From: dsong@clyde.ICS.UCI.EDU
Subject: Invitation to UC Irvaine Ph.D. Program
Newsgroups: soc.culture.korean
Date: 16 Dec 92 01:20:07 GMT

This is for those students who want to apply to a Ph.D. program in Computer Science. I am a graduate student in University of California at Irvine and have various experiences in the field(teaching, research, working) and I feel that UCI Ph.D. program is a good choice for those who want to develop his/her research career. I believe I have some tips to increase your probability of being admitted in our program but I can not broadcast here explicitly. I will give some general information in this posting and 

will be willing to answer any question about our program and admission procedure upon requests. Feel free to send EMAIL to dsong@clyde.ics.uci.edu for further information.

1) If you want to study following fields, UCI is one of the best choice for you.

- Machine Learning : UCI is one of the frontrunner in this field with CMU, U.Illinois UC. Most faculty members are on the editorial boards of major journal or annual conference for a long time.

- Software Engineering: Perhaps UCI is most well-known to this area. All faculty members are on editorial board of major journals and major conferences. Whoever you pick as an advisor, he/she is one of the big names in the field. UCI's Arcadia project is a long-term (this is 6TH year and I believe the contract is 10+ years) innovative cooperative(4 more institutions are involved in Arcadia) project which can produce a lot of Ph.D. dissertations and impacts on the field.

- High Performance network : Prof. Suda(Japanese) has numerous contracts in this field.

- High level architecture design : Prof. Gajski seems to take care of foreign students and is a big name in this field. He chaired and invited as a keynote speaker in numerous conferences and has many research contracts.

- Parallel architecture design : Prof. Scherson (moved from Prinston) simply has PLENTY of money. Because I do not know much about the field, I guess this financial information says it all.

-CORPS : Computer Organizations, Policy, and Society
This is a unique subfield of UCI Ph.D. program. Those who have background in business, psychology, or any social science may have benefit to study this interesting field. One good thing for CORPS in UCI for Korean students is that UCI is involved in Pacific Rim Project so that you may have a good contact with Korea while studying this field. Many students in this field have coworkers in Management School.

2) In general, UCI is no MIT, CMU, Stanford. But, in above specialized fields, UCI is as good as any university in U.S.. Also, we do not have Master's program. Thus, professors are VERY research oriented and you as a Ph.D. student if admitted are the main resourse they can use. Financial support for the first year is NOT EASY. But, in general, if you survive in the first year, you have financial support from second year - of course, it's not a free gift. UCI has not been known to Korean students very well 

and vice versa. In 25 years history, only 6 Korean or Korean-American students had been in the program and three of them graduated recently. Those graduates become a professor at California state university, a researcher at IBM Watson Lab., a researcher at Aerospace Cooperation in L.A.. Thus, we have only 3 continuing korean students out of about 130.

3) A few statistics about UCI Ph.D. Program population (Estimated)
-Females   : 15 - 20 %
-Foreign students : About 33 %
		    From Asia 20% (Half from India, half from China or Taiwan)
		    From Europe, S.America 10 - 15 %

4) What is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing in your application materials?

Undoubtly, your RESEARCH INTERESTS!!!!!
Your research interests must be matched to the faculty member's current research direction. Your test scores may not be important if you did not make any faculty member interested in your 1 page proposal of research. Or, vice versa. If you think your test score is not good but you know one of the research field very well which matches one of UCI's faculty member's, you have great chance to be admitted. Actually, the distribution of GRE scores varies very drastically. I could not tell you in this post. Also

, there are several other factors for your admission. But, I can tell you this.

You claim your research interest in the application material.(say, AI)
Then, each faculty member in that field READs your file. (Imagine what they want to read).
If any faculty member is interested in your record, he/she make a recommendation for you to be admitted.

There will be a cross-field meeting to decide how many students will be admitted this year or what general criteria we will set. But, all the procedure above is done in the subfield first.

5) Further information : dsong@clyde.ics.uci.edu

If you are applied to UCI already or interested in this program, please EMAIL me. In that mail, you may tell me your current situation(age, backgroud, test scores, GPAs, research experiences, etc.) , then I will suggest the best strategy that I can think of to be admitted in this program for YOUR case. Of course, being admitted and being survived is quite different.

Good Luck.