As everybody knows, research experience helps in one undergraduate's admission to a PhD program. It would be even better, if the undergraduate has a publication out of his or her research experience.
However, for a full-time undergraduate, it is quite difficult to devote too much time to research since one still has the school work to deal with. (Maintaining a high GPA is also important, isn't it?) Given the time limitation by this or other reasons, the undergraduate may face the following dilemma.
The quality of work is low, but the undergraduate has no time to improve it.
Should the undergraduate publish it to a random and low-tier conference to at least have a publication?
OR
Should he or she just make it a technical report instead of publishing it?
In other words, during the PhD admission, how do the admission committees or professors view a low-quality conference paper? Do they take it as an advantage in the sense that most of the undergraduates have none. Or do they start suspecting the student's research potentials? Does a low-quality "1" win a "0" in this case?
FYI, the field of interest is EECS, but any generic comments are also very much appreciated!
Answer
If the quality of the work is low, the student should neither publish it in a lower tier conference nor publish it as a technical report. They should either make the time to improve it or toss it in the trash. A bad publication, no matter what venue it's published in, is worse than no publication at all.
Similarly, a "publication" listed in a CV or described in a statement of purpose that isn't retrievable via google (unlike most technical reports, which are googlable) is also worse than no publication at all, because we can't tell if the applicant is lying. (Sadly, some applicants are lying.)
No comments:
Post a Comment