So, I got an email from the Student Affairs Officer at UC Berkeley‘s Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences Department. It never occurred to me that Berkeley would ever know who I am; after all, this is one of the top public universities.
It’s sort of a strange perk of going to California school for an REU, I suppose.
The letter itself is odd though. As would be expected, it’s a form letter and seems to be oriented to students that are non-white and/or non-male due to it’s references to diversity student groups. By the length, whomever wrote it feels passionate about diversity, but didn’t consider that reading a page long email is a bit tiring.
Tags: diversity, grad school
[...] Last week I got an email from Berkeley. Today, Riverside contacted me. Their email is quite a bit different: We received correspondence that you are interested in our Computer Science and Engineering Graduate Program. The first place that you should check out is our website: http://www.cs.ucr.edu <http://www.cs.ucr.edu/> and see what we are all about. Second, please let me know if there are any questions and/or concerns that you may have about the program; we have students from many different disciplines: math, biology, IT/IS, physics, business informatics, electrical engineering, etc. We also have students from many different backgrounds and countries, and celebrate the diversity of our department and university! If you apply online (http://graddiv.ucr.edu) as a PhD before January 5, 2010 then you are eligible to receive a fellowship that awards an average of about *$50,000* in the first two years alone! Our PhD students are fully funded, so if you have a minimum GPA of 3.0 (in your last two years of undergraduate study) and 1100 GRE score, please apply. You too, can attend graduate school essentially FOR FREE!! We are currently accepting applications for Fall 2010, Winter and Spring 2011. Please e-mail or call us if you have any questions or would like to schedule a visit to our campus. (If offered admission to our department, we will fund your visit up to $500 for you to come out and see us in our spring open house!) [...]