---
tags: InGenius
---

# Meeting Report for Grace (Apr 1, 2021)

## Summary
- Introduction
- Education background
- Research/work experiences
- Skills
- General academic interests
- Expectation for Advisor
- Help construct an initial planning (timeline)
- e.g., when to take GRE, when to start connecting with professors for potential collaboration, etc.
- Help identify academic interests and relavant experiences needed

## After-Meeting Feedback
- General comments
- Grace has a strong and competitive background.
- As I see it, Grace's previous CS-related experiences is mostly on the "*engineering*" aspects of research projects, like writing pipelines, applying existing framework, data analysis, etc.
- Detailed suggestions
- Top PhD programs (especially in AI) are more *research*-driven, rather than engineering-driven. To enhance the background, Grace could consider to do more *research*-driven work (meaning that you should make innovations, like identifying new problems or providing novel solutions to existing challenges).
- For this summer, I suggest Grace to reach out to professors to involve in some AI-related research and improve academic maturity (we could talk more on this later). By the way, it usually takes about one year to publish on top conferences. Although publication is not a must to get into Top PhD programs, be aware that your competitors can often have two or more publications.

## Assignments for Grace
- Reconsider what is your core motivation for applying to PhD programs
- Find several sub-areas of AI that you are interested in (e.g., object detection, bias and fairness study, etc.), and make a summary. Specifically, try to answer the following questions:
- What are the major directions (research focus) in this/those subarea(s)?
- What do you think the major challenges are?
- What are the future directions that you can think of?
- We could start to find suitable professors/research labs for you afterwards.