grad school

Today's big excitement was schmoozing with the prospective students here for the physics department open house. They had a barbeque by the citrus trees on the balcony of 375 LeConte and all these fancy would-be (will-be) grad students compared notes as is the custom at grad student recruiting weekends. I enjoyed chatting with them about Berkeley, convincing them to come here. It's self-defeating, but I can't help it. I think most of the students who are visiting had a very positive impression of Berkeley already. After the barbeque, we all went out to Jupiter, which was pretty fun.

Data point: Of 650 applications, the physics department accepted 120, and expects about 30-40 to enroll.

That's a very high acceptance rate, and a very low yield rate. At Rochester, 30 students were accepted from 400 applications, and 15 are expected to enroll. 7.5% acceptance, 50% yield. Berkeley Physics was 18% acceptance, 33% yield. Berkeley AS&T, the group I applied to, accepted 5 students (down from 10 last year) of 85 applicants (acceptance ratio of 6%), and word on the street says three of those are coming.

Apparently it's all about self-selection. There is a definite tiering going on, since nearly all of the prospective students at Berkeley are from big name schools, and few of those at CMU or Rochester were.

Liz got in everywhere. Princeton, Caltech, Stanford, Berkeley. She didn't seem to like Berkeley very much.

I think that the department at Rochester is under-rated, but I'm ever-more reminded of what I'd be giving up in university environment. Nonetheless, I'm more and more inclined to give it a go and see how I like it.

ICFP Contest

I want to form a team to participate in the ICFP Contest 2004, which will be June 4-7. It's a programming contest that generally involves a nontrivial optimization problem, one year it was a raytracer.. anyway, all manner of cleverness, and good coding in any language are helpful. anyone interested? (btw, I will be at UCSD at that time.)