School Specific Requests

On some level, I don't think it's really important where I study. If a school can provide me with the coursework and literature I need to learn about my topic of choice, I'll take care of the rest. HOWEVER, there are two schools that excite me more than any other: MIT and CMU.

I have provided information as to why each of these schools invigorate me and how they stand out from the other programs I'm considering. If you can, I would like you to include information specific to MIT and CMU in your letter to those schools.

MIT

WHY IS MIT A TOP CHOICE?

Outside of all the practical considerations (faculty that study exactly what I want, world class labs, fantastic coursework etc.), MIT is a top choice because my gut screams it so, and has done so consistently for a very long time:

I have been pursuing MIT for nearly a decade. For nearly 3000 days in a row, MIT is the first thing I think about when I wake up and it's the last thing I think about when I go to sleep. Between the blogs, OCW, and the various advice in department pages, MIT has already been continually aiding my social and intellectual development before I've even had a chance to study there. Whenever I have struggled in academia and needed resolve, I have dreamt of MIT and all that makes it special: the pset parties, the firehose of knowledge, the duality of IHTFP, the playful hacks, the harmony of theory and applications (Mind and Hand), and above all else, the people. If I am certain of anything, then I am certain of this: MIT lights a fire in my heart like nothing else.

Here are some of the highlights I referred to in the above (and some other stuff):

COMMUNITY:

MIT has its own blog page where students and admissions officers post about anything and everything. There's too much for me to say about the blogs to fit in a meaningful summary. I created a page that contains some of my favorite posts and how those posts solidify my confidence in MIT, but if you don't have time to read any of it, here's the big picture: MIT makes me feel at home. If you ever visited a school and thought, "Yup, this it. This is the one," that's how I feel when I read the blogs.

My comments on MIT blogs

Blogs Home Page

Source: MIT blog post: Joys and Frustrations of 6.009

VALUES:

All schools have a, "Here's what we value," page, but I don't give those pages a lot of weight because it's not clear to me when the school actually means it or when they're just saying whatever they think will bring back donations. In MIT's case, I am completely confident the MIT values are legitimate. Why? Because MIT releases its resources to the public and all of those resources clearly reflect the statements expressed in MIT's values page.

Curiosity

MIT claims it values curiosity. I suggest that OpenCourseWare, a platform with hundreds, if not thousands, of MIT courses released to the public for free, strongly supports this claim. OCW gives students—all students—the opportunity to explore their interests.

Collaboration

MIT claims it values collaboration. At the top of most problem sets is a section encouraging collaboration. Some courses (e.g 18.300) even have an online platform to help students find study groups (see linked syllabus).

18.300 Syllabus

MIT Values

IHTFP AND THE FIREHOSE:

The acronym IHTFP has two meanings: I Hate This F***king Place and I Have Truly Found Paradise. As I understand it, the idea is that MIT is not for the light-hearted. They say that if knowledge is water then MIT is like drinking from a firehose. Hence, half the time you will be miserable because you will be challenged to a very uncomfortable degree, but then the other half of the time you'll feel amazing because you overcame the challenges, you learned more than ever thought you could, and really, what's better than that?

JULIA:

Julia is a programming language that was invented at MIT. It's incredibly fast, it's easy to use, and it has great support for scientific programming (ODEs, Matrix Operations, Random Numbers etc.). Julia is my language of choice and I'm much more likely to find people that feel that way at MIT than I am anywhere else.

CMU

WHY IS CMU A TOP CHOICE?

The short answer is, "I have yet to find any other program that offers what CMU offers."

I'm looking for a program that allows me to explore specific pockets of statistics and computer science. Most CS programs have too many requirements that aren't related to my research interests (programming languages, systems, computer architecture) whereas many stats programs are, of course, very applied and might not have as much research in learning theory (my primary research interest). Here's how CMU not only avoids those problems, but has ample resources to support my goals:

1) CMU has an entire school—not department, school—of computer science, including a machine learning department (extremely unusual, in a good way).

2) CMU offers a joint degree in Statistics and Machine Learning, which a) gives students access to both departments and b) has a curriculum that is exactly what I'd be trying to create for myself at other schools.

WHY DO I WANT THE JOINT STATS ML DEGREE?

I really don't think it's wise to specialize in inference/prediction without decent exposure to machine learning AND statistics. Choosing only one makes me worried about a, "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail," problem. Both fields of study have their limits and sometimes the limit in one field could be addressed by methods in the other.

WHERE IS THE FIT BETWEEN ME AND CMU?

Admittedly, I don't have as much anecdotal information about CMU's personality as I do for MIT, but I've actually studied at CMU and I would be thrilled to return. The motto of CMU is "My heart is in the work," and this was immediately present when I was on campus. I lived in a building that contained all the Summer Scholar Fellows so I got to see a sample of the CMU community and that sample reflected the motto. Every other day, I met new people working on wonderful projects, and in a wide variety of disciplines (chemistry, biology, physics, human-computer interaction, cyber security, to name a few...). The intellectual diversity present on CMU's campus this summer—both in the REU program and beyond (seminars, my advisor's lab, random open offices in the math department)—is precisely the kind of inspiring atmosphere I hope to find wherever I go.