For example, a faculty member might have funding for two graduate students and might interview the top four to see which two are the best fit.

Master’s Applications

If you applied for a coursework-based computer science masters program, it is unlikely that you will have an interview. Most decisions are made from your application materials alone. The one exception is that if you are a non-native English speaker, you may be asked to do a quick phone interview regarding your English proficiency (we describe these more below).

If you applied for a research-based (thesis) masters, you might get called in for an interview. These interviews will likely be more similar to the PhD interviews discussed below, but likely less intense.

PhD Applications

Interviews are fairly common for PhD applications. Getting an interview invitation likely means that the school is interested in your application. However, it is important to note that this is a one-way indicator: you can still be accepted to a PhD program without an interview (for example, Madeline only had interviews at about half of the schools she was ultimately accepted to).

Interviews are generally conducted remotely over phone or video conference. There are three types of interviews you might encounter:

1. Language-proficiency screening
2. Departmental Interview
3. Interviews with specific faculty who might want to hire you

In some situations, you may have more than one interview for a single school. We detail each interview type in turn.

Language Proficiency Screening: In some cases, the focus of the interview may be spoken language proficiency. For example, Wes Weimer worked at a state university where there was a state law mandating certain levels of English proficiency for student-facing teaching assistants (as in the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or TOEFL). Because the department wanted graduate students to be able to work as teaching assistants, it would assess their English proficiency. During the interview, students were evaluated on their ability to give clear explanations and directions in English. (If memory serves, an indicative question was along the lines of “You are entering a grocery store and someone stops you and asks for step-by-step instructions about where to find the eggs. What do you say?” Something like “They’re in the back of the store” would be probed for more detail: interviewers were looking for a logical, coherent sequence of instructions and references.) This type of interview is rarer and will typically be clearly explained in advance.

Departmental Interview: Most departments have a designated faculty committee for reviewing applications. The faculty on this committee can vary year from year. In addition, committees can run PhD admissions in different ways. You may also receive an interview from a faculty member who liked your application but is not directly in your area. It is common for departments and committees to spread out the time cost of conducting interviews across multiple faculty.

Specific Faculty Interview: This is the most common type of grad school interview. Faculty members who reach out will often, but not always, be one of the professors you listed in your application essays or on the submission web-form (see elsewhere in this guide for the internal view). Interview length varies, but they are generally from 20 minutes to an hour in length. Every once and a while, you may be asked to prepare a set of slides or similar formal description of your work.

In most cases, the focus of the interview will be on determining if you and the advisor (or you and the department) have a good fit.

How Can I Prepare for a PhD Interview?

In most cases, the professor or department’s goal in the interview is the same: to determine if you are a low-risk, high-reward candidate who is aligned with a relevant research or lab objective and who is pleasant to work with. In some rarer cases, professors might have particular information needs (e.g., a professor might have a grant with a particular deliverable, such as a piece of software that must be written, and may only be in a position to admit students who are willing to do that specific work to be funded by that specific grant).

In our experience, professors often perceive that they can gain a wealth of information from a few simple questions in a personal interview. That is because both your answers themselves, and also the manner in which you deliver them, convey information. A professor might ask you to explain the research project you described in your application essay in your own words. Applicants who understand their projects well tend to offer coherent, well-organized explanations (often mimicking the structure of a scientific paper). Applicants who were not as involved in the research or lack an interwoven understanding of it often struggle. At the same time, the manner in which you respond to the question conveys other information. Are you enthusiastic about the work? Are you clear and articulate? Would you make a good teaching assistant? And so on.

While there is high variance between professors, common personal PhD interview questions or prompts include:

• Your application mentioned that you worked on X. Could you describe that in your own words?
• Which parts of that project did you work on most directly? What was the hardest part or detail, and how did you address it?
• Tell me a little bit about yourself.
• What do you want to do going forward? Why do you want to work in this lab?
• Here are some projects I am working on. Which one of these sounds the most appealing to you?
• What do you know about Topic/Technique X?

The first three questions in that list are about you and your work, and the best preparation is to practice giving an “elevator pitch” for your own work. Your undergraduate professors can help you prepare or practice for this aspect. This preparation tends to be universal to all interviews rather than specific to a particular school. Computer Science professors are trained to expect certain key pieces of information in these brief summaries often called the Heilmeier Catechism (it is the same scaffolding used across papers, presentations, funding applications, etc.). Being able to give 1-2 sentence answers to questions 1-4 and 8 in the linked article will make your description of a project clear, concise, and memorable. (You’ll also notice these questions show up throughout our suggestions in this section.)

