Stefan Wild

Stefan Wild
School of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering

Stefan Wild
PhD Student
School of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering
Cornell University
257 Rhodes
Ithaca, NY 14853
(607) 254-8871 - phone
(607) 255-9134 - fax
stefan (at) orie.cornell.edu - email
Personal Page of Stefan Wild

April 2006 - Back when the ORIE website didn't have nearly as many words on it I maintained a FAQ for students seeking more information about the PhD program in ORIE at Cornell. The new website has its own attempt at an ORIE PhD FAQ but I am told the one here is still necessary and have attempted to update it. Whether you find this page useful or lacking, please send me a quick email so I can get a feel for who is reading this and how you found it (now that it's been hidden from the ORIE site).

So you got into Cornell Operations Research and Industrial Engineering?
And like me, you started looking around on students' web pages trying to get a feel for this place and then somehow make up your mind as to where you'll be spending the next X years of your life. I have finished five semesters here and so I am by no means an expert on how things work here, but I have attempted to give you a student's perspective on our department/program/school. Everything else should be available online (somewhere) on the new ORIE site. In general, PhD students here are a very happy lot and so hopefully that comes across in this dump of information. I've tried to include a little bit of everything here but the best way to find out more is to email a couple of current students. My colleagues may wish I never said this, but if they have time they'll answer your questions so that you can acknowledge them in your stellar thesis years from now...

Sid Resnick taking a rare breather

Faculty
We have about 25 active professors in the School of ORIE. The School is responsible for teaching the undergraduates (of which there are roughly 200), the MEng's (roughly 90), and the PhD's (roughly 35). The Field of Operations Research and IE consists of professors in the school and 15 (or so) professors in highly related departments (Math, CS, etc.) and any professor in the Field can supervise a PhD dissertation. With essentially a 1:1 ratio between PhD students and Field members, we have a wide array of potential advisors to choose from. The faculty are extremely approachable for PhD students and are more than willing to make time in their day to speak with a PhD student. Many professors also hang out with students -- while the weather's good we play soccer/football every Friday afternoon, and professors have been known to participate in the ORIE tennis ladder, play CUCS ice hockey, or recruit students for karate classes.
On top of all this, the faculty are a world class group. You will find leading researchers in Optimization (Continuous and Discrete), Applied Probability, Applied OR/Manufacturing, and Statistics both in the School and across the Field. Pick up a standard graduate text in a discipline of Operations Research and you should find the name of at least one Cornell Professor in the references. I will caution you that the research done in our program is primarily theoretical. Most students arrive with a background in pure or applied mathematics, and dissertations often focus less on applications than those in other programs.

CS/ORIE Ice Hockey

Students
At any given time, there are roughly 40 PhD students in the School. On average, 8 new students arrive every fall and 6.5 (6-7) graduate every spring/summer. Students who do leave the program do so on their own terms the vast majority of the time, and generally depart with an MS. This retention rate is very high for a PhD program and should not be overlooked -- if you pack up and move somewhere for a PhD program you want to know that you can stay for the duration. Presumably, the admissions standards are high enough that the faculty are content with the incoming class of students and anyone who can keep up with the work placed before them should be able to stay. This is not the case at some comparable programs.
Cornell ORIE PhD Students form a pretty close-knit community. This was one of the biggest surprises to me when I visited. Because we are all guaranteed funding from the start, there is no fierce competition for financial support, and the abundance of great faculty means that there is (predominantly) no competition for advisors. Perhaps as a result of the isolation of Ithaca, most students are socially active in the department. Many students play Bridge weekly, play CUCS ice hockey, play squash, drink at the Big Red Barn on Fridays, etc. We also have our own student organization, ORGA, which puts on picnics and other events, gets us good food at the Colloquia, and recently put a (well-frequented) ping pong table in our lounge. Students come from around the world (your letter probably tells you that) and with enough Turks graduating, it looks like the Indians will each outnumber the Americans next year. There are many campus activities (academic, social and professional) available to suit almost any interest. After the first year, students usually have enough free time to do something other than prove theorems and in the past we have had people on the figure skating and cycling teams, playing in the jazz band and classical music ensembles, running the graduate and engineering student governments, taking any number of PE/wine classes, winning televised quiz/game shows, creating a moustache gang, joining the flying club, and so on. Here are some things that I take an active part in:

