RealGMUCS

GMU Computer Science Stats

Disclaimer: ThanhVu Nguyen created this website https://go.gmu.edu/cs-stats with contributions from GMU CS faculty members. The author’s views expressed on this website are personal and do not necessarily represent the official views or opinions of GMU or GMU CS.”

Why CS@GMU ?

• Reputation, quality, size steadily increase
  • CSRankings: 33 in ‘26,’25, 32 in ‘23–‘24, 50 in ‘22, 60 in ‘21, 70 before 2020.
  • Faculty: double in size in past 3 years (84 total, 38 were new ‘20–‘22)
  • Generous Ph.D. stipend: help recruit top students!
• Close to funding agencies NSF, DoD, NIH and industries
  • internships and opportunities for your students (or even yourself, e.g., Amazon Scholar program)
• Many generous internal (e.g., IDIA) and in-state grants (e.g., CCI)
• 1-semester study leave before tenure
• Flexible course scheduling: 2,3 days / week or 1 day / week
• On-campus living for faculty (Masonvale) and daycare for kids
• Active and helpful Slack channels!
  • questions about NSF? We have multiple faculty who are/were NSF directors / program managers
  • interested in Industrial funding? Our faculty win Amazon/Google/Meta awards every year (see Awards)

GMU Computer Science

• CS Rankings: 33 overall
  • top 25 in the last 5 years
    • top 20 in mobile computing, software engineering, security, graphics and visualization. See (CSPicks to see faculty and research strengths of GMU).
• Faculty: 84 total (36 tenured, 21 tenure-track, 27 term)
  • 38 new faculty (27 tenured/tenure-track, 11 term) during the last 3 years (i.e., during the pandemic)
  • Research in a wide range of areas
    • cybersecurity, cryptography, systems and networks, machine learning and data mining, artificial intelligence, robotics, mobile computing, natural language processing, theory, databases, bioinformatics, computer graphics, computer vision, HCI, and software engineering
  • Awards
    • 9 Fellows (ACM, IEEE, etc)
    • 32 NSF CAREER and Young Investigator Awards
  • Many affiliated faculty from non-CS departments
  • Always expanding
• Students
  • ~200 Ph.D.
  • ~100 M.S. (this is quite big compared to most other schools, 200 of them are in Software Engineering)
  • ~2200 undergraduate
• Degrees
  • Ph.D. in CS
  • MS in CS, MS in Software Engineering, MS in Information System
  • BS in CS and Applied CS
• Others
  • largest dept in the College of Engineering and Computing
  • TT track faculty, before tenure, can get a study leave semester (i.e., no teaching or services for a semester)

GMU in general

• R1 : Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity
  • $214M research spending in 2021 (federal funding in Computer and Information Sciences #19 among all universities and #11 among public universities)
• 40,000+ students from 130 countries and all 50 states
  • Largest in Virginia
• Multiple campuses
  • Fairfax (main campus, where CS dept is)
  • Mason Square (Arlington)
  • Science and Technology (Manassas)
  • Mason Korea (Incheon Korea)
  • and others
• Age: 50 in 2022

CS PhD Students’ Stipend

• GTA
  • Full Tuition / Health Insurance / other benefits typical for R1 universities
• GRA: depending on advisor but at a minimum as good as GTA (usually better)
  • For example, I pay my students about $40K/year (including summer)
  • Overhead/Indirect: 58.9% (of MTDC). In short, about $70K budget per Ph.D. student

PhD Application Info

• 2 LoRs
• GRE NOT required
• English tests through TOEFL/IELTS or Duolingo
  • NOT required for students from the US or from these countries
• Eligible for Presidential Scholarship
  • awards to 2 incoming PhD students
  • at minimum as good as GTA

