I’m glad that you’re interested in working with me! I receive many requests for mentorship and often do not have the time to respond to each one. Read this web page for more information on how to best maximize your chance for a response.
Who Am I Hiring?
As of Nov. 2024, I am primarily hiring the following groups of people:
Current UT undergraduates
I do not take first semester undergraduates who come straight from high school
I do take transfer students and non-traditional undergraduates who are in their first semester
Current UT graduate students
Prospective PhD students
Prospective postdocs with their own sources of funding
Due to limited bandwidth, I currently cannot take on the following groups of people in my lab:
High school students
Please check out programs specifically designed for high schoolers, such as RSI, MITES, and HSRA
If you are a current UT student or prospective postdoc, please email me directly with a resume using the advice HERE
If you are a prospective PhD student, please apply directly to UT Austin before sending me an email. You have two options for applications:
Apply to the ECE department, selecting DICE or bioECE as your academic track
Apply to the ME department, selecting DSC as your academic track
Make sure to put my name down as a professor who you are interested in working with. For ECE, this is a direct form option. For ME, put my name down in your Statement of Purpose.
If the application fee presents a financial hardship, I am happy to discuss with you first about your chances of getting in.
FAQ: Which department should I apply to?
Grad admissions are siloed by department. Professors in one department can only see applicants from another department if they have special permission to see them. This means you need to know what department faculty are in and apply to that specific department. I can read applications from the Mechanical Engineering department because I have asked for special permission, but you can not assume that is always the case.
For example, let’s say you’re interested in Professor A who works in the Aerospace Engineering department. If you apply to the ECE department saying “I’m interested in working with Dr. A”, Professor A will not be able to read your application. Similarly, if you apply to the Aerospace Engineering department and say “I’m interested in working with Dr. Chin”, I will not be able to read your application.
Thus, apply to the department whose curriculum and professors most resonate with you. It does not matter what your major was in undergrad. This may mean applying to multiple departments, which unfortunately means more application fees.
How I Review Grad School Applications
I read all applications that specifically put me down as an advisor of interest. I will quickly skim through other applications in my academic tracks that mention “robotics” as a keyword to see if there are any other applicants that may be good fits.
Every year, I read about 100-150 applications to select down to an interview list of about 5-10. I spend about 2-3 minutes max on each application (and I am trying to get this number even lower). I read applications in the following order:
Statement of Purpose (SOP)
Do we have meshing research interests?
What skills do they hope to gain in grad school?
What kinds of research experiences are they looking for? Will they only be satisfied by one specific kind of project or are they open to many types of project?
Do they have the experience I need for the projects I have?
======= For most applications, I stop reading here. =======
Recommendation Letters
My criteria for a good letter is similar to this guide by MIT Undergrad Admissions. I recommend sending this to your letter writers, especially if you are applying from a non-US university.
Letters that just rehash “X was a good student. You can see because they got a good grade in my class” are a missed opportunity
Do the letter writers highlight any particularly strong technical skill sets or problem solving capabilities?
Are there any stand-out personal anecdotes?
(stretch) Do they give a sense of what it’s like to mentor this person?
======= I mainly read the below materials when I am working on my interview list =======
CV
Does their experience match up with what they claimed in the SOP?
Are there interesting pieces of background that might prove useful to a project?
Transcript
Do they actually have the technical capabilities that they claimed in the SOP?
I do not care what your home department is. I am more interested in what classes you’ve taken or work you’ve done.
Poor grades in key classes are causes for concern. Showing improvement over the years will help
(tied) GRE, TOEFL
So long as these are not dramatically lower than average, these have no weight on the application for me.
After reviewing all applications, I compile a short list of applicants and then conduct hour-long interviews with those candidates. In those interviews, I ask the following questions as a starting point for further conversation. Half of the time is spent discussing research, while the other half is spent on discussing mentorship.
What is your experience is on all levels of the robot stack (mechanical, electrical, and computational)?
What technical skills are you hoping to gain from grad school?
Walk me through a hard technical problem you’ve faced
What are you currently planning to do after you graduate with a PhD?
What are you looking for out of an advisor and lab community?
From those interviews, I make a holistic judgement of advisor-advisee fit and make offers depending on funding limitations.
Tips
Ultimately, what I’m looking for is who you are a person. I’m here to nurture your interests and if I can’t get a sense of what those are or whether they match, then we are at an impasse.
When writing your SOP, be mindful of your audience. Are you writing to just one professor in your application? If so, then what if they don’t have space? How do you think other professors who read your application will feel? Are you really committed to just that one professor or are you open to broader things?
Personal anecdotes matter a lot to me in the recommendation letters.
If the letter just rehashes what is in the CV, it’s a missed opportunity. It verifies that you’re telling the truth, but I would rather know what the letter writer took away from their relationship with you
Getting a letter from someone who you have done independent work with is really important, whether in a capstone project class, an internship or a research opportunity. This is the best chance of them actually knowing who you are as a researcher. If they can’t talk about what you were like in the lab, then I have nothing to review.
I discourage getting letters from a professor who you only know from taking a class with them, unless (a) this was a project-based class and you interacted a lot with the professor or (b) you frequently went to office hours and the professor knows you by name. Letters that don’t meet (a) or (b) tend to be fairly superficial.
The CV tells me what you’ve focused on in the past, but the SOP tells me what you’re looking towards in the future. Do not rehash what you have done in the CV except to bolster this forward looking vision.
Seeing how you write in your SOP matters more than your TOEFL score. I will appreciate it if you include other samples of English writing, including non-technical writing.
Note that I can tell when ChatGPT is used because it is not a good writer.
What I Am Looking for in a Lab Member
As a professor, my goal is to pursue my research interests by recruiting trainees whose research interests align with mine. I provide trainees with advising support (funding, space, advice, networking) so that they can accomplish their research goals. For a longer write-up, I recommend reading Section II and III of the MERGe Lab Expectations document.
This means that the most important thing I look for in a student is fit. “Fit” is a very broad term; it encompasses the following:
Research fit – are we interested in the same topics? do we ask complementary questions?
Technical fit – do we have the sufficient expertise to pursue those topics?
Funding fit – is there enough money available to pursue these questions?
Personality fit – can we get along with one another?
Communication fit – can we learn and teach in complementary ways?
The idea of “fit” goes both ways. I may not be the best advisor for you, even if we share very similar research interests. Similarly, you may not be the best student for me if we are unable to communicate. The admissions process is about both of us trying to figure out who the other person is and whether or not we’d like to work with each other for many years.
As difficult as it may be to believe, a bad advisor-advisee fit is worse than not getting into grad school at all. We will both not be happy if you are doing something that you do not like for poor pay over 5-6 years. We will be especially miserable if we find that our personalities clash too much.