CCOP	Cornell Computational Optimization Project
SR NSF Project	Professors Ruppert and Shoemaker's NSF Project
Continuous Optimization	Weekly Continuous Optimization Seminar
Fanclub Collective	Promoters of indie concerts at Cornell
CUCS Hockey	Cornell Computer Science & friends play ice hockey
SCC	The Swiss Club of Cornell

Don't be fooled by most programs' claims of how long it takes to graduate... ask the students who actually go there. Here, the median, mean, and mode times to thesis defense are 5 years (and more people take 6 than take 4). Generally speaking, almost one-third of students come in with a Master's although this (usually) does not shorten the time to graduation. This is not to say that students cannot finish in 3.5 years, it's just a rare event.

Hoola hoops at the Spring Picnic

Coursework/ Requirements
Course requirements are simpler than the information you probably received made them out to be. Students are required to take 3 core courses (630, 650, 670), 3 breadth courses (representing 3 of the four disciplines), complete two graduate minors (one outside of the Field) consisting of 3-4 courses each, and then satisfy the computing requirement. Of course you will also end up taking plenty of courses in your major area. Students are required to take 3 courses for the first three semesters. Generally students are taking courses (eg.- at least two per semester) during the first 2.5 years. You will end up taking a lot of courses at Cornell, but generally these are in either ORIE (and hence good) or other strong areas such as Math or Computer Sciences. No PhD courses are offered in the summer and so most students teach or TA undergraduate courses while doing research. A few students each year do internships in industry or at a lab.
Your first year at Cornell will be a lot of work. The "Q-Exam" consists of getting at least an A- in each of the three core classes and then completing a formal oral presentation, intended to serve as a transition between focus on coursework and research, on a provided paper during the third semester. As a result, courses are (generally) taught at a relatively high level. On average, approximately half of the incoming year have not completed the course component of the Q-Exam after the first semester, either because they have deferred courses to the third semester or they have received below an A- in at least one of the core courses. If you don't get an A- in one of the core courses, you take an oral exam on the course material before the third semester. Beyond the oral exam, students are usually consulted as to their options on a case by case basis. In rare situations, a student chooses to leave and in even rarer situations, they are asked to leave. The remaining two exams are committee-based -- you choose an advisor for each of your minors and a major advisor to sit on your committee -- and consist of an A-Exam, proposing the scope of the work and reviewing necessary background material, and the B-Exam, the dissertation defense. After the core and breadth courses, grades (as in almost any doctoral program) are basically inconsequential.

Funding, Cost of Living, Housing
When you are accepted, you are (basically) guaranteed funding throughout your (reasonable) tenure here. The size of the undergraduate and MEng programs guarantees a need for TA's and this is why your funding can be guaranteed. Most students usually receive support from a TA half the time and from (internal or external) fellowships and RA's the other half. TA's are capped at 15 hours per week (7.5 for first years in their first semester), which is less than the 20 hours demanded by some programs. Health insurance is included in your tuition and your spouse/partner/children are also eligible to enroll in this insurance. The cost of living in Ithaca is much cheaper than in larger cities and the stipend is more than adequate for one person to live off. Before you accept an offer to any program you should definitely think about the level of support relative to the cost of living. As long as it doesn't affect our future stipend levels, I will admit that most students find the level of support very comfortable (*for a single graduate student*) relative to the local cost of living.
Most students (including first years) live off-campus. Cornell graduate housing is usually pretty good (and very close), but it's generally felt that it's over-priced (unless you will not be in Ithaca for your first summer). Just as an example of rent, (before we purchased our house) I lived in a spacious house (two units, 4 people total) a ten minute walk from Rhodes Hall which housed ORIE PhD's for a decade. We paid $445/month which includes electricity and heat. There are other houses/apartments which have been in the ORIE PhD family for years, if you need help looking for housing, just email someone here or contact your fellow first years. A bus pass and athletic/fitness center pass is unfortunately not included for Cornell students. These vary in cost depending on what you want. A car is not essential since the bus system is very reliable for a town of Ithaca's size, but about half of the ORIE PhD students get a car by the time they graduate. As a result, you can usually get a ride wherever you want.

