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: 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!)
There’s something very wrong when I had not heard of the school and would not have sent any sort of correspondence. And that’s a difference I would like to keep from my undergraduate applications.
As an incoming undergraduate, it’s my responsibility to find schools I’m interested in and contacting them. I was competing for attention against millions.
As an incoming grad student, it’s different. Universities know who I am (or more accurately that I am a female science student) and are contacting me.
The second difference is the focus of the letter. This one focuses a lot more on money compared to the Berkeley one. And I am very confused as to why. I am a PhD student in the sciences; I expect my academic career to be paid for by the university I choose to attend. For a full graduate career, I should be researching and it is silly to expect me to give a university IP without being employed.