The final questions are more about the potential advisor’s research. The advisor is looking for students who will fit into existing and future research projects. You benefit by showing that (1) you understand what that work is about, (2) you are qualified and prepared to assist, and (3) you are interested in the topic.

As a result, your preparation for this is typically specific to each school. In a broad outline, we recommend:

1. Go to the professor’s webpage. In most cases, you will have already looked at the professor’s webpage when you were choosing where to apply. At this point, you will revisit the webpage and be even more thorough.
2. Look up some of the papers that they’ve published in the last few years, and pick 1-3 of your favorite ones. For each, read through and skim the paper, and pre-write answers for the following:
   1. What problem are they trying to solve and why is it important?
   2. How do they solve it, and why is their solution better than the state of the art?
   3. What is one thing you like about the work?
   4. What is one thing you’d be interested in adding to the work, or a lingering question that you have? How could your interests or skills mesh with their research? We encourage you to think out of the box — it’s ok if the connection feels tenuous to you!
      1. At a high level, suggesting that you would do the same work again but evaluate it on a larger benchmark is typically not compelling. By contrast, suggesting that you would lift an input assumption of the work, or strengthen the work to provide additional guarantees, is more compelling. Most new projects are made by combining insights or techniques. Perhaps the professor has been making a series of tools or type systems that improve programming, and your undergraduate work included a human study. You might suggest publishing a human study of the benefits of the professor’s tools, and then using those results to guide the design of the next generation type system.
   5. If you aren’t able to understand their papers, that’s ok! Try and pick those that closest match your own expertise. You can also talk with your primary advisor at your current institution if you have questions while reading.
3. Look at the other parts of the professor’s website:
   1. Do they have any hobbies or interests that you also like?
   2. Do they have a mentoring plan on their web page?
   3. How many past students have they had? Where did they go after the PhD?
4. Throughout, take note of any questions that you have and write them down. It is totally legitimate (and recommended!) that you bring notes to an interview. For example, Emma Shedden used a template to help her prepare for each of her faculty interviews, available here. We recommend that you write down notes for some questions they might have for you, as well as write down some questions that you have for them.

Students might worry about discussing weaknesses in a paper written by the professor (will they get offended?) despite this being an opportunity to demonstrate critical thinking. Rather than stating, “a weakness of the paper is X,” you could instead raise this as a question about the paper:

• Is a limitation of this approach that it doesn’t apply to problems of type X?
• What would happen if we didn’t assume Y?
• Has anyone tried doing Z?

Knowing what questions might be asked is definitely helpful. However, it can still be hard to construct a strong answer even if you know the question in advance. Here are some strategies you can use when answering questions

• Restate the question to the author to confirm you heard correctly – make sure you are actually answering what they asked! It is particularly easy to misinterpret “why” or “how” questions. Professors will often ask questions of the form “Why did you use X to do Y?” The professor often intends the focus to be on one of those parts (X or Y), but you may interpret the question as being about the other.
  • For example, a professor might ask “Why did you use a generalized linear mixed model to analyze program correctness?” You might view the question as being about the choice of analysis model, in which case a good answer might be to contrast against a simpler analysis and explain why it was inadequate. “Why did we use a GLMM? Oh, because our pilot study suggested both fixed and random effects, such as blah blah, and so a simple linear regression, while perhaps easier to interpret, would not suffice.” But perhaps the professor was viewing the question as being about the subject of the analysis! Something more like: “Why did you analyze program correctness instead of analyzing program speed?” Many research results involve the use of hammer X on nail Y (or strategy X on problem Y). When a professor asks why you used X on Y, it is often good to clarify whether the question is “Why did you use X on problem Y1 instead of on problem Y2?” or “Why did you use strategy X1 to solve problem Y, instead of using strategy X2?”
• Take your time. Pausing is entirely acceptable. A five-second pause to gather your thoughts may feel, subjectively, like an eternity of silence. In practice, the professor likely won’t notice at all (most professors are used to asking questions in class to which they know the answers but the students do not, and are thus used to students taking a little longer to answer) or will probably think more highly of you for being deliberate and rigorous rather than rushing in.
• Write down notes. This has many benefits. If you receive multiple offers, notes can help you remember what you liked or disliked about an interview or candidate advisor. Notes can also buy you a little bit of time: if you are clearly taking notes longhand, that provides an “excuse” for why you are taking an extra second or two before responding. Finally, taking notes typically flatters the professor.

What Can You Ask?

You may have the opportunity to ask a question or two at the end of the interview. Some professors explicitly leave time for this. If you are talking to someone generic from the department who is not a potential advisor, this is slightly less important: students often ask questions about decision timelines and reaffirm that they are very interested. If you are talking to a potential advisor, this is an opportunity to show that you are invested in graduate school and to get useful information.

