Intelligent Vehicles and Systems Group

How do I join the group?

Thank you for your interest, and the fact that you are reading this FAQ makes us much more interested in you! We typically receive about 500 requests a year from students we have never met but who are interested in joining the group. Here's the standard template:

*******

Respected Prof Sean Brennan,

I am (name) from (location). I am currently finishing my (fill in class standing, usually senior or MS student) year. I want to pursue a (fill in the degree) at your esteemed university in Mechanical Engineering. I am currently ranked (some low number) out of (some high number) at (a university), which is the most prestigious out of (some region).

Please find attached my profile with this mail. Please let me know if I am eligible to apply for this program.

Awaiting a positive reply.

Yours sincerely

********

While this makes our team feel quite popular, we honestly do not have time to reply to even a small fraction of these requests. But these emails are also hollow in that they do not indicate awareness of what students are asking, what students want of us, nor what the students should do within the constraints of the admissions process.

With this in mind, we try here to answer the most common questions. If we see these in student emails, we will most often simply ignore them so that we can continue doing very cool work.

Will you accept me as a student?

Individual faculty do not make admissions decisions, nor do faculty typically "force" a hire of a student. Dr. B does not ever ask that a particular student be admitted to sidestep the admissions process.

How our process works is as follows: there are a selected number of faculty who review applications for all admissions based on the number of total open Research Assistant and Teaching Assitant positions - usually about 40 to 60 per year - reported by the faculty. And the admissions are made accordingly. Faculty then meet with these students, usually in February to March, and we honestly then compete to hire them.

Thus, the most difficult part of the process is to have a distinguished application such that you can be admitted. For domestic students and students at Penn State, this usually means that you are within the top 10 to 20% of students by GPA and at the same time are active in research (as demonstrated by publications) and/or activities (internships, student leadership positions, etc.). For international students, this means typically that you have research experience and are at the top of your class.

Will you fund me as a student?

Let us review the common question: will you support me financially? As one can see from the admissions process, nearly all students have full funding for our graduate program, and indeed sometimes we do not have enough students for all our funding (yes, this happens).

But where does this funding come from? A student asking to be supported by a faculty member is asking for support that, on our research project budgets, is roughly $100k a year per graduate student. For a PhD student that may take up to 5 years to finish, this corresponds to roughly a half million dollars in financial support and many hundreds of hours of interaction. This money is not "free"; it takes me about 3 to 4 months of late-night proposal writing to support one student's degree.

Now consider: what type of person would agree to give away such time and money to someone who simply writes an email? But more importantly, if a faculty were to offer this to a student without serious inquiry about their ability to succeed, could one trust such an offer? Our experience is that when people are giving out large sums of money in unproven circumstances, that this is usually indicative of a very negative work environment, the funding may not be real, or it may be revoked at any moment. It usually takes us a year or more to understand a sponsor's needs and gain their trust in order to get funding. To use this trust wisely, we expect commesurate efforts from those wishing to join the team.

Instead of an email, our team needs real proof that you are worth our time and funding, especially since it must be taken from someone else - including our own support - to be given to you. Your proof is illustrated by efforts to be involved in our work, to meet our team, and to be present physically with us. And this may not be easy for you; by necessity we may need to ignore your messages. We are busy because we do good work, and interrupting that work hurts us. You may have to travel far to arrive here. But know that nearly all on our team also made these efforts.

What type of student or skills are you looking for?

We are ALWAYS looking for great people to join our team. And if someone is good enough, we will go to great efforts to make a position appear. We generally hire about 3 to 5 students into the lab each year, and usually we are looking for PhD students. Our perfect recipe for a student involves:
- 1 bag of problem solving abilities.
- 1 heaping handful of teamwork skills.
- 2 cups of peer-reviewed publications.
- 1 stick of sensor fusion, vehicle dynamics, or model-based estimation/control skills, depending on the project flavor. 2 sticks are even better for most projects.
- 3 tablespoons of mechatronics experience.
- A dash of image processing, database development, or similar programming spice.
- ROS programming truffles, if in season, as these are quite rare!

Ingredients that spoil the recipe: we don't often consider or hire students that are doing model-free automation work. This includes fuzzy methods or fuzzy control, neural networks or ANNs, etc. It's not that these approaches are bad, but it is that we are seeking to create experts in real-time, physics-based automation algorithms that are verifiable and can easily be re-tuned for safety-critical implementations. Model-free methods are generally a very poor tool if verification and re-tuning is frequently required.

What are my chances, and can you help?

Our process at Penn State is set up where faculty are not meant to individually influence the overall quality of our program, and thus students MUST gain admission into our program based on their academics alone. The ratio of applications to admissions is roughly 2000 : 100, so getting admitted is the hardest step. An applicant must have amazing GRE scores, an outstanding GPA, good letters, and (for PhDs) a good publication record. And again, faculty have almost no influence on whether a student is accepted to the MNE graduate program, so don't ask the faculty for acceptance decisions!

The good news is that, if you are accepted, the department almost always guarantees some sort of funding for your first year, and sometimes more. This gives you plenty of time to meet great faculty personally, decide if you like their research, and be hired into their group as RAs. In special cases, it may make sense to get started on your RA position immediately and thus you should start contacting faculty as soon as you have an "accept" letter. But before then, sadly, faculty will have to ignore you just due to the absurd volume of unsolicited E-mails from prospective students.

To get our attention AFTER you've been accepted, e-mail me. And SAY you have been accepted! We do read these, but still might not have time to respond until the interview window begins around February.

AFTER you are accepted to Penn State, and to help place new students in the group, we often request that students submit a skills/interests evaluation which can be downloaded here . Note that the typical student scores 2 of 5 on most categories. We made the scale very hard so that we can really quickly identify when applicants are truly exceptional in one particular area (and this is indeed very rare).

How can I become more "visible" as a prospective student in your group?

One of the best ways for us to get to know each other is to take one of Dr. B's classes. This allows us to become familiar with your work and get to know you as a person. Another great way is to volunteer your help to some of the team's current graduate or honor's students.

To inquire about joining the group, also do not be afraid to email the grad students too! They often introduce new members to the team.