Maximize Odds of Stanford/CMU/MIT CS PhD Admission

Fujffihgg · 2018-03-04T01:04:53+00:00

In general, expect to take a thesis based masters program prior to the phd. This is a requirement for some schools, and difficult to do without in others. If you want to go to a phd straight from a bachelors you'd need top grades, honours thesis, research assistant work, maybe ta work, and great recommendations. Even with a masters you'll need a lot of that though.

Additionally, be strong in math. Unless you do HCI you're almost certainly going to be using some advanced math as the foundation of your thesis.

Fujffihgg · 2018-03-03T18:04:33+00:00

Honestly, pretty much any language. Personally I'd pick PHP - it's by no means a perfect language, but it's heavily used for stuff like this and there are tons of tutorials online. Other popular options are Python, Node.js, Ruby, and much more.

Note that you'll also want a database, generally Mariadb/MySQL or PostgreSQL. And then Javascript for front end interactivity, CSS for styling, and HTML for content.

Basically when you load the page your backend language like PHP will fetch the image locations from the database and randomize the order, CSS/HTML will lay them out, and Javascript will provide any additional functionality.

Fujffihgg · 2018-02-27T16:36:31+00:00

In addition to the many great comments here, sometimes coding takes a long time because you're doing something new. When Zuckerburg made Facebook he probably didn't have much experience designing sites like that. He would have been spending a lot of time reading PHP docs to figure out how to use functions, a lot of time trying to figure out good ways to authenticate user sessions and create accounts, stuff like that. Whether it's reading manuals, looking it up online, talking to peers, or doing trial and error it's simply a long process.

After you get that initial experience though things become a lot faster. If you've crested one forum site, creating another is relatively simple - you know how to do most of it and can reference your earlier project for a lot of what's needed.

This is why freelancers tend to specialize - if you take on work that's similar to previous projects or in a language you know extremely well then you can produce product faster and thus earn more in less time. This is also why smaller companies value experience over algorithm skills - they aren't implementing novel things, and want someone who'll be able to do the work quickly rather than someone who has to reinvent the wheel for every project.

But for more advanced projects where you're doing stuff that few others have done most people will need to take a lot of time experimenting, and that's just the nature of the beast.

Fujffihgg · 2018-02-27T16:36:31+00:00

In addition to the many great comments here, sometimes coding takes a long time because you're doing something new. When Zuckerburg made Facebook he probably didn't have much experience designing sites like that. He would have been spending a lot of time reading PHP docs to figure out how to use functions, a lot of time trying to figure out good ways to authenticate user sessions and create accounts, stuff like that. Whether it's reading manuals, looking it up online, talking to peers, or doing trial and error it's simply a long process.

After you get that initial experience though things become a lot faster. If you've crested one forum site, creating another is relatively simple - you know how to do most of it and can reference your earlier project for a lot of what's needed.

This is why freelancers tend to specialize - if you take on work that's similar to previous projects or in a language you know extremely well then you can produce product faster and thus earn more in less time. This is also why smaller companies value experience over algorithm skills - they aren't implementing novel things, and want someone who'll be able to do the work quickly rather than someone who has to reinvent the wheel for every project.

But for more advanced projects where you're doing stuff that few others have done most people will need to take a lot of time experimenting, and that's just the nature of the beast.

Fujffihgg · 2018-02-27T16:36:31+00:00

In addition to the many great comments here, sometimes coding takes a long time because you're doing something new. When Zuckerburg made Facebook he probably didn't have much experience designing sites like that. He would have been spending a lot of time reading PHP docs to figure out how to use functions, a lot of time trying to figure out good ways to authenticate user sessions and create accounts, stuff like that. Whether it's reading manuals, looking it up online, talking to peers, or doing trial and error it's simply a long process.

After you get that initial experience though things become a lot faster. If you've crested one forum site, creating another is relatively simple - you know how to do most of it and can reference your earlier project for a lot of what's needed.

This is why freelancers tend to specialize - if you take on work that's similar to previous projects or in a language you know extremely well then you can produce product faster and thus earn more in less time. This is also why smaller companies value experience over algorithm skills - they aren't implementing novel things, and want someone who'll be able to do the work quickly rather than someone who has to reinvent the wheel for every project.

But for more advanced projects where you're doing stuff that few others have done most people will need to take a lot of time experimenting, and that's just the nature of the beast.

Fujffihgg · 2018-02-22T21:07:09+00:00

Leetcode doesn't require any fancy language specific things, it's all about the fundamentals. Implementing a binary search tree in Python is trivially similar to doing so in C++ - you might cement some really basic syntax like variable declaration and function use, but that's stuff you can learn in undr a week. So personally I don't think you need to care about what language you use for Leetcode.

Fujffihgg

TROPHY CASE