All other things being equal, asking about the professor’s mentoring style can be a good choice. UMich has a list of candidate questions (and many professors answer them); we repeat the some relevant ones here as suggestions:

• How would you describe your advising style? Does your approach vary over the course of a student’s progress within their degree?
• How often do you plan to meet with students one-on-one (be as specific as possible, it’s okay to describe multiple styles that may vary with student needs)? Is an agenda required? How long are meetings?
• Do you have regular group meetings? What does student participation look like in a group meeting?
• How do you decide authorship and/or authorship order?
• Do you ask students in your group to serve as teaching assistants over the course of their program?

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Visit Days: You Interview a Grad School

For almost every PhD program and many master’s programs, if you are offered admission, the department will also pay for you to fly out and visit in person. Visit day invitations are typically only extended to people who are admitted, but in some rare cases you may be invited to interview on a visit day without your admission status being certain.

When possible, the department covers all costs (travel, lodging, food, etc.). In some cases (COVID, budget emergencies), visit days may be conducted remotely. In addition, the reimbursement amount is typically sufficient for students already in the US to visit US schools, but is rarely enough for international students to visit US schools.

A department’s visit day activities typically last one to two days. Meetings with potential advisors, meetings with current students, listening to presentations about the department and its policies and opportunities, and social or town activities are all common.

Talking to Students. Graduate students will give you the most accurate information about what it is like to be a graduate student. Current graduate students of a potential advisor will give you the best idea of what it is like to be a graduate student who works with that potential advisor. We encourage you to prioritize asking questions that will help you establish a personality fit. It is much easier to assess a research topic alignment remotely (e.g., by looking at the potential advisor’s papers). It is much harder to tell if you will actually be comfortable working with a potential advisor.

Kaia Newman asked a number of questions of advisors and graduate students, both virtually and via in-person visit days for multiple schools (Arizona State U., Carnegie Mellon U., North Carolina State U., Oregon State U., U. Southern California, and U. Virginia). She emailed and met with students and professors who were interested in working with her before the in-person visit days as well.

Kaia’s questions for professors included: -What is your advising style? -What are your favorite and least favorite parts of being a professor? -How do you choose a first project for a new Ph.D. student? How did your current students get their first projects? -What does a week in your lab look like? -Do you think there are many opportunities available for interdisciplinary collaboration at this university? -What are the most important qualities of a successful Ph.D. student? -Why did you choose to become a professor? -Can I talk to your students (or other people they work with, if they’re new) to discuss more about the environment and opportunities at [school]?

Kaia’s questions for students included: -What other places were you choosing between, and why did you choose [school]? -How many times a week do you meet with your advisor, and how does this compare to other advisors? -What’s your least favorite part about being a student at [school]? -Do you talk to other students in your lab? How is building a community at [school]? -How many people share a lab? What does the lab building look like? -What is the qualifying process at [school] like? -What projects are you working on right now? -What is some advice that you would give yourself if you could go back in time? -Do labs collaborate with one another? -Have you ever heard of someone switching advisors? -Are there specific faculty you’ve heard of that you wouldn’t want to work with? -Are there any scandals in the department that you’ve heard about? -How does the cost of living in [city] compare with your stipend? -How big is the department? How many Ph.D. students are there in computer science?

Beyond Kaia’s suggestions, other potential questions we recommend include: -Where have recently-graduated students ended up? What sort of jobs did they get? (Do those align with your career goals as an applicant?) -How many students do you know who were able to work as teaching assistants? As full instructors of record? -How many master’s degree students do you know who were hired as paid research assistants?

Inverted Phrasing. By the time you are attending a visit day, the school is trying to convince you to accept the offer. Many applicants have multiple offers (see elsewhere in this guide for raw numbers). Many faculty and students will have been told to put a positive outlook on things and convince all of the visitors to accept. One the one hand, that can reduce pressure. On the other hand, that can make it difficult to be confident that you are getting precise information: you may wonder if people are just telling you what you want to hear. Sadly, direct experience with visit days (from both sides) suggests that this bias is quite real.

