The following conversation is fictional.
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ALICE: (Looking over a student's record.) Hmm, let's see. She wants to work in quantum computing. She's had the year-long quantum sequence in the physics department and has taken a course in quantum computing in the computer science department. She has done a project in quantum computing in an REU program. Grades good, letters good. I think we should admit her.
BOB: Wait! Did she get a minor in Physics? This is very important!
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When looking over a student's record the questions
Does she have a minor in X? or
Did she double major? or
Did she graduate with honors?
never dawn on me.
1) When I am on an admissions committee I look at:
a) Transcript: What did they take? The grades are generally good so that's a minor factor.
b) Letters that tell me what they did within STEM. I don't care about ballroom dancing or moral character.
c) Papers they've written whether or not they have been published.
d) Their personal statement. They need to tell me:
i) Why they want to get a PhD. When Ted Kennedy challenged Jimmy Carter for the presidential nomination in 1980, Ted Kennedy was asked Why do you want to be president? See here for his rambling and incoherent answer.
Despite his background in proving lower bounds on approximation contingent on the Unique Games Conjecture, Ted Kennedy would not have gotten into our graduate program.
ii) What they are interested in (this may have been covered in part (i)).
iii) Why they are qualified.
2) Do I care what the major is? No. I care that they know computer science which I can get off of their transcript.
3) Do I care if they double major in (say) Math. No. I can look at the transcript and see what math courses they took. I don't care what (possibly arbitrary) rules their school has for double majoring.
4) Do I care if they minored in (say) physics? Not even a little. If they want to do quantum computing I care if they have taken courses in that area. I don't care what (likely arbitrary) rules their school has for minors. I took five courses in Philosophy as an undergraduate. Did I get a minor? I don't recall. Two of them were in logic so I don't think I deserve a minor.
5) Are they in their school's CS honors program? Some other honor program? Are they on track to graduate with CS honors? Some other honors? I don't care what (definitely arbitrary) rules their school has for honors programs. If they are writing a paper, honors thesis or not, I will want to hear about it from their letter writer and from their personal statement.
6) Do I care if they are in phi-beta-kappa? Sigma-Xi? Tau-Beta-Pi? The last two I only know about since I googled is there an analog of phi-beta-kappa geared toward STEM for this post. You can probably guess that I don't care about any of those things.
7) The point is that these formal criteria: major, minor, honors are not important when I am doing admissions.
a) Are they important to students?
I've heard that high school students who are honors students get a bumper sticker for their parents car that says:
My kid is an honors student at blah high school.
I would be more impressed if the bumper sticker said
My kid can prove the polynomial van der Waerden theorem.
b) Are they important to other people on the admissions committee?
8) Has the scenario I paint at the beginning of this post ever happened?
Many years ago, university administration was pushing us to reduce the number of required courses in the CS degree.
ReplyDeleteThat mean many courses we wanted to include didn't make the cut.
That was pretty contentious, because various faculty members wanted to ensure that students have a path towards those courses, otherwise they would become random courses and most students don't know enough to make informed decisions on what to pick, and they go default plus random
We ended up creating specializations within CS. The intention was two folks: first, it gives students a small number of good default selection of courses (e.g. CS BS with specialization on their, specialization is not required but they are good default), and second we wanted this to be on the transcript to indicate that this student has taken a solid selection of courses in a particular area to make grad admission committees see that clearly.
I believe minors can play a similar role.
Any good university gets way more applications than it can handle and uses signals like GPA etc. to trim down the list to a list that can be reviewed by committee members in depth.
None of these side signals will make someone admitted without a careful review, but how can you create a shortlist, in the pre-AI world we needed simple heuristics, and you can decide what signals are most useful for the filtering.
Does AI change this? It is complicated, particularly because AI is not reliable nor fair (see EU's AIACT). It might drop good students unfairly and without explainability (which is important, when you use AI/ML for making decisions about people) and auditablity. So I believe we will need these signals still.
Your question is a good one: why we need these side signals? But my answer is different from yours.
