Please read this note before contacting me about graduate school. It gives some specifics on our graduate admissions process. I am a faculty member in the Dept. of Electrical Engineering at Princeton. As an associated faculty member in Computer Science, I can also advise Ph.D. students from CS as well. Therefore, if you are interested in Princeton, I encourage you to apply to the department that best suits your background and that optimizes your chance for admission.
All applications for graduate admission are evaluated by the admissions committee
largely independent of the faculty the applicants have expressed an interest in working
with. Based on an absolute ranking, the top students are
offered admission. All students offered admission to the PhD
program receive fellowship support for the first year, and with good
progress, are also assured financial aid for a four year period.
Once
admitted as a PhD student, if you accept our offer of admission, you
spend the first semester largely in course work, and select an advisor
in December/January of your first year, based on a match of mutual
prof/student interests.
Thus, individual
faculty do not make private assurances of financial aid to applicants before
admission. Please keep this in mind when contacting me
regarding your interest in applying to
I receive a large number of email messages from students expressing an interest in working with me. I unfortunately cannot respond to each of these individually. Believe it or not, I receive a large number of "Dear Sir" emails from people evidently unclear on gender; if you cannot do the research to figure out that Dear Sir is inappropriate for me, then I will be forced to infer a similarly-low effort level in your engineering research.
I will however, be more inclined respond to email messages from students who evidence a sincere interest in understanding my research before expressing a generic interest in working with me. If you read one or more of my papers, and have genuine questions about them or interests in pursuing follow-on ideas, I will make every effort to respond to your message.
Good
luck with your grad applications!
Margaret Martonosi