If you ask something like “Do people change their advising situations here commonly? I don’t want to have to worry about changing groups all the time” you are likely to get an answer like “No, almost everyone settles down with their first advisor, don’t worry about that!” But if you were instead to ask “Do people change their advising situations here commonly? I think I might want to do interdisciplinary research and I want to add a co-advisor without much hassle” you are likely to get an answer like ”Sure, I know many people who changed or added advisors, don’t worry about that!” Those two claims aren’t strictly contradictory, but if you only hear one of them (because you only ask one framing of the question) it can be hard to tell what the real situation is. This isn’t malicious: people are not trying to deceive you, they are trying to solve your problem. Informally, your question about “X” gets translated into “Is it possible for X to turn out the way I’d like it to if I come here?”, to which the answer is almost always “Yes, that’s possible!”

People are not maliciously lying but many will tell you what you want to hear if it’s possible to do so. As a result, you (logically) get a larger amount of information when you implicitly indicate that you want X but they are unable to tell you what you want to hear. Similarly, if you know the answer to a question, you get some information (e.g., about department climate) if they don’t know it.

This leads to a conversational strategy where you “invert” the implicit direction of your question. This explanation may feel abstract, so let us consider three examples.

• Suppose you believe you will benefit from more structured meetings. Perhaps you know that you do not have good scheduling habits on your own, and so you would really appreciate being held accountable for meetings. If you just ask a student “I want to stay on task; does your advisor care if you attend group meetings?”, you’ll receive “Of course, yes!” as an answer, which is basically no information. But if you invert things and ask “I know some students want a bit more freedom and do their best creative thinking alone; if I skipped the group meetings, would that be OK?”.
  • Suppose they say “Yes, it’s OK to skip meetings.” You gain no information; they may just be telling you what you want to hear.
  • Suppose they say “No, actually, my advisor cares about that and you really have to be there.” The person thinks they are disappointing you, so this answer gives you a lot of confidence.
• Suppose you have seen friends be mistreated based on race, gender, ethnicity or some other characteristic. You know that happens fairly frequently at every school. You want to figure out what the culture is around that sort of thing (e.g., is it accepted? is the reporting process easy?). If you just ask “Is there a reporting process for misconduct here? Are there things a mistreated student can do?”, you’ll receive “Of course!” as an answer. That’s true at every school, and it’s basically no information. But if you invert things and ask “I know some students who are worried about going to a school where students are mistreated. Do you know anyone who has complained or reported that sort of thing here? What was that like?”
  • Suppose they say “No, I don’t know anyone like that.” Since you know that does actually happen commonly, what you have learned is that the climate and culture around reporting are very poor (e.g., people don’t feel comfortable talking about that sort of thing with their friends).
  • Suppose they say “Actually, yes, over the five years I’ve been here two of my friends have had issues with grading treatment in class and potential bias. They both said it wasn’t fun, but ultimately they were able to get the grades they deserved.” The person thinks they are disappointing you, so this answer gives you a lot of confidence that reporting and resolving complaints is normalized. (This is actually a much more positive result than hearing nothing.)
• Suppose you want to have the freedom to switch advisors if the first one doesn’t work out. If you just ask someone “Is it possible to switch advisors here?”, you’ll receive “Of course, yes, there’s a simple form …” as an answer, which is basically no information. Every department has such a form or process, but at some departments it is very hard to switch in practice even if it is easy on paper (e.g., perhaps students fear the prior advisor will make their committees difficult going forward, etc.). Similarly, there is typically a moderate amount of advisor switching in the background, so you know what the general answer is. If you instead invert things and ask “I know some students are worried about a lot of advisor switching. Do you know anyone who had to switch advisors?”
  • Suppose they say “No, I don’t know anyone like that. Don’t worry about it!” You gain no information (or information that paints things negatively). Since you know advisor switching does (or should) happen, if people are not hearing about it, that’s probably a bad sign (e.g., it’s very difficult in practice). On average, a more senior graduate student “should” know someone who switched advisors.
  • Suppose they say “Actually, yes, over the last few years I know two people who switched advisors. It was a little tricky, and one of them said they felt like they ended up a semester behind, but it seemed to work out.” The person thinks they are disappointing you, so this answer gives you a lot of confidence that it is possible. (Even though it is described as somewhat onerous, this is actually a much more positive result than people saying they have never heard of anyone switching.)

Consider writing your persuasive statement of purpose. Elsewhere in this guide, we encourage you to provide concrete evidence, and the same concept can apply to your visit day questions. While there are many fact-based, yes/no questions you want answered, try to frame your questions to collect evidence. For example, instead of asking “will this program prepare me to teach computer science in a liberal arts school?” (to which the answer is most likely “yes, sure!”), ask questions like “how many courses a semester have graduate students as instructors of record?” Just like with the phone interviews, what information professors and students share with you is just as important as how they respond. Be observant, and take lots of notes on your visit.

