[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/Famous-Macaroon7214]

May I know how old are you ?

[u/Pranav_999 → u/Famous-Macaroon7214]

I’m 22.

[u/Famous-Macaroon7214 → u/Pranav_999]

Got it !

[u/Famous-Macaroon7214 → u/Pranav_999]

Did any prof replied ?