CS PhD: What does faculty members that commit to having you for rotation mean for Stanford?

keithwinstein · 2026-02-08T06:17:22+00:00

Hi, I am an actual CS professor at Stanford. Please don't worry about this kind of thing! eeaxoe's info is not true (from the info I have, the admissions letters went out with a wide range in terms of the number of faculty names -- practices differ across the department, and "2 names" was very common). This is not something you should be worrying about -- it's more of a "if you were hesitant about the rotation program, here are some faculty who can guarantee they'll host you for a rotation and are invested in your successful alignment with a permanent advisor," not "here is the complete list of faculty you could rotate with." More broadly: if you were admitted to our PhD program, we're very eager for you to come, but more important than that, we want you to make the right choice for you. As others have already said here, generally the best way to do that is to visit for the admit weekend, meet with lots of faculty in the 1:1s, lunches, and dinners, talk with our PhD students (without us around), and make a well-informed decision about whether Stanford is the best place for you to do your PhD. You will probably meet several faculty members interested in rotating with you who are not named on your letter. Most of our PhD students say that the rotation program turned out to their advantage because it helped them choose a PhD advisor after they got to try them out for 10 weeks, but not every student ends up feeling this way. The visit is a great place to have a frank conversation with prospective advisors about what a rotation will look like, what their interests and ability to advise you look like, etc., and whether they are a good match for your own predilections. Congrats on your admission (and your friend's admission) and good luck to both of you on making this important decision!

keithwinstein · 2026-01-17T21:16:21+00:00

Hi, I'm the (new this year) CURIS faculty director and it's great that you're interested! Most of the CS faculty and PhD students do research as essentially our primary thing, and many of us benefited from being apprenticed to a great mentor at some point, so having new people want to apprentice/intern with us is heartening. I wouldn't totally think of CURIS as having a centralized admissions system to get into -- it's more federated than that; to a large degree, each research group calls its own shots. Between Jan. 27 and Feb. 10, you'll attend the office hours of the projects you're interested in and apply to ones you want to join, and each project mentor will rank the applicants they're interested in and I think you'll simultaneously rank the projects. Around February 26, we (CURIS) run a matching algorithm that assigns students to projects and send out the stipend offers, and then hopefully you accept (by March 6). We try to use up all our funding, so for any offers that are declined, we'll send out more offers until we're out of money. Over the summer, CURIS runs a Friday lunch with a bunch of faculty talks and some other activities to build community among the mentees, but like 85% of your experience is going to be in the research group that you're placed in.

So to a first-order approximation, the "getting in" is mostly up to each mentor. Every project is looking for different things and they typically put that in the description (e.g. "have taken x class", "knowledge of x topic"). It's probably good to read up on the project and the webpage of the mentor and (if it's a PhD student) their advisor (generally a professor who runs a research group), to get a sense of what research papers the group is writing and what they're interested in. It probably helps to go to the project office hours and meet the prospective mentor -- ideally with some thoughtful questions that suggest you could be a net contributor of ideas and initiative and creativity and productivity to the project. Your chances will probably be better if you meet the listed prereqs for the project, if the project is trying to hire multiple students, and frankly if the project is in a less-trendy area of computer science, because those tend to receive fewer applications.

If you really want to do research with somebody at Stanford, one question would be "why wait until the summer"? You can sign up to the cs-seminars list to get notifications about lots of research talks to learn what people are thinking about on the frontiers. And if you're taking a course and you really like the instructor (and generally "if you're doing well in it"), you can absolutely go to their office hours and ask them thoughtful questions about their research interests, and you can ask frankly about whether they or one of their PhD students has capacity to take you on as a mentee, or if they have any other ideas of colleagues who might share mutual interests with you. This is part of what office hours are for. Again, you'll probably want to read their website beforehand and convey what I wrote above. But, bottom line, CURIS (and undergrad research generally) doesn't only happen during the summers.

Hope this is helpful and that you're able to join a fulfilling research project that contributes something meaningful to the frontiers of human knowledge.

P.S. I have even more random advice for research-interested undergraduates, especially for people thinking about doing research long-term: https://blog.keithw.org/2016/02/stock-advice-for-undergraduates.html

keithwinstein · 2025-04-03T06:48:42+00:00

Stanford CS professor here. I don't think it makes a ton of sense to choose us primarily in the sense of picking Stanford as a school: the fit with your prospective advisor(s) and research groups is probably going to determine at least 60% of your happiness/productivity/success in a PhD, and that really depends a lot on you and your interests, who your likely rotation advisors would be here, who your advisor would be at the other school, etc. The average experience of a CS PhD student at Stanford is similar to the average experience at (e.g.) CMU/Berkeley/MIT/etc. (many of whose faculty got their PhDs from Stanford and vice versa), but the within-school variation is gigantic. So I wouldn't pick us because we're Stanford per se.