Places

estimated time from GMU

• Airports
  • Dulles IAD (30 mins)
  • Reagan DCA (30 mins)
  • Baltimore BWI (1 hr)
• Funding/Gov’t Agencies
  • NSF (Alexandria VA, 30 mins): local for NSF Panel meetings
  • DARPA (Arlington VA, 30 mins)
  • DoD Pentagon (Arlington VA, 30 mins)
  • DoE (DC, 30 mins)
  • NASA (DC, 30 mins)
  • NIH (Bethesda MD, 40 mins)
  • Dept. Of Homeland Security (DHS) (DC, 30 mins)
  • National Security Agency (NSA) (Fort Meade MD 1 hr)
  • Dept. of Agriculture (USDA) (DC, 30 mins)
  • National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) (Gaithersburg MD, 40 mins)
  • CIA (Langley VA, 20 mins)
• Research Labs
  • NASA Goddard (Greenbelt MD, 1 hr)
  • Naval Research Lab (DC, 30 mins)
  • Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) (Alexandria VA, 30 mins)
  • Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) (Laurel MD, 1 hr)
  • Army Research Laboratory (ARL) (Adelphi MD, 40 mins)
  • National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (Silver Spring MD, 40 mins)
• Industry
  • Accenture Federal Services
  • Amazon
    • AWS (Herdon VA, 30 mins)
    • Amazon HQ2 (Arlington VA, 30 mins)
      • is now opened
  • Upcoming Boeing HQ (Arlington VA, 30 mins)
  • Booz Allen Hamilton
  • Capital One
  • Facebook (DC office)
  • General Dynamics Information Technology
  • Leidos
  • Lockheed Martin
  • MITRE
  • Micron
  • Northrop Grumman
  • Raytheon Technologies
  • Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)
  • and a lot more
• Cities
  • Washington DC (30 mins)
  • Baltimore (1 hr)
  • Philadelphia (2:45 hrs)
  • Pittsburgh (4 hrs)
  • New York (4 hrs)
• Schools/Universities
  • Thomas Jefferson High School (Alexandria VA, 20 mins)
    • #1 HS in the US
    • Many faculty mentor TJHS students
  • American Univ. (30 mins)
  • Howard Univ. (30 mins)
  • Georgetown University (30 mins)
  • George Washington Univ. (30 mins)
  • Univ of Maryland-College Park (45 mins)
  • John Hopkins (1:45 hrs)
  • Univ of Virginia (2 hrs)
  • Virginia Commonwealth University (1.5 hrs)
  • Virginia Tech (4 hrs)
  • CMU (4 hrs)
• Miscs
  • White House (30 mins)

Health & Life Quality & Others

• Healthiest College town
  • Fairfax, VA (home of GMU) #2 healthiest college town in US
  • #1 is College Park, MD (UMD), #3 is Berkeley, CA (UC-Berkeley)
• Public schools:
  • The top public school systems in VA are in the Northern VA, according to Niche’22’s Best School Districts in Virginia
  • E.g., Arlington (1), Fairfax (2), Loudon (3), Falls Church (4)
• Naturally Beautiful
  • stunning natural display of autumn leaf colors (Oct - mid Nov): picture taken at GMU Fairfax
  • Cherry Blossom right on campus!(and of course the national one is in DC in the Spring around March)
  • Shenandoah National Park and many more
• Also, DC has highest concentration of museums in the world
  • 70+ museums in the city

Things to keep in mind

No place is perfect, here are some of the complaints you may hear about the area

• Living cost of NOVA: 43.33% higher than the national average!
  • Median household is ~105K (US Census’22)
    • National median is ~69K
  • Fairfax median household is $125K, making it ~55% higher than national average !!!
    • likely many of your neighbors will make more than you!
• Housing
  • Median home value in Fairfax is $646K (comparing to the national median of $310K, Zillow’22)

• Traffic: DC area (which includes NOVA) consistently ranked among the most congest cities in the US

• But all of these are nowhere compared to other big cities including the Bay Area, New York, Boston, Seattle

Interesting Things

• GMU Fairfax is the first campus in the country that adopts the Starship Robots for deliveries (in 2019)
  • ~60 robots
  • completed 335,489+ orders
    • 39,828 coffees delivered.
    • most popular item is Steak ‘N Shake’s The Original Double ‘N Fries (ordered 13,637 times!)
• The Zotero reference manager was created at GMU!
• VA is the most patriot state in the US (based on Military Enlistees/Veterans and Voters)
• VA is known as the Mother of Presidents
  • 8 total: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and Woodrow Wilson
  • also known as the “Birthplace of a Nation”
• Naval Station Norfolk, Norfolk, VA is the largest naval base in the world
  • 3,400 acres and including over 100 piers and wharves.
  • Home to over 75 ships and submarines, and over 130 aircraft, and serves as the headquarters for the Atlantic Fleet of the U.S. Navy
• Home to the Pentagon, the largest office building in the world (over 6 million square feet of space)
• #5th in the US for the wine industry
  • 300 wineries and an industry worth over $1.37 billion; known for production of Virginia, Cabernet Franc, and Petit Verdot.
• Pocahontas, the famous Native American woman who played a key role in early English settlement in Virginia, was born in what is now modern-day Virginia.
• Has the longest continuous roadway in the world:
  • 469-mile-long Blue Ridge Parkway, which winds through Virginia and North Carolina, is the longest continuous roadway in the world that was designed specifically for scenic driving
• Appomattox, VA is where General Robert Lee surrendered to General Ulysses Grant, and effectively ending the American Civil War
• In the event of nuclear war, we’re close to ground zero (ouch).
• GMU started life as a UVA satellite and grew its reputation by being a basketball underdog (that’s OK, being an underdog appears to helps us flourish, e.g., largest university in VA).
• GMU is the youngest R1 university in the US (became R1 in 2016).

Other stuff

Useful Links

• GMU Stats and Figures

Standard Tests Waiver-Eligible Countries

Non-US Countries that do not have to take standard tests

https://www.gmu.edu/international/english-language-requirements