Information for Students

Information for Students

Admissions

If you have already applied for admission, you have done all that is required to gain full consideration for admission and financial support.

It is not possible for faculty to provide an individual assessment of your chances of admission to our department.

In particular, students are not admitted to the department by research project directors, so contacting individual faculty has no effect on your chances of being admitted.

I would encourage all students with GRE scores above 1350 and GPA scores of at least 3.5 (or top 10% of your graduating class) to apply.

Doing Research

My research is in the areas of:

· Computer Graphics (real-time, rendering, visualization, hardware accelerated algorithms) [CG]

· Virtual Environments (interaction, rendering, avatars, and real-world applications) [VE]

· Human-Computer Interaction (interacting with digital characters, virtual worlds, 3D interfaces) [HCI]

· Image Based Rendering (combining vision with graphics, vision for VR, capturing real-world data) [IBR]

If you are not interested in these areas, please contact a faculty member that shares your interests!

If our interests coincide, please drop on by. I’ll give you a project to work on for 1 month. At the end of 1 month, we’ll evaluate progress. If things go well, you’ll be invited to join our weekly group meetings.

Preparation

Students should have had course work or experience in computer graphics, virtual reality, visualization, human computer interaction. Students should be strong C/C++/Java programmers.

General Advice

If you are an undergraduate or MS student and want to apply for a Ph.D. program (here, or at other places), you should become involved in research *NOW*. A senior project, MS project, or MS Thesis is a good test to see if you really enjoy and have talent for research. It will also improve your chances of getting accepted into a good Ph.D. program.

Please note: A good GPA is not enough for a highly competitive (top 20) graduate school. The acceptance rate is usually around 10%. Everyone that applies has at least a 3.5!

Undergraduate Research

Undergraduates looking to work on undergraduate research are very welcome to apply. Sophomores and juniors are excellent candidates as they will have sufficient time to learn and contribute to the team. Minimum time commitment is one year. Starting research in your semester of graduation is too late.

Financial Support

Fall 2008: I have an opening for Fall 2008 for 1 RA position. I am interested in having undergraduate students working on projects. However, I have no funds available to support undergraduate students (domestic and abroad) this semester. This might change in Fall 2008. If you are interested in getting involved in undergraduate research without financial support, please contact me.

A graduate student who wants financial support must first:

Take one or more courses in (CSE4370) Computer Graphics, Virtual Reality, Computer Vision, or Human Computer Interaction. You should finish in the top 10% of the class.
Do an Independent Study, Senior Project, MS Project, or Thesis in Virtual Reality with me

I generally do not reply to email from a prospective student who does not specifically indicate having done these things. Here are examples of letters I receive but routinely ignore. (From David Banks):

Here is an example letter worth responding to, because it indicates that the student is serious.

Here is a dream letter from a student that I would be happy to support.

This page was inspired by/shamelessly cannibalized from: David Banks (FSU - dbanks@cs.fsu.edu), Larry Hodges (UNCC - lfhodges@uncc.edu), Fred Brooks (UNC - brooks@cs.unc.edu)