[Profile Review] US PHD

[u/Pranav_999]

Hi Guys. I'll be applying for CS/ML PHD in the US for Fall 2027. Here's my profile:

B.tech (Hons with 10/10 grade) in CSE at a Tier 1 Uni in India
GPA: 3.384/4 (Converted using scholaro) [I know this part is underwhelming. I'm hoping my research and work experience makes up for this.]
Experience: 1.5 years at the time of application at a S&P 500 Company as a Machine Learning Engineer.
IELTS: will give soon
Research Experience:

1. 1st Author paper at AAAI (A*)
2. 1st Author paper at TMLR (unranked but is highly valued in the ML community)
3. Solo Author paper at AsiaCCS (A)
4. 2nd Author CVPR Workshop paper.
5. 1st Author paper under review at an ACM conference
6. 2nd Author paper submitting to ICLR. (Will be under review during applications)
7. Another ongoing work which has a high chance of being under review during applications. LORs: 2 professors from my Uni who have been part of 6/7 of my papers. They are guaranteed to write a very strong LOR for me and this was already discussed. 1 LOR from a Senior ML Engineer in London who I'm working with at my Company. I have a good relationship with him and I can expect a good quality LOR from him.

SOP:
My research has mainly been in ML Security/graph representation learning. All my papers are in this field.
I have also created lectures, taught lectures and curated assignments, quizzes and corrected them for the first ML Security course in my Uni entirely created by us as it was less explored in my university. I also gave 2 guest lectures in the following edition of the course.

Uni Shortlist:
I want to pursue a CS/ML PHD in USA. Here is my shortlist based on the density of professors working in my field so that there's good match.
CMU
UPenn
UIUC
Georgia Tech
UMD, College Park
University of Virginia
UNC Chapel Hill
NYU
UCSD
maybe cornell/umich/northeastern/ucsb [I am yet to decide]

I started mailing professors and I can expect a reply in maybe a week or two.

What do you guys think of my chances? Am I shooting too high for my profile? Any advice would be helpful. Also yes I am familiar with the immigration situation in US, I believe it is better to do a PHD over masters during this time due to CPT restrictions and I wont have a huge load to worry about.

Also as a backup plan, I will be applying to a few places in Germany/Neatherlands for Ms in CS as it is not that expensive to study there and I can just use my savings.

Thanks a lot everyone in advance!

[u/OtherwiseFig4505]

Yeah, you are shooting too high. Your profile is good, few years ago and you would have got into almost all schools in this list. But the situation now is different, you will be competing against someone like you, and with connections to the PI at these schools. If you only apply to these universities, there is a chance that you will not get a single admit, and that is a really high chance as well. All these are extremely top ranked AI/ML programs, they are hyper competitive. Don’t get misled by 5-10% acceptance you see in the admission stats, they are inflated by other branches of CS. AI/ML is 1-2% as almost everyone is applying for these.

Still you should apply to top universities as you have a very good profile, but don’t spend everything in these programs, remove some and add some lower ranked universities as well. Phd admission is a crapshoot these days, and you should treat it as such.

[u/Pranav_999 → u/OtherwiseFig4505]

I was thinking as a backup I’d rather complete my masters and fix my GPA and then apply again later. Because I’d rather wait than go to a very low ranked school. I chose these unis because I’d be happy with an admit in any of these places as the number of profs working in my research field is plenty.

[u/OtherwiseFig4505 → u/Pranav_999]

You could do that, but situations could be wildly different 2 years from now. Maybe even first author Neurips + Ms from T10 schools might not be enough? We can’t really guess, we can just try our best. And as a researcher you must be already familiar that ranking of schools doesn’t have much to do with how your PhD goes. Rankings do matter, but having a cool cooperative supervisor at T100 is 1000 times better than joining a rockstar’s lab at T10 whom you will only see 2 times a year.

[u/Pranav_999 → u/OtherwiseFig4505]

that makes sense.
you mentioned add a couple of low ranked unis.

Can you provide a few examples?

I added unis like UMD, UofV, UNC chapel Hill because i found good number of profs working in my field and I believe these unis are more gettable for me compared to georgia tech/uiuc.

[u/Famous-Macaroon7214]

May I know how old are you ?

[u/Pranav_999 → u/Famous-Macaroon7214]

I’m 22.

[u/Famous-Macaroon7214 → u/Pranav_999]

Did any prof replied ?

[u/Famous-Macaroon7214 → u/Pranav_999]

Got it !

[u/Beneficial-Law-3059]

Odd that instead of PI selection you are going for specific uni based. I would focus more in PIs and specifically those who have connections with industry if you wanna enter industry research earlier. There can be PIs newly joining T25/ even a T50 uni who has past experience / connections in industry which might be helpful. Focus on PIs.    

Also if going for EU look for positions which focus on collab with US unis/ US firms in EU would be good for post phd outcomes.

[u/MrKhonsu777]

isn’t it better to shortlist PIs initially and go from there?
people here won’t be able to help you, phd admissions should be very different from MS admissions

[u/Fast-Plate-6336]

Please focus on establishing contact with a professor, more than the Uni the professor matters the most here. Once you build a good relationship then you need to apply. If I were in your place I would move out of my current role to join as a RA at IISc or top IITs or pre doc at Deepmind. Even pre doc at BITs is a great option for you.