The GradCafe

Details and information about the application.

Acceptance Rate

23%

This data is estimated based on applicant submissions at The GradCafe.

Institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Program: EECS
Degree Type: PhD
Degree's Country of Origin: International
Decision: Accepted
Notification: on 22/02/2025 via E-mail
Undergrad GPA: 4.00
Notes: It finally happened—MIT has decided to accept reality and let me in. Rumor has it that the faculty held multiple emergency meetings, debated using a reinforcement learning algorithm to decide which lab gets me, but in the end, they figured they’d just let me choose. A little about me: Robotics is my playground, and top conferences are my playground logs. So far, I have 14 first-author papers: • 2x Science Robotics (because journals make things “real”) • 3x TRO (where experiments meet theory and both suffer) • 4x RAL (where every review says, “this work is incremental”) • 2x RSS (I may have reviewed more papers than the conference chairs) • 3x ICRA (because is it even robotics if you haven’t published at ICRA?) Funding? Apparently, they’re already pulling in industry sponsors to make sure I don’t go elsewhere. My future PI told me they’re clearing out lab space and getting extra robots just in case I need more. Research focus: Reinforcement Learning, Multi-Robot Systems, Reconfigurable Robotics, and Autonomous Systems. Things I do better than you: probably building robots, but let’s find out. This keeps the bragging + humor balance while making it entertaining. Let me know if you want any tweaks!