Eight Thousand Miles to Illinois

Prelude

I am typing this nearly 8,000 miles away from my very own home, the everyday space where I belonged for 25 long years. Sometimes it feels dreamy; sometimes it feels like a strange combination of seclusion and solitude. Above everything, I feel extremely blessed to be here and grateful to the Almighty.

I received many notes asking me to share my Ph.D. journey and application process. I had been extremely lazy about it, partly because I never felt that I was accomplished enough to give “advice” to others. But now I am finally wrapping up everything I faced from end to end, beginning with my slightly “lunatic” decision to apply for Fall 2026 while I was still an undergraduate.

How It Started

My Level 4, Term 1 finals at BUET ended in the second week of November. I sat silently at my table and began laying out every plan I could imagine for the next six or seven months, when I would hopefully graduate. I sorted the possibilities, weighed their pros and cons, and scored them against my present portfolio.

On 16 November, I decided to apply for Fall ’26.

Life had been too harsh for the previous four years, so I found myself thinking: what else should I lose except money?

The decision immediately created a problem. I needed to sit for IELTS as soon as possible. With university deadlines approaching, the window was extremely narrow. I booked the exam for 19 November, leaving myself only two or three days to prepare. I was stuck, and honestly, I knew I was gambling with luck.

I dared to sit for it anyway.

Three days separated the decision from the test. Sometimes a journey begins before you have time to feel ready.

IELTS, TOEFL, and GRE

Most universities require international applicants to demonstrate English proficiency through IELTS or TOEFL. In the United States, both are widely accepted, although requirements vary by university, program, and even by individual section: Reading, Listening, Speaking, and Writing.

I chose IELTS because of its broader portability across countries, even though I eventually applied only in the United States. In general, strong Reading and Listening scores make it easier to raise the overall band. A higher Speaking score can also make teaching-assistant eligibility easier at some universities. Still, there are often ways to meet TA requirements after admission, so I would not describe any single speaking score as an absolute rule.

I had shared my IELTS resources with a friend, who later organized them into a useful guide. You can find it here. Because my preparation time was so short, I could not properly practice the Writing structure and barely crossed the margin I needed for Ph.D. admission.

But the gamble worked this time.

As for the GRE, it was optional at every school to which I applied, so I did not take it. I cannot comment confidently on programs where it may be mandatory. I have also heard of applicants using a strong GRE score to compensate for concerns about CGPA, but I did not experience that first-hand.

Letters of Recommendation

I received my IELTS result on 21 November. Once I knew I was eligible to apply to my intended schools, I turned immediately to letters of recommendation, which I consider one of the most important parts of the entire application.

I contacted professors with whom I had worked closely. During my undergraduate years, I collaborated remotely with Dr. Min Xu at Carnegie Mellon University and Dr. Ben Lengerich at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I believed they could write highly specific letters grounded in our work together. I also requested letters from three professors in CSE at BUET: Dr. M. Sohel Rahman, Dr. Md. Shamsuzzoha Bayzid, and Dr. A.B.M. Alim Al Islam.

The famous name on a letter matters less than many applicants imagine if the letter itself is superficial. A low-confidence or generic recommendation from a globally renowned professor can backfire. What matters is whether that professor knows your work well enough to write about you in a detailed, niche manner: your particular contributions, your research habits, how you handle difficulty, and how you work with others.

Most U.S. Ph.D. programs I encountered required at least three letters. I sometimes chose different recommenders for different programs. If I applied to a program strong in Health AI and named faculty in that domain in my SoP, I tried to include recommenders who had supervised my Health AI work. There is no hard-and-fast rule here; I followed my intuition about alignment.

A few practical points from my experience:

• A professor may ask you for a first draft and then revise it independently, sometimes after consulting co-PIs from the project. You cannot see the final version submitted to the portal.
• Portals generally ask whether you waive your right to inspect the letter. My strong recommendation is to waive access by selecting “Yes.” Committees often treat waived letters as more candid and credible.
• Send recommendation requests through the portals early. Your recommenders need time, and you do not have to finish the entire application before inviting them.
• Some portals ask recommenders for ratings in addition to the written letter. This makes it even more important to ask people who can assess you confidently.

Statement of Purpose

After arranging my recommendation letters, I began writing a separate Statement of Purpose for each university. The SoP is another central part of the application.

The fewer unrealistic and vague statements you make, the more convincing the document becomes. Your motivation for research should connect from beginning to end, revolving around one central idea throughout your journey. That was my strongest impression while applying.

Do not involve multiple unrelated domains at once. It can make your Ph.D. interests appear unfocused.

The most irritating part of the SoP was identifying professors at every university whose work genuinely aligned with mine. I had to go manually through department and faculty websites and prepare those lists. Yes, I know what you are thinking: it would be a thousand times easier if a web agent could sort prospective professors for each university. It is very possible now, and you can try it before you start applying. I simply did not have the time.

For reference, I am sharing the SoPs I prepared during my application season. I did not ultimately apply to every university included there, but the collection may help you understand how I shaped the flow for different programs.

Mailing Professors

This topic confuses many applicants because the value of emailing professors depends heavily on the program.

You will often hear about two broad admissions models: professor-driven and committee-based (or central). In the first, an individual professor or principal investigator has substantial influence, often tied to available funding. In the second, a faculty committee performs an initial review before applications reach potential advisors.

Most programs I applied to appeared to be committee-based. From conversations after arriving at UIUC, I came to understand the central process as a long sequence: a very large pool is screened, a smaller group receives detailed faculty review, promising applications are circulated to faculty in the relevant research area, interviews follow, and recommendations eventually return to the graduate admissions leadership. This is only my informal understanding, not an official description of UIUC’s process.

Professor-driven programs may involve fewer layers, with a PI’s research fit and funding capacity playing a more direct role. Regardless of the formal model, I think it is reasonable to email professors before applying. It may matter less in central admissions, but it can be crucial in professor-driven programs.

I had mostly chosen central programs and started preparing emails only around 25 November, painfully close to deadlines beginning on 1 December. If I could repeat the process, I would prepare a list of professors and email addresses much earlier.

How can you tell which model a program uses?

There is no single open book that tells you. You may get hints from how faculty respond to prospective-student emails, whether students rotate through labs, and how the department describes advisor matching. Based only on my application experience, I suspected that the CS admissions processes at schools such as MIT, Stanford, CMU, UIUC, Cornell, Princeton, USC, UW–Madison, the University of Washington, NYU, Georgia Tech, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Duke leaned central or committee-based.

Again, do not treat this as an absolute list. Departments change, and different programs within one university can work very differently.

The email structure I followed

My emails were direct: I introduced myself, focused quickly on my publication record and research alignment with the professor, and attached or linked my latest résumé, SoP, and website.

CV, Résumé, and Website

There are no hard-and-fast rules for building a CV, résumé, or academic website, but each plays a meaningful role. One of the first things a PI may inspect is the applicant’s résumé.

A CV and résumé are not quite the same. A résumé is a focused, two-to-two-and-a-half-page summary of your portfolio; a CV is a longer and more comprehensive record. For applications, I generally preferred a concise résumé. An admissions committee has a bulk of files to review, and an unnecessarily long document can distract from your key strengths.

You can view my application résumé here.

I would keep the portfolio website simple as well. Academics often prefer a plain, clear structure that lets them find research, publications, and contact details immediately. I visited many faculty websites and noticed that most followed a modest base theme. My own site, of course, is the one you are reading now.

The Deadline Sprint: 1–15 December

I tried to complete and collect every major component before 30 November. Somehow, I finished on exactly 30 November. Then I began opening portals and submitting applications.

I focused mostly on highly ranked universities in the United States. To understand the landscape, I consulted both U.S. News graduate CS rankings and CSRankings. Their methodologies are very different: U.S. News combines multiple institutional measures and reputation surveys, while CSRankings is based on faculty publications at selected venues. I treated rankings as one input, not as a substitute for research fit.

In total, I applied to roughly 18 universities, mostly through central or committee-based processes. Remember that a single university may host several graduate programs with very different research emphases and acceptance patterns. CMU’s School of Computer Science, for example, includes programs spanning machine learning, computer science, HCI, and computational biology.

Health or computational-biology speocific programs may also ask for grades in relevant biology or health courses. For CS programs, you don’t need to give any sepcific course GPA in the portal. I encountered no portal that specifically asked for class rank except CMU’s CPCB program. Most requested the overall CGPA and transcript.

Be cautious with time: completing one university application properly can take four or five hours, sometimes more. Leave enough space before the deadline to review every field and document.

Once the last application is submitted, take a breath and relax.

Then the intense waiting begins, along with the suffocating uncertainty. I am sorry to say it like that, but that is what it is.

The Interviews: Mid-January to Mid-March

The first hell phase was the waiting: recklessly refreshing my inbox and spam folder again and again. The most horrific part was that all my undergraduate classes, labs, exams, and other responsibilities were continuing at the same time.

For the central programs, an interview invitation may come from the university, a lead PI, or a professor whose lab you named. That email would be the first real sign of a possible destination, and waiting for it was extremely suffocating.

Then came the interviews themselves.

In my experience, the first round usually introduced the PI to my background, research experience, and publications. If the conversation goes well, generally a second round is called by the same PI/ another PI. I was sometimes given research papers from the lab or from top-tier venues and expected to discuss them deeply in the next meeting. I prepared slides, studied the assumptions and methods, and tried to anticipate every possible question.

The interviewer PIs prepare questions in order to assess you during the interview. Whatever the difficulty, you should be able to answer with confidence and honesty. Superficial knowledge will not carry you through a technical interview, so there is not shortcut to it.

I will allow myself one small flex: after reaching UIUC, I was told that I had answered one interview question that none of the other candidates had even fully understood.

An occasional third round may ask for a research idea aligned with the PI’s lab, although this was rare for me. Most of my interview processes involved around two rounds (However, USC CBB programs called me for 4 rounds of interviews with 4 different PIs), but there is no universal pattern. The structure varies by program and PI.

I am sharing one set of slides from my interviews for reference.

What earns an interview?

Fortunately or unfortunately, that remains a black box. My personal guess was:

LoR ≥ Publications > CGPA > Competitions > Other extracurricular activities

That is only my stipulation. I received roughly 15 interview rounds across MIT, UIUC, UMD College Park, Dartmouth, USC, UVA, UC Riverside, and UMass Amherst. I was fortunate, and I feel blessed by the Almighty. In my case, substantial research experience, a decent CGPA, publications, and very strong recommendations from faculty at highly ranked universities probably mattered most.

After the interviews ended, the second phase of suffocation began.

The Decision

Final decisions arrived from late February through mid-April. By then, I was so exhausted that I sometimes thought I would never apply in the United States again if I did not reach one of the schools I hoped for. The process took a serious toll on my physical and mental health.

At the same time, I was organizing DL Sprint 4.0 for CS Fest while keeping up with class tests, assignments, and regular university classes. I worked harder than I knew I could. I wish I carried that kind of ability throughout my life. Most importantly, I was blessed by the grace of the Almighty to hold everything together at once.

The situation for international students felt especially difficult that year, and decisions seemed to arrive later. I waited, waited, and entered what felt like a never-ending loop.

From my UIUC interview, I had received hints that an offer might come.

Then, on 16 March, I received a rejection from UIUC.

I felt frozen from feet to head. It was Laylat al-Qadr, the 27th night of Ramadan. There was nothing I could do except pray to the Almighty.

After a while came an almost unbelievable message: the previous email had been sent by mistake, and my application would be placed under review again.

So another cycle of waiting began. This time, I barely had the strength to carry the stress. I simply waited for the days to pass by any means.

Finally, on Chand Raat, the night before Eid (21 March), the precious email arrived: I had been accepted to the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

I did not scream with joy. I went quiet for a while, told my parents, and let the truth settle in: that day had finally come.

Gratitude to the Almighty.

The days afterward were smoother, except for the stretch between my visa interview and approval. I later received offers from UC Riverside and the University of Virginia, which I declined after choosing UIUC.

I feel heavenly blessed to have drawn a dreamy conclusion to this “pathetic” journey.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do grades really matter in CS Ph.D. admissions?

I am not completely sure. For highly ranked, committee-based programs, I suspect grades may be used as an early screening signal, but I cannot verify a universal cutoff. In professor-driven programs, CGPA may matter less when an applicant demonstrates strong research experience. Either way, do not assume grades are irrelevant; they are one part of a broader research profile.

What kind of research experience matters most?

For AI/ML-oriented CS applications, a main-track publication at venues such as CVPR, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ICCV etc. can boost an application enormously. Strong Q1 journal publications also matter. From my interviews, I felt that one excellent, highly relevant paper can sometimes make an applicant more competitive than several minor or weakly aligned publications.

But this is not absolute. Venue, authorship, contribution, recommendation letters, research fit, opportunity, and luck all interact.

Should I complete a master’s in Bangladesh first, or apply during undergrad?

It depends on the competency already present in your portfolio. There is always a trade-off between applying early and using a master’s degree to build deeper preparation. The right choice depends on your research readiness, life priorities, and personal timeline.

My preference was to begin the Ph.D. early. I knew I wanted it for the research, and I felt that moving forward while still in the flow of study would be most convenient for me.

How much money should I prepare for the application and relocation?

This is one of the most practical parts of the journey, yet it is also one of the easiest to underestimate. Based on my application cycle, I needed roughly USD 90–120 for each university outside California. For universities in California, the total expense per application was generally higher, at approximately USD 180–220.

The application fees are only the beginning. Before traveling from Bangladesh to the United States, I strongly recommend arranging a minimum of BDT 7–8 lakh. This preparation fund should cover the visa-related fees, plane fare, initial house rent, security deposit, essential household items, and the other accessories and unexpected expenses involved in settling into a new country.