Academic/Prospective graduate students

Benjamin Mako Hill maintains this page. Please do not change the message of the material on this page. Please do be bold and fix errors or other issues. It's a wiki after all!

The University of Washington Department of Communication has an absolutely wonderful PhD program. When I was considering graduate school, I very nearly went here myself. The good news for me is that — because there is a unwritten rule that universities should not hire their own students — I now to get teach here.

What I'm looking for in students

I am looking for students with a technical background (e.g., programming, statistics, and/or mathematics) and an interest in and experience in free software, free culture, or other peer production communities online. I am always interested in working with students interested in studying peer production communities to understand how and why they work. If you contribute to a wiki, a remixing community, or a free software project, if you use GNU/Linux, if you enjoy programming (even if its a mean to solving problems you do care about), and if want to become a social scientist, please considering applying to my department and getting in touch with me to let me know you've applied. It's OK if you're not an expert in this stuff yet. After all, that's why you're going to graduate school. What's important is that you can show that you're interested and able to learn.

Personally, I'm much less concerned with things like grades and test scores than I am with a proven ability to build things, to ask interesting questions, to write working code, to craft solid prose, and to make the world a better place. Of course, admission to my department is not up to me and things like grades and test scores do help your case.

Applying to UW

If you have not already, you should check out the following information about applying to the UW Communication program:

• UW Department of Communication Admissions Homepage
• UW Department of Communication Admissions FAQ

Please keep in mind that I do not serve on the graduate admissions committee. I will not be reading applications. I will not be making the first cut through applicants. I will not be making the final decisions. In fact, the only impact I normally will have in the graduate admissions process is giving feedback on students who the admissions committee has decided are likely to work with me.

My department is wide and interdisciplinary and accepts a wide variety of students with interests in doing work that spans the humanities and social sciences. Normally, I will only weigh in on students with strong programming, quantitative, and mathematical skills and whose proposed research agenda involves quantitative data science on computer mediated communication and online communities.

Emailing questions

If you have questions about the department or the admissions process you should check the material on the admission website, look carefully through FAQ, and contact the admissions staff who will be more helpful and more responsive than I am.

If you have have questions about my research or about working with me, you can email me directly at makohill@uw.edu. If I don't know you, you should introduce yourself by describing your interests, qualifications and the reason you think these are a match for my research interests and methodologies. If you don't know my research interests and methods, you should look through my academic page — maybe even read a couple papers — and try to make sure it really is a good match.

Please keep in mind that I am busy, not always awesome at email, and that responding to prospective students can often fall low in my priority queue. As a result, it might take me some time to respond. If it's been more than a couple weeks, feel free to ping me again.

Meetings (prospective UW graduate students)

Many university faculty have blanket rules against meeting with prospective doctoral students.

I personally met with both my masters and PhD advisors before I was admitted to their programs so I will always consider meeting with prospective PhD students if I'm not teaching and if time permits. That said, there are hundreds of students applying to at top department like UW Communication and many students try to contact as many faculty members as they can. It is simply not possible for the faculty to meet with every interested student.

Much more importantly, meeting with faculty not on the admission committee usually does not help an applicant's chances of getting in. If you make it past the first round at the committee level, and if you are doing work that looks extremely similar to my research (i.e., data-driven social science) I might then be asked by the committee to look at your application and offer my opinion.

So although I'm happy to meet with students, I do have a request:

Please only ask for a meeting if you really are very likely to work with me and if others reading your application will realize this. This means that either of following things should be true:

• You are interested in graduate school because you want to do quantitative data science on online communities and plan to use programming, statistics, and mathematics as the core of your research program.
• You are interested in graduate school because you want to study peer production and the production of online public goods like free culture and free software].

In either case, you should be able demonstrate a background and experience that suggests you have the skills to pull off the above.

If the above does not apply, this doesn't mean I don't want to work with you. It just means I'm extremely unlikely to be able to impact your application to the department.

Of course, if one of my colleagues at UW has referred you to talk to me, that's also good enough because it means that that they might ask for my opinion when they do make decisions later.

Meetings (admitted UW graduate students)

If you have been admitted to the UW Communication Departmetn, I'd love to talk with you!

If you don't fulfill the criteria I listed above, that means I very likely did not participate in the review of your application. However, it does not mean I will not work with you at some point in the future, teach classes that you might take, or help you try to develop and frame your research as a graduate student at UW.

And of course, If you've been admitted to other good programs, I would also love to try to convince to come to UW. I love UW and I love Seattle and I love to tell you why.