There are many considerations when choosing a university for a Ph.D.

Below I’ve compiled a list of things to know and consider when choosing schools.

  1. School ranking doesn’t matter as much as finding research-active faculty in your area of interest.
  2. You should think of a Ph.D. as applying to work with a specific professor/lab rather than applying to the department/school.
  3. Look at your potential advisor’s CV to see if they are recently active in publishing.
  4. If your potential advisor has no or rare papers in the last few years, it could be a sign that they are focusing on administration, outreach, a startup, or anything else.
  5. Use Google Scholar, home pages, and DBLP profiles to see a professor’s recent research activity.
  6. csrankings.org uses publications in top CS venues for rankings.
  7. As a student, turn off all the areas and highlight the areas you are interested in for csrankings.org.
  8. csrankings.org has biased rankings in terms of bigger schools having more faculty to pump out papers.
  9. It’s a good idea to change the rankings to be within the last 4 years rather than the 10 years.
  10. Apply to the program which has a good fit and then email the faculty that you are interested with and show interest and that you’ve done your research.

Citations:

[1] https://csrankings.org

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOSl3xPmHiQ

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