Summary
- Current UT students should apply via Google Form
- Prospective grad students should apply to UT ECE / MechE directly
- We do not take high school students or first semester freshmen
As of Aug. 2026, I am primarily hiring the following groups of people with hands-on project experience, especially in machine learning.
Due to funding constraints, I am mainly interested in the following groups of people only if they have their own funding or are an extraordinarily good fit with the lab’s research vision.
Due to limited bandwidth, I currently cannot take on the following groups of people in my lab:
If you are a current UT student, please fill out this Google Form. The Google Form has the most up-to-date record of what projects we are looking for. We encourage you to fill out the form even if your expertise is not currently being sought. Projects frequently appear, and we will look at the form first before a broader search. All emails directly to Dr. Chin asking for a position will be ignored.
If you are a prospective postdoc, please email Dr. Chin directly with a resume and the subject line “Prospective MERGer – Postdoc” using the advice HERE. I also strongly recommend that you prepare a project portfolio. This can be a simple set of Google Slides / Powerpoint presentation where you have photos of the project, describe what the goal was and what your contribution was. HERE is some advice on what makes a good portfolio.
If you are a prospective PhD student, please apply directly to UT Austin before sending me an email. You have two options for applications:
Make sure to put my name down as a professor who you are interested in working with. This should be a direct form option for both the ME and ECE option. If this is not the case, please email me with the subject line: “Prospective MERGer – App Issue”. If the application fee presents a financial hardship, I am happy to discuss with you first about your chances of getting in. Please email me with the subject line: “Prospective MERGer – Pre-screen”
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.
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:
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.
From those interviews, I make a holistic judgement of advisor-advisee fit and make offers depending on funding limitations.
Think of talking with an academic like making music in a jam session. Jam sessions are fun casual times where we riff off of each other’s knowledge and see what new ideas can come out. However, this means we need to have some common ground before we can start making music together. If you show up to jam session without an instrument or an instrument that is different from what I’m used to, it’ll be harder for me to jam successfully with you. Make it easy and exciting for me to see how your research interests will mesh with mine.
Pro tip: Read the MERGe Lab research and publications pages to tell me explicitly which papers you like and why.
Tell me about your interests and what you want to do, not what you think I want to hear. Be as concrete as possible without falling into cliches (ex. “ever since I was a little kid, I wanted to make robots”, “robots are the future and I want to be a part of that future”)
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:
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.