u/AdMeliora16 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Haven’t applied for any programs beyond bachelors, but did you have to ask for Stanford to tell you the specific reason for a rejection was your undergrad thesis professor’s reference?
u/michaelnovati replied ·
Ultimately academia at that level is like the startup world. A bunch of HCI professors came from Georgia Tech under professor Gregory Abowd and then sprinkled themselves across a bunch of schools, including UofT. So my professor's reference helped a lot with those schools.
Stanford at the time had Scott Klemer (who is now at UCSD) who didn't overlap much and I'm competing for a handful of slots with dozens of other people who have papers with awards from all over the world.
So I just wasn't strong enough.
I'm friends with dozens of Stanford people now (fun fact but I partied on campus with my couple-year younger Stanford friends haha).
At the time I was legit not strong enough to go there. I was too sheltered and didn't know how to have an impact on the world. I didn't understand enough about 'humans' haha. I needed more life experience.
Second, everyone there is crazy smart. I can keep up but maybe at the bottom to middle of the pack and on paper I was all "raw smarts" but I wasn't "raw smart enough" for Stanford.
Ultimately I HATED writing papers. The best paper award I got was a funny story. I did all the work, wrote the paper and a PhD student in the lab 'edited it' i.e. REWROTE THE WHOLE THING, and I realized I don't like writing papers and I just liked building stuff... which made the choice to stay at Facebook easier.
I didn't appreciate at the time what academia was. It's a living and breathing scientifically proven treasure trove of analysis of humanity that everyone is contributing to. Contributions prove tiny little things, built on top of other tiny little things, etc...
This is my paper: [https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1978942.1979167](https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1978942.1979167)
It was cited 51 times including in the past year.
I proved that word cloud + sentiment analysis can give readers of online reviews the same impression as reading pages of raw reviews.
That one thing I proved then lets other people build on top of that fact.
If academia taught me one thing it was about EVIDENCE AND FACT. And I carry that forward to Reddit today haha.