Making Decisions

In the United States, universities coordinate to require graduate school decisions on the same date: April 15th. That means that if you hear from one University in February, you do not have to decide immediately, and can wait to hear from another one in March.

Students often incorporate a number of factors into these decisions: potential advisor relationship fit, potential research interest fit, stipend amount, location, ranking, research advisor’s record of placing students in good jobs, department morale, etc. The advice elsewhere in this guide (e.g., things to ask at interviews and visit days) will help you have multiple pieces of information for comparison.

We highlight two common considerations for additional discussion:

Feelings and Rankings. Some students end up choosing between two options, one of which looks better “on paper” (e.g., higher ranking, household name organization, etc.) and one of which feels better personally. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to these considerations, but we encourage you to consider master degree vs. PhD distinctions and ranking tiers.

First, a higher ranking (“prestige”) is typically more important for the jobs one pursues with a master’s degree. Since master’s programs focus on coursework, rather than individual scholarship, when you are evaluated for subsequent jobs the recognized strength of your degree-granting institution matters more. A PhD student can stand out by doing unique research at a less-selective school, but a master’s degree student typically does not do individual research. In addition, a master’s degree is typically much shorter (e.g., 1-2 years vs. 5-6 years). All other things being equal, if you could get a master’s degree at CMU (but you hate Pittsburgh) or a master’s degree at the school ranked #100 (in a town you love), you should probably accept the CMU offer.

Second, people often pay more attention to rankings than they should. Rankings are better interpreted as broad “tiers” or “categories” and not as a specific total ordering. For example, within the top twenty or thirty CS departments, the exact ranking of the program will matter much less than a PhD student’s advisor-advisee fit and enthusiasm to complete the program. If you love the camaraderie of the department and are excited about the town and research topics at the PhD program at School Ranked #20, but you also have an offer from School Ranked #10 where everything seems dreary and you don’t feel as much of a fit with the potential advisor, you’ll should choose #20, even though it is nominally ranked lower. Ranking differences only really start to come into play when the schools are quite far apart in ranking, at which point the ranking starts to be more indicative of available resources, collaborators, and other impacts that cumulative matter over four to six years. There is a common adage that the best student at MIT and the best student at any other (lower-ranked or less-selective) school are just as good – it’s just that the distribution at the lower-ranked school has a longer tail.

We encourage you to talk through potential decisions with local advisors, people you meet at conferences, professors in other classes, and so on. By contrast, in our personal opinion, family members tend not to be good sources of guidance in these situations: in most cases they lack specific knowledge of what graduate degree work entails, and thus tend to over-prioritize location information and their outdated assessments of ranking.

Simultaneous Industrial Offers. Many students apply to industry (e.g., Microsoft, Google, etc.) and graduate school at the same time. In most cases, this results in an offer from the industrial position arriving before the graduate school due date of April 15th. The industrial company almost always then says “this offer will expire in two weeks, you have to decide now” and “if you don’t take this offer, it goes away, and if you apply again you have to go through the system again”. This “short-fuse” or “exploding offer” strategy is designed to put pressure on students — to encourage them to feel fear and take the safe option. In our personal opinions, even if this is not actively malicious (logistically, companies can’t hold positions open forever) it is one of the most structurally deceptive things companies do to students in this setting.

The company can tell that you are the sort of person who might also be applying to graduate programs. If you are such a qualified person, it is to the company’s advantage to hire you, rather than having you go to the graduate program. It is thus to the company’s advantage to highlight the safety of their available offer, rather than the uncertainty of the graduate program offer, which might not arrive until March. If you choose the company’s offer out of anxiety, it is to the company’s benefit … but not yours. It is to your benefit (following optimal game theory) to avoid making irreversible decisions until you have as much information as possible.

When the company says “this offer will expire, and if you don’t take it you’ll have to re-apply through our system”, that’s not a lie, but it is very deceptive in almost all cases. The reason is that companies keep records of interviews and applications for a few years and larger companies are constantly hiring. Companies like Microsoft and Google hire throughout the year, every year (barring the occasional hiring freeze). If you were good enough to receive an offer in October, you will also be good enough to receive an offer in March: people enter and exit those companies all the time. In addition, large companies are not interested in wasting work. While it is true that you will have to reapply through their system, if they see that you had a skills interview or behavioral interview within the last year or half-year, after you reapply through the system you will find that your application skips to Step 5 (etc.) rather than going through Steps 1-4 again: it is not a good use of their employee time and salary money to double interview you.

In Wes Weimer’s personal experience, every single time one of his advisees has turned down an industrial position to wait for graduate school and then re-applied for that industrial position later, the advisee was fast-tracked through the process and received the offer again.