// the take
A hand-maintained list of links — blog posts, PDFs, tweet threads, podcasts — about applying to and surviving grad school, mostly in CS, NLP, and ML. It's for people deciding whether to do a PhD, writing an SOP, picking an advisor, or just trying to get through the process, not a tool or library.
The table of contents maps the entire pipeline, not just admissions: advisor selection, SOP/LoR/CV writing, but also paper writing, reviewing, rebuttals, advisor-advisee dynamics, and impostor syndrome, which most admissions lists skip entirely. Sources are mostly named professors and PhD students writing from firsthand experience (Matt Might, Jason Eisner, Mor Harchol-Balter), not generic SEO advice blogs, and several entries are flagged 'MUST READ' by the maintainer, which is a useful signal in a 200+ link list. The scope honestly matches the title — it doesn't pretend to be more than a links repo.
There's zero original content; the repo's entire value lives on external pages, and a meaningful fraction are tweet threads, which are increasingly fragile given Twitter/X's link and account churn since 2023. Last push was November 2023, so nothing here reflects the post-2023 PhD funding squeeze or the AI job market shift, both of which materially change the advice's relevance for a 2026 applicant. It's heavily skewed to US CS/NLP/ML academia — someone in a different field or country gets a thinner, less applicable subset despite the broad framing. There's no dead-link checking or dating on entries, so some fraction of 200+ links are quietly rotted and you won't know which until you click.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →