Siebel School SRP Lunch and Learn: Preparing a Competitive Application for Graduate School and External Fellowships - Max Fowler, Aishwarya Ganesan and Lana Lazebnik 07212026

Preparing a Competitive Application for Graduate School and External Fellowships

This session will provide information, examples, and strategies for how to prepare a competitive application for graduate school and external fellowships. The session will address questions such as: What should you write in the personal / research statement? What should you highlight in your resume? Should you take the GRE? Who and how should you ask for letters of recommendation? How are applications reviewed? Should you contact professors at the schools you are applying to? How important is prior participation in research? Do awards (e.g., CRA Undergraduate Research Award) matter? 

Max Fowler

Aishwarya Ganesan 
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My research interests are in distributed systems, storage, and operating systems. I co-direct the Distributed And Storage Systems Laboratory (DASSL) at UIUC. My work on distributed storage reliability has exposed many severe bugs in popular distributed systems. Ideas from my research on corruption-tolerant replication are implemented in a financial database. My work has appeared in top systems venues such as OSDI, SOSP, EuroSys, and FAST and has been recognized with best-paper awards at SOSP 24, FAST 20, and FAST 18 and a best paper award nomination at FAST 17. I am a recipient of a NSF CAREER award. I was selected for the Rising Stars in EECS workshop and a recipient of Facebook 2019 PhD Fellowship. Previously, I was an affiliated/postdoctoral researcher at VMware Research Group. I earned my PhD in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, working with Prof. Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau and Prof. Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau. Prior to starting my Ph.D., I was a Research Fellow at Microsoft Research India in the Mobility, Networks, and Systems group. Before that, I graduated with a master’s degree from Indian Institute of Technology – Bombay. I am looking for PhD and Masters students interested in systems to work with me. If you are a student at UIUC reach out to me. If you are a prospective, please apply to the UIUC CS graduate program and mention my name in the application.

Lana Lazebnik  
I received my Ph.D. at UIUC in May 2006 under the supervision of Prof. Jean Ponce. From August 2007 to December 2011 I was an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and as of January 2012, I have returned as faculty to U of I. My research specialty is computer vision. The main themes of my research include scene understanding, joint modeling of images and text, large-scale photo collections, and machine learning techniques for visual recognition problems.

Current and former sources of support for my research include the National Science Foundation (under grants CCF 2348624, IIS 1718221, IIS 1563727, IIS 1228082, CIF 1302438, and IIS 0916829), Amazon Research Award, AWS Machine Learning Research Award, Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, Xerox University Affairs Committee Grants, DARPA Computer Science Study Group, Sloan Foundation Fellowship, Google Research Award, ARO, and Adobe.