What are my chances of getting into a Masters program?

[silver abyss]

Hey all, I’m wanting to transition into graphics by doing a Masters thesis on a topic in the field. I want to try to apply this year (mostly Canada + US universities) as I’m looking to start asap, but I’m worried that I won’t get in to anything because I’m still early in my learning and don’t have a portfolio of completed projects. I decided to commit to this in the last few months after job searching for a while and disliking my current prospects.
My Bachelors is in EE, and I didn’t have a focus on SW at the time so I didn’t take any graphics classes in undergrad, though I didn’t even know about graphics at the time. I’ve since been working full time for a few years (and will continue to until I’m accepted) in a role that is unrelated to graphics. I’ve gotten advice from friends that if I’m clear about my interests and intentions in my Statement of Interest, it should be fine for the transition but I’m still apprehensive about it.
So my question is should I even bother applying this year? Or should I wait another year, do some more self learning and get a better portfolio before applying for next year?

[stuck drum]

What are you gonna lose by applying this year?

[keen bloom]

i'd say around $150-200 canadian dollars

may be more for foreign students

[silver abyss]

Yeah application fees are pretty expensive, roughly $150 per school, some more

Also lots of my time and others time writing up my app and their recommendations

• I’ll need to disclose that I’ll be quitting my job in the near future as I’ll need my supervisor as one of my references

I suppose I could still apply this year, but just feeling super stressed about making the Dec deadlines

[dusk pilot]

@silver abyss I just started my CS master's here in Canada (umontreal) and I did my applications around this time last year. So I can provide some advice at least for Canadian schools, but I can't speak much about US schools (since I never applied to any)

Absolutely the most important thing is that you contact profs that you'd want to work with before you even start applying. For one thing different profs have different expectations about how knowledgeable they want you to be in your desired research field; some are fine if you have a general interest, others heavily prefer that you have specific interests (even simply saying "I'm interested in global illumination" could be considered too vague to them). In the case of the latter category, obviously this doesn't mean that you have to be coming into the program with a whole thesis in mind; they just want you to have a somewhat concrete idea of which topics interest you and which don't.

It's also worth pointing out that some schools don't require you to choose a supervisor before you start. For example, uwaterloo (where I did my bachelor's) does require it, whereas umontreal doesn't (although having a supervisor before you start is still beneficial).

Another very important thing is funding. As far as I know in Canada, most (if not all) full-time research based masters/phd programs require that your supervisor pay you funding. This is nice since it means you won't have to stress as much about money; although in practice the funding is quite minimal - it's certainly enough for food+rent+etc, but you won't be living as comfortably as regular full-time pay. On the contrary, what this means is that profs might not be able to take you as a student if they don't have the money for it. This actually happened to me with two different profs at uwaterloo; both would've been happy to take me, but they just simply didn't have enough money to give me funding (most prof funding comes from government grants, etc. which get renewed every few years; if they don't have money for new students then they typically just have to wait until their grants get renewed). That being said, in some cases where profs don't have adequate funding for you, you can sorta work around it if you can get scholarships of some kind (NSERC, etc), but these are generally competitive so it's not a guarantee. All this is to say that it's doubly important to contact them first for this exact reason - if they don't have the money then they will flat out tell you, and so you'll know not waste money and time applying.

Now I didn't start reaching out to profs until around mid-Sept of last year, and honestly it felt kinda late to me. Obviously things worked out fine since here I am now, but if I could've started a bit sooner I definitely would have. Early-mid september is always a suddenly busy time for profs, as the new semester just started, and profs are generally very busy depending on how many responsibilities they have outside of just teaching and research (eg. committee work, other admin stuff, etc).

Anyways, none of that is meant to discourage you or anything, it's just what I saw in my experience when I was applying. Just start reaching out to profs if you haven't already and hopefully things will work out

[hidden void]

Do you work as a Software Engineer? If so, definitely yes. Maybe you could apply to 2 schools above your level, 2 where you think you would probably get in and 2 that are below your level.
I did my MS here https://pvfa.tamu.edu/academics/visualization-program/master-of-science-in-visualization/master-of-science-in-visualization-admissions/ and some of my classmates were from Architecture, Civil Engineering, etc. I would really recommend the program, you can email them to ask these things too. It's not directly a CS program, is more Technical Art, so I had to take a few art classes too, but the main courses I chose were computer graphics. There are other good schools I could recommend if you want, but to your point, I would apply anyways, next year there could be more competition, or you never know

[silver abyss]

Thanks for the advice! This is really helpful. Did you apply based on what responses you got from the profs you reached out to? Which Universities did you end up applying to?
I’ll definitely need to start reaching out to profs now seems like

[silver abyss]

I’m not in an SE role, it’s still mostly HW but SW dev is a part of my work.
Thanks for the recommendation, would definitely take any other ones you have too. But yeah I think I’m going to try and go for it and see what happens. Can always try again next year right?

