Grad School Hunting And More

A view from a hotel foom (with Merlion in the distance)

I am currently writing this post from a hotel room in Singapore. In about a week, I will be taking my first classes as a graduate student. This all sounds like it is happening very fast, but it has been a while coming. Here’s a wrap up of what I have been doing in the past 16 months, since April of last year.

April of last year? Seems a bit early for grad school hunting isn’t it?

To be honest, you can never be too early to start thinking about grad school.

However, I did start looking at grad school quite early on because I tried applying for a scholarship (specifically the Fulbright scholarship), which, if accepted, would have at the very least partially fund my Master’s degree in the US. Since I did think of that as an option, I had to look at schools I could go to. Although at that point, I did not have a concrete plan of where I wanted to go yet - I only knew that I wanted to go to grad school for computer science, and give up on the hopes of becoming a physicist (which to be honest, wasn’t really a dream I ever had).

What happened with the scholarship?

Well there was an initial round, where the committee took a look at our applications (which included an essay and a bunch of recommendation letters) and shortlisted a number of candidates to conduct interviews with. I managed to get into the shortlist, and by my quick calculation, the scholarship would have been awarded to a quarter of the people shortlisted.

In the interview round (which was in around July), well, let’s say it didn’t go that well. I honestly think it was one of the worst interview I have done for anything. I tried to anticipate questions that they may ask, but in the actual interview, I just got too nervous and ended up not answering the questions well.

Of course, I did not get the scholarship, and so I had to look for other plans for grad school.

How did you get ready for grad school applications?

The first step is thinking about what I actually want to do during grad school. I knew I wanted to do something in the area of computer science (specifics not yet known at that point), and I do enjoy research work so I felt like completing a PhD would be the end goal of what I want to achieve. Of course, it could all change when I do go on to study, but I figured I should aim for that.

Then, it was shortlisting schools. There are many, many schools to choose from all around the world, but I wasn’t going to apply to them all, since it would have been expensive.

Then, it was preparing the documents and scores that I would need for the applications. I have already asked professors for recommendation letters before for the scholarship, so asking them again for university applications wasn’t a big deal. I have valid TOEFL scores already on hand, so all I needed was to take the GRE. One of the school made the GRE mandatory, and with very little preparation, I was barely able to meet their minimum requirement by 2 points (in the maths and reading sections).

Have you been doing anything else in the meantime?

Since COVID striked, I have moved back to Chiang Mai to stay with my family. After graduation, I remained there in Chiang Mai and managed to get a job which allowed me to work from home and make money to fund my grad school applications and studies. The office was actually in Bangkok, however I stayed home in Chiang Mai to work. I started out there as a part-time employee (since I had to get my grad school applications sorted at first), and only swithced to a full-time employee afterwards. The majority of the employees there were my friends from undergrad though (and the founders were actually alumni at my university), so there was no need for getting to know your coworkers better.

100% a cat

During that time I continued to work on the research project that I started in my senior thesis, however since the start of 2021 I have gotten more busy and the project has not really been prioritised. I really did think I would have had a paper published by now, but oh well. I still do intend to work on it later on though.

Outside of work and family, a few of my high school friends are also back in Chiang Mai, and of course I went out with them. We went mini-golfing and bowling once, and just gone hanging out a couple of times after that as well. Oh, and I played many hours of Cities: Skylines and also fed the cats at home.

Where did you end up applying to in the end?

I applied to too many graduate programs. Without mentioning the name of the universities I applied to, a handful of the schools I applied to were in the US, and the remaining were schools in Canada, Switzerland, Singapore, and my home country Thailand.

I tried to vary the schools I applied to, applying to a few top-tier schools which I did not expect to get accepted to, and a few were more of the middle range where the rankings may not be as high but were in nice cities or had other factors which stood out. I did not apply to any safety schools, and I only applied to schools that I would be happy studying and living in.

What I did do, however, was pick schools where I found advisors who I may be interested in working with, or have a wide enough range of professors that I would eventually be able to find an advisor I would enjoy working with.

I also made sure to apply to schools in different countries, since the COVID situation may have made studying in certain parts of the world infeasible (at that point we weren’t completely sure how the pandemic was going to play out just yet).

Where did you end up getting accepted to in the end?

I got accepted to two places - the school in Singapore and another in Thailand (again name omitted on this page). I had a round of interviews with both of the places, and after the interviews (which went much better than when I applied for the scholarhip earlier), I got offers for the PhD programs from both places, which came in around a week of each other. The deadline for acceptance, however, was very tight.

So, where did you end up accepting?

Merlion replica in my bedroom

I accepted the Singapore offer, mainly because I wanted to try going the adventurous path.

I have spent my internship at the place in Thailand and I know that it is a good place to go to. But after consultation with many people, I decided that the offer from Singapore was simply too good to pass up. There were a few other reasons that I don’t really want to discuss here that went into the decision as well, but I will say both schools had their own benefits in terms of the environment and research support, and it was very difficult to choose between the two schools.

There is also a Merlion replica which has been sitting in my room for the past ten-ish years (from the last time I came to Singapore), and I liked to think it was some sort of foreshadowing of my life that I would end up being here again.

Anything you would have done differently if you could go through the application process again?

In hindsight, I would have saved quite a bit of money if I only applied to the two places I got accepted to. In reality though, I’m not sure if it was even a good choice to apply to as many schools as I did, so I might have reduced the number of schools I did apply to.

The schools which I got rejected from did not tell me why my application was rejected, so I do not know how I could have improved my application anyway. If I had to guess, it may have been a lack of a (concrete, or published) research project, and maybe a more unclear idea of what I wanted to conduct my research on. I may also have been more of a risk for the university due to a weaker computer science background (with me having graduated as a physics major), so I should probably have told myself 4 or 5 years ago to switch to majoring in CS instead, or at least taking an OS or Com Arch class.

Another thing may have been to actually study on my GRE, but I don’t think it is as big of a deal.

After you have been accepted, what then?

The formalities! In Singapore, students had to apply for a Student Pass, so there was an entire process I had to go through to get that sorted. Other than that there were registration process for the university, the housing arrangements and orientations that I had to attend.

Also since it is a COVID year, it meant there were also extra procedures in asking for permission to enter the country (i.e. the Entry Pass) and also registering for a quarantine place and for a number of PCR tests I had to do before leaving and upon arriving in Singapore.

I also had my job that I was still at, so I also had to finish up the projects I had and started passing on my projects to my coworkers who are to continue on them (which meant I had to go back to my old code and write documentation and tests for them which was a bit of a pain).

There were a lot of things I had to do before I can travel in July. I always had the feeling in the back of my mind like I forgot to do something, but once I got into my quarantine room last week, I felt a big relieve that I did not forget anything.

What now?

Surprisingly good quarantine food

As mentioned earlier, I have now made my way to Singapore, and will be starting school in around a week. Yes, the classes will be online but the school did advise on us coming here if possible since classes may switch to on-site later on, and also that there are some formalities that must be completed in-person here. Now it is just getting ready for classes and looking at which professors I may want to work with in the next few years.

I also hear the country calling me, so when I can get out I will definitely do a bit of sightseeing before the coursework becomes too overwhelming and I become too bust with assignments.

For now though, I’ll just be in my room staring into the Singaporean skies, enjoying the meals they’re bringing me, and binging Community, hoping one day, the show will really have six seasons and a movie.