Hunter R. Rawlings III Cornell Presidential Research Scholar (RCPRS) program?

fsharp
Fri, 03 Apr 2015 06:42:09 +0000

Congrats to everyone here who got into CPRS. My daughter also made it. She’ll be a CS major in CoE. Cornell was her #1 choice (ED). We’re also still trying to learn more about this so additional insights are more than welcome. Here are some impressions so far:

On the Research spending account (RSA) – Although CPRS doesn’t require you to do research in your major, 8K isn’t all that bad especially if you’re doing research in CS? It should cover machine time on the cloud (AWS?), books and journals, trips to conferences, even data collection experiments should one need to hire volunteers. It’s not like you’d need buy chemicals, specimens, and all that fun stuff. Mostly it’s just designing algorithms on a whiteboard, and coding them away. The biggest chunk of the 8K might come from summer accommodation, and they allow you $3.5K for 8 weeks. To OP’s question, whether 8K is enough or not is briefly addressed in the CPRS FAQ in the handbook. Apparently, it works for most people, and when it doesn’t, one’s mentor can usually find a way to compensate.

On the program itself – It appears this isn’t merely a badge of honor that you’re entitled to carry once you’re in. There’s work to be done to remain in good standing. That means keeping a 3.0 GPA (no easy feat at Cornell), 6-12 hours/research per week (this must add up in a hurry), at least one semester of summer research on campus (unless you make other arrangements and apparently CPRS scholars do more), tons of faculty and peer interactions, etc. The fact that they have all these conditions can only mean this is a serious structured program that’ll help develop great research/inquiry skills, and prepare you for grad school (if that’s a goal). It also seems to be very selective and there were only ~40 freshmen chosen in 2013 (Got this info straight from the Spring 2014 newsletter). That’s around 1% of the students who enrolled that year.