Note to Prospective Students

Thank you for your interest in the CIS department at UAB, and in the topics of my research. There are many exciting opportunities in progress in our department and within the SOFTCOM laboratory, and we hope that you can take a moment to browse through our brochures or Web pages.

I frequently receive unsolicited emails (sometimes, several emails a day!) from students who are writing to me asking for financial support and to comment on their chances of admission. Here are some general guidelines and suggestions that I will follow as a reply to such requests:

1. If you have already formally applied for admission, you do not need to do anything else in order to be considered for admission and financial support.
2. It is not possible for faculty to provide a detailed individual assessment of your chances of admission. The potential volume of such requests would make it impossible for us to individually respond to everyone. In the CIS department, a faculty Admissions Committee reviews all applications, ranks the applicants by overall merit. From this ranking, individual admission and financial support decisions are made. The quality of the applicant pool and the quality of your application are the primary factors for this decision process.
3. Information about the types of support offered within the CIS department at UAB can be found at: http://www.cis.uab.edu/graduate/financialaid.php
4. A list of Frequently Asked Questions about applying to our department is at http://www.cis.uab.edu/graduate/faq.php
5. If you are asking about TEACHING ASSISTANTSHIPS, I am not the person to ask. Such positions may be available for you, but I am a new junior faculty member and not in the decision making process for deciding who gets those assistantships. So, please do not ask me to comment on your ability to get a teaching assistantship - I am clueless. Please apply through the regular admission channels in order to find out about the possibility of teaching assistantships.
6. If you are writing to me about supporting you through a RESEARCH ASSISTANTSHIP under one of my grants, please consider the following:

• My preference always will be to fund a Ph.D. student over a MS student. A doctoral student is here longer to help me with the research and my investment in training them to work on a grant has more long-term benefits. Most MS students are only able to devote 6-9 months of their time to research, as compared to a few years for a doctoral student. This is not to say that MS students will never be funded on one of my grants - it may be the case that opportunities arise. But, keep in mind my bias toward doctoral students.

• Those students that will be selected for a research assistantship will always be those students who have taken one of my classes in the targeted research areas. If I have never met you or observed your skills, I am not going to financially support you without you first proving to me your desire and abilities. There are already many students that have gone through my classes that could be selected as a pool of candidates. The exception to this rule will be to those students who have evidence that they have already done work in the targeted research areas (e.g., show me a paper you wrote on the topic).

• If you have visited my web page (or the web pages of other faculty members at UAB and other schools), found out my research areas, and then simply pasted those into a form letter, please understand that I find such a practice to be distasteful. I can easily tell when someone is taking a "gunshot" approach and writing to anyone just to find support, versus those students who truly have an interest in my research areas. In fact, our FAQ (see the bottom of tp://www.cis.uab.edu/graduate/faq.php) states that faculty consider such unsolicited emails to be SPAM.

This certainly does not mean that I am unwilling to work with you on research ideas, or to help you find a thesis topics; these statements refer only to those requests that are made to me for financial support.

Thank you for your interest, and best wishes in the admission process and future graduate studies.