Recent Operations Research PhD's
A good indicator of your fit in a particular department may be the where their graduates end up. We now have a pretty good list of Cornell ORIE PhD graduates. This list does not include the most recent PhD's, maybe because they're not far enough along in their academic career, but here are the last three years of graduates (that I have contact with), where they went and their dissertation advisor:

Sam Steckley - Mitre Corporation, Washington, DC - Shane Henderson

Ranjith Rajagopalan - Sucker Punch Games - David Shmoys

Gavin Hurley - Goldman Sachs, London - Peter Jackson

Yuriy Zinchenko - McMaster University, Advanced Optimization Lab - James Renegar

Deniz Sezer - York University, Canada - Philip Protter

Retsef Levi - MIT Sloan School of Management - Robin Roundy/David Shmoys

Joerg Rothenbuehler - Capital One, Washington, DC - Gennady Samorodnitsky

Bharath Rangarajan - University of Minnesota, Dept of Mechanical Engineering - Michael Todd

Rommel Regis - Cornell Applied Math Postdoc - Christine Shoemaker

Soumyadip Ghosh - IBM T. J. Watson Research Center - Shane Henderson

Amar Sapra - University of Florida, Industrial and Systems Engineering - Peter Jackson

Aaron Archer - AT&T Shannon Research Laboratory - Eva Tardos

Feng Zhang - General Electric, China - Robin Roundy

Trevor Park - University of Florida, Dept of Statistics - David Ruppert

Tim Huh - Columbia University, Dept of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research - Robin Roundy

Chek Beng Chua - University of Waterloo, Dept of Combinatorics & Optimization - James Renegar

Paul Hyden - Clemson University, Dept of Mathematical Sciences - Lee Schruben

Greta Pangborn - St. Michael's College, Dept of Computer Science - Leslie Trotter

Ganesh Janakiraman - NYU, Stern School of Business - John Muckstadt

Catalina Stefanescu - London Business School - Bruce Turnbull

Vardges Melkonian - Ohio University-Athens, Dept of Mathematics - Eva Tardos

On Peter Jackson's sailboat

Ithaca
The greater Ithaca area (Tompkins County) is home to about 100,000 people. Since you got in, you know that this is significantly smaller than cities like Boston. In my opinion, there's still plenty to do here and you may not need the distractions that come with a big city. That said, Ithaca can be cold in the winter (although not lately). It goes without saying that every year we drive the south Indians to buy thick jackets before they see their first snowfall. Here you can find historical weather data for Ithaca. As you can see, you avoid the extreme heat/humidity in the summer, enjoy the leaves changing in the fall and then get hit by an east coast winter.
Ithaca is also known for its gorges so we enjoy a plethora of outdoor activities including hiking, biking, sailing, swimming, skiing. Restaurants are ample in number and variety and independent films are shown nightly at three different cinemas. Ithaca College is located on the south hill and contributes to the college town feel. The town atmosphere is very liberal/leftist (Ithaca has its own currency) but large chain stores have moved into the area in recent years. Ithaca has an airport (generally expensive on short notice) serving Detroit, NYC and Philadelphia daily. Also within an hour are airports in Binghamton, Syracuse, and Elmira. Buses (Shortline, Cornell, and Greyhound) leave for New York City several times a day and range from $50-$80 round trip. The outskirts of New York City are three hours away, and then another .5-2 hours into Manhattan depending on traffic. I usually end up going to NYC or some other "nearby" city (Philadelphia, Washington, Boston) 3-4 times a year.

Good luck making your decisions!
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About Me
My research is in continuous and numerical optimization. My advisor is Christine Shoemaker and we are currently investigating optimization of expensive functions, especially in the context of difficult bioremediation problems where derivative information is often unavailable. I am supported by a CSGF Fellowship from the DOE and will be spending summer 2006 at Argonne National Lab. I began pursuit of the PhD at Cornell ORIE in the fall of 2003 and passed my Q-Exam in the fall of 2004. Before coming here I received Bachelor and Master's degrees at the University of Colorado-Boulder in Applied Mathematics. I recently got married and my wife is an attorney in Ithaca with Guttman & Wallace. We recently bought our first home in Dryden, 10 miles outside of Ithaca.

Some more useful links:

Avalanche - WICB (Ithaca College Radio) - Colorado Applied Math - Cornell Daily Sun - CornEll Libraries - Fanclub Collective - Ithaca CraiG's List - (Cornell Hockey) ElynaH - Ithaca Show Syndicate - Ithaca Journal - Cornell PunK Society - Living in Dryden - Movies (Cornell Cinema) - COIN OR (Computational INfrastructure for Operations Research) - ORIE Faculty