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. See more details through CSPicks
  • 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 (see Places below)
  • 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).
  • Learn more about the research strengths of GMU CS through CSPicks, which is developed at GMU CS.
• Faculty: 84 total (36 tenured, 21 tenure-track, 27 term)
  • 38 new faculty (27 tenured/tenure-track, 11 term) during Covid ('21–'23)
  • 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
    • 10 Fellows (ACM, IEEE, etc)
    • 32 NSF CAREER and Young Investigator Awards
  • Many affiliated faculty from non-CS departments
  • Always expanding
• Students (as of 2025)
  • ~200 Ph.D.
  • ~1100 M.S. (this is quite big compared to most other schools, 200 of them are in Software Engineering)
  • ~2600 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 (Herndon 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)
  • Johns 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 Northern VA, according to Niche'22's Best School Districts in Virginia
  • E.g., Arlington (1), Fairfax (2), Loudoun (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 congested 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 was the first university campus in the US to launch Starship autonomous delivery robots, in January 2019 (initially 25 robots, the world's largest campus fleet at the time)
  • fleet has since grown to ~60 robots, and has completed 458,846+ deliveries (as of Jan 2024), traveling 474,225+ miles
  • most popular item ever: Steak 'n Shake's Original Double 'N Fries, ordered 15,779 times
• The Zotero reference manager was created at GMU's Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media
• Two GMU economics professors have won the Nobel Prize: James M. Buchanan (1986) and Vernon L. Smith (2002)
• VA was ranked the most patriotic state in the US by WalletHub (2026 study, based on military enlistment/veterans, voting, and volunteering). VA was also officially designated a "Purple Heart State" by the General Assembly in 2016
• 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
• Naval Station Norfolk, Norfolk, VA is the world's largest naval station
  • 4,600+ acres, 14 piers (~11 miles of pier/wharf space)
  • home to 75+ ships/submarines and 130+ aircraft; serves as headquarters of the Atlantic Fleet
• The Pentagon (Arlington, VA) was the world's largest office building for over 80 years (~6.6M sq ft) — until India's Surat Diamond Bourse surpassed it in 2023
• VA is a top-5 state for the wine industry
  • 5th in the US for both number of wineries (300+) and wine grape production; the industry generates over $6.4 billion in economic activity (2022)
• 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.
• The 469-mile Blue Ridge Parkway, winding through Virginia and North Carolina, is the longest linear park in the US ("America's Favorite Drive," 15M+ visitors/year)
• Appomattox, VA is where General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant, 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 help us flourish, e.g., largest university in VA).
• GMU is the youngest independent university to hold the R1 research designation in the US (became R1 in 2016).

Other stuff

Useful Links

• GMU Stats and Figures

Standard Tests Waiver-Eligible Countries