To Prospective Applicants:

The Integrated Signal Processing Group has openings for new doctoral students. If you are a potential applicant with a strong interest and background in the field, I encourage you to apply to the Electronic Circuits and Systems Program within the UCSD Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.

Each admission season, numerous prospective applicants from around the world send what are essentially form letters to prospective PhD advisors. Unfortunately, this tends to overwhelm prospective PhD advisors, and we are not able to answer all such letters. However, we do carefully read your applications, and we take the job of selecting excellent graduate students very seriously.

Pursuing a PhD is a positive, life-changing experience, but it is also a long and sometimes hard journey. To maximize your success, it is important to choose a research group that fits your interests and personality. This is critical as research groups vary widely in their research and management styles and their cultures. One way to get a sense of the research style of any given group is to carefully read one or two of the group’s published papers. This is not easy, because academic papers tend to be advanced and quite dense, but it can be worth the effort in that it provides a window into the type and style of research you would likely do if you were to join the group. Furthermore, if you contact a professor with a custom letter from which it is clear that you have spent significant effort learning about his or her group’s work, you are much more likely to get a response than if you send a generic form letter. This is certainly not a requirement, but it is a good way to stand out from the crowd.

The Links for Applicants menu on this page provides some useful resources for prospective applicants. Our Graduate Affairs Office is also available to answer questions about the logistics of the admissions process via ecegradapps@eng.ucsd.edu.

I wish you all the best with your applications and future graduate studies.

Ian Galton