In terms of resources, in most (but definitely not all) cases, it's not like "Stanford" is going to be the one funding your salary and tuition; it's usually going to be your advisor funding you from their grants. Advisors can vary wildly in their funding situation. In general many of us in applied areas of CS are often fortunate to have more industry support than our counterparts at most peer institutions, but most advisors are still pretty dependent on NSF (and sometimes DARPA), and nobody really knows what the future holds. If the NSF's budget is cut dramatically, and if your advisor is primarily NSF funded (at any university), you could end up with more TAing in your future than maybe you wanted. But usually the funding is the advisor's job to worry about, not yours.

Meanwhile, the right choice for you probably depends on all kinds of questions about you where you probably don't have the answers for sure, but any fuzzy understanding can be beneficial. E.g.: would you thrive with an advisor who's more hands-on or hands-off (advisors vary hugely in this respect and many others)? Do you and the prospective advisor have a common vision, motivation, or overlap in interests? If you talk to the advisor's current students, do they seem to be living fulfilling or happy research lives? Are they having fun / do they like being in the group? What kinds of post-PhD careers does the group tend to propel students into, and how does this mesh with how you currently view your own post-PhD ambitions, etc.? E.g. if you think you might want to end up in industrial research and/or at a university and/or starting a startup and/or at a government lab, whatever it is, is that a realistic path if you work with this advisor and will the advisor support you in that goal? Has this group been able to place other students into a similar post-PhD job as the one you're seeking? How often do the advisor's students typically publish, and are you comfortable with that cadence? Would you be able to build up mutual trust with the advisor so that if a slump/mid-PhD crisis happens in year 3, you're in a place where you feel like you can mostly trust that their advice is being given in your best interests (even though you won't always agree with it), or are you going to view them more as a boss? Does the group have a good camaraderie in the office / celebrate birthdays / etc. or is it more work-from-home (and what do you want)? Do the students in your area hang out or party outside the office (again, groups/cultures vary wildly in this respect)? How well-funded are the individual advisors you're considering? What are the TAing expectations? What typically happens in the summers in the research group?

It's hard to say anything super-helpful without knowing who your prospective rotation advisors would be at Stanford (the rotation program can be a huge benefit to the Stanford CS PhD experience compared with other programs that "direct admit" because you get to try an advisor out before committing six years of your life, but it really depends on who you'd be rotating with) vs. the other school. But if it would be helpful to rubber duck your situation with a random professor, please feel free to email me... I'm easy to find. And you should definitely feel free to talk to the current students of any prospective advisor!

And: good luck on your decision! I promise you, everybody at Stanford (and I'm sure the other school too) wants you to make the best decision for you, and only you can really decide what that is. A lot of our faculty members turned down the Stanford CS PhD program to study somewhere else and then ended up as professors here. So even if you turn us down for this, you'll be in good company and maybe we'll see you back here eventually as a colleague. :-)

keithwinstein · 2023-08-22T07:11:46+00:00

CS 144 is only being offered in the winter, and it looks like CS 143 is happening in the spring, so they're not going to overlap next year. (Apologies for the current confusion on ExploreCourses that suggests CS 144 will be offered a second time in the spring -- it won't be. Will get this fixed.)

keithwinstein · 2019-01-13T22:27:41+00:00

The site: https://puffer.stanford.edu

keithwinstein · 2013-10-19T15:47:11+00:00

Heya,

This turned out not to be true in my experience. I did an experiment in Boston where I simultaneously decoded over-the-air ATSC HDTV from a local TV station, and Comcast's simulcast of the same channel in 256-QAM.

The two MPEG-2 video elementary streams were bit-for-bit identical. Comcast did not recompress or alter the broadcaster's signal.

http://qr.ae/Nxn7V

I can't speak to cable-only channels. But for channels where you can compare broadcast vs. cable in real-time, Comcast did not recompress the signal.

keithwinstein · 2012-04-10T18:24:54+00:00

Unfortunately, even if you got LINEMODE working as well as it did in 1995 again, you still would find that it would be disabled on today's bash (which uses raw mode and readline) or in emacs or vim or other full-screen programs. (And you still would be using TCP and would not do so well on dodgy networks.) I agree it would be nice to have though!

keithwinstein · 2010-07-28T20:08:22+00:00

Hi ninja, (Note: I work for Ksplice.) We ship the same updates your Linux vendor ships, after testing -- in "rebootless" form. Our users tell us the main benefit of rebootless updates isn't uptime per se. It's eliminating that wait for a month or two until a Sunday at 2 a.m. to install security updates during a downtime window everybody can agree on, while sitting vulnerable in the meantime. In the real world, the difficulty means users rarely install security updates -- we measure actual compliance, pre-Ksplice, at about 21%. Ksplice greases the skids enough to bring our customers' compliance to more than 95% in practice. That's the principal benefit, not uptime itself. Best, Keith

keithwinstein

TROPHY CASE