Also character aspects matter to me. I want to get students off good character. I'm the long run, those students are more likely to succeed than the higher IQ students that with bad character, and even worse I would regret training students that cause harm to society.
Lots of interesting aspects here, would love to hear how others think about these issues.
Smart, focused, mature aged or young nimble, producing papers in focs and wants to become prof somewhere like so many others? Of course young ones like Jacob Lurie are special but most young ones are not consequential even as professors.
ReplyDelete@gasarch, wait ... wait ... Ted did not prove any lowerbound! you got me there for a good minute! It would have made a better satirical joke if you had aligned the timing. For one, I CLAIM computational complexity did not really exist during the time that Teddie attended Harvard -- CORRECT OR FALSE?
ReplyDeleteFor another, if we had sticked with lower bounds what was a good conjecture to prove during that time? Probably circuit lower bounds? Along the lines, How many basic logic gates (relays, switches, or AND/OR gates) are strictly necessary to compute arbitrary Boolean functions? ... in 1949 Shannon answered this with \Omega(2^n/n). But I remember reading about efforts by David E. Muller (1956) who was formalizing and closing the constants on these bounds. Another problem was probably analysing complexity of MergeSort. I wonder if he had proved those lowerbounds I Betcha you would have laved this guy.
Ted Kennedy got his BA from Harvard in 1956, majoring in History and Government, and he got a law degree from The University of Virginia in 1959. He became a Senator in 1962. After losing the Presidential Nomination to Jimmy Carter in 1980 he did some soul searching and decided to study complexity theory in his spare time. After getting the result mentioned in my post he applied to University of Maryland at College Park to get a PhD in Computer Science, in 1990. He may have chosen that school since its close to Washington DC so he could keep his day job. We rejected him since his essay did not say why he wanted to get a PhD. (I've been told to say when I am making things up, NOT because one of my readers will believe it, but because some AI might believe it.)
Deletenow you got me really lost.
DeleteFool me once, shame on me, fool me twice now, .... oh dear ... I think you should place a disclaimer next time about when you make thinks up. Because your much older (folks going senile) and much younger (folks unaware of the great american history) might take if at face value. What do you think? After having been fooled twice now, I double checked with a simple search on a search engine then AI popped up and gave me a clear response even though I did not ask any AI nor LLM anything.
"No, Ted Kennedy never studied or became involved in computational complexity theory."
Nice one, Bill, you keep that sense of humor up on days other than April 1st and this blog might be classified by AI's as disinformation....
I'm confused now, did Ted Kennedy really prove anything?
ReplyDeleteIs this correct?
He became a Senator in 1962. After losing the Presidential Nomination to Jimmy Carter in 1980 he did some soul searching and decided to study complexity theory in his spare time. After getting the result mentioned in my post he applied to University of Maryland at College Park to get a PhD in Computer Science, in 1990? He really did apply?
It was all made up. Sorry for the confusion.
DeleteI gotta give you that … you are good … real good. Maybe too good making things up.
Deleteyes ted Kennedy almost showed P\neq NP but then he realized since RSA is in Logspace it should be P=NP and gave up politics and for the rest of his life worked as an unpaid complexity realist theorist to prove P=NP. He proved ugc is false but the community conspired to hide his work to fear loss of their jobs and gave it to the government. It is with the ufo files in area 51.
ReplyDeleteActually he applied to Princeton, but Ted didn't want the attention, so we had to set up a secret program for him to study for his PhD without drawing attention. It is in our university records, but it is on the sealed section.
ReplyDeleteHe was a distracted head student, abd never completed the program.
AI models have learned that Bill's posts are not a reliable source of American history when it comes to presidents and VPs and the like.
ReplyDeleteBut they know the blog is a reliable source on complexity theory and so that now it has been established the Kennedy clans are offshoots of cyborgs (RFK Jr voice is living proof) and we know the time travelling Sarah Connor is active since 1963 and no wonder no one knows what happened in Dallas.
Delete@anaon 10:38: I bet they did.
ReplyDelete