[dusk pilot]

Pretty much yeah, I applied according to what profs told me. For example, there was a prof at uwaterloo who I took 3 courses with (also happens to be my favourite prof of all time lol), all of which were on numerical methods for PDEs - which of course is also his research area. It's a topic I strongly enjoyed (even though it wasn't graphics-related) so I reached out to him, and he was one of the profs who said "I'd be happy to take you but I don't have the money to fund you".

Now I actually didn't apply to that many schools, only 3 (which I'll list below). Knowing that the applications take time and money, and given that I only wanted to do a research masters, I decided to only apply to schools / work with profs that I'd be excited and interested to work with. That is, it wasn't like in highschool where you apply to "backup" schools in case you don't get accepted into your top choice - if I wanted to go there then I applied, if not then I simply didn't.

Anyways the three schools were:

• uWaterloo: There's a prof there who I did URA (undergrad research assistant) work with, and the stuff he did was pretty cool. I spoke with him ahead of time and he said that he might be stretched a bit too thin to accept me (as of right now he has like 7 phd students, so not exactly a lot of time + funding money available). In any case though he said to just apply anyway and we'll see what happens.
• uMontreal: The same URA prof recommended me some profs in Canada who do similar kinds of research as him, one of whom is here at uMontreal (and is my current supervisor). I reached out to him and we had a video call, and he said he would be really happy to work with me (given that I already had a somewhat extensive background in graphics).
• UofT: Unlike the previous two schools (where I wanted to work with profs who do graphics stuff), I applied here for some of the profs that do research on numerical methods / computational math. There are also profs that do graphics work, but not in rendering (which is what I'm mostly interested in). With UofT's application they just give you a huge checklist of profs you'd be interested in working with, and so I selected a few. Only one of them got back to me saying she wanted to move forward with my application. She asked me to do a short review of two papers that are related to her work, and so I did. I sent them back to her and she said she would reach out to me again soon, but I never heard back from her 🙃. Honestly not really upset about it, as I only would've gone there if I was rejected from uWaterloo and uMontreal.

It's worth noting that there were a couple other schools I was thinking of applying to, but which I didn't for different reasons:

• McGill: The URA prof also recommended me someone here, but he wasn't accepting new students at the time. I think he's got like 20 people in his research group right now so that's most likely why lol.
• ETS: Again, another prof recommended to me here by the URA prof. I reached out to him but I don't remember if he ever had the chance to respond to me. In any case though I'm taking a course with him right now so it's alright. Furthermore, I could also ask him to be a co-supervisor in the future if I wanted to (the schools in Quebec are quite flexible in this way, I don't know if schools in Ontario or other provinces typically allow this).
• UBC: Similar to UofT, there were also some profs here who did numerical methods research. However, there weren't any that I was interested enough in working with such that I would've applied. Again, there are also quite a few folks there who do graphics research, but mostly on physical simulation.

[hidden void]

Yes! Sorry here's the other places I would consider:
Apart from MS in Visualization at Texas A&M, the MS in Computer Science, the professor John Keyser does Computer Graphics and he is really nice.

I think an MS in Computer Science at University of Utah could be good too, the professor Cem Yuksel is doing cool things in the field but I guess getting there could be competitive.

But since you don't have previous experience in Graphics maybe going directly into research might be too big of a jump. There are programs in games development that have some graphics but also other areas (like the visualization program I mentioned).

I would consider the program from the University of Southern California (but that's probably the most expensive), the MS in entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon University or at University of Central Florida, maybe Ohio State also has something like that.

The University of Pennsylvania, Cornell and Brown are good Ivy league options but they are probably expensive too and hard to get in.

In Canada also look at the Vancouver Film School