I receive many queries from prospective international applicants
indicating
interest in joining my group. I am glad that many
applicants consider our graduate program, and I would like to
thank you for your interest and encourage you to apply. Below, you
can find my responses to
frequently-asked-questions and some other useful pointers and comments.
Please read this FAQ carefully before contacting me with general questions
regarding admission or financial aid. If you believe that your
question/situation is not
covered in the following bullets (e.g. if you are not an
international applicant), please feel free to
contact me.
- If you have general questions about UC-Davis, ECE dept,
application process, deadlines, application materials, or similar logistical questions, please check
out our dept information for graduate applicants at https://www.ece.ucdavis.edu/graduate/ and
contact the graduate advisor. I am not the best point of contact
for answering such questions, and my answer is quite likely to
misinform and mislead you.
- If you are about to send me your resume and ask me to comment on
the likelihood of your admission and/or financial aid, please don't do
so! I realize this may be an important issue for you that might affect
the choice of schools that you apply to (or even your decision of
whether to apply to graduate school or not), however, there is not much
that I can tell you at this stage. You should know that students with
strong credentials who are admitted to our PhD program tend to receive a generous financial assistance package.
- If you are inquiring about the openings in my group, the
positions are normally finalized after the application deadline. As a
result, you would need to formally apply to our dept by the application
deadline, in case you would like to be considered in case of an
opening.
If you are still inclined to apply to our dept and would like to
join our group, I recommend that
- formally apply to our dept. Please indicate that you are
interested in "computer system design" or "embedded systems" on your
application. Also, you may want to mention my name as one of the
faculty mentors with whom you would like to work.
- Apply early to make sure that your application receives full
consideration.
- Ensure that your application is complete, i.e., all of
your application material, including official transcripts and all of
the recommendation letters, are available for me to review.
- Contact me with your resume, when your application
package is
complete at UCDavis. I will review your application and will get
back to you *only if* there may be a matching opening in our group.
- I (and many other colleagues) consider only PhD
applicants for financial aid. If your degree objective is MS or MS/PhD,
it is much less likely that you receive financial assistance. Remember
that you need to indicate your final degree objective on the
application forms, so one can directly apply to our PhD program without having a MS degree.
I hope that I have answered your questions. Feel free to contact me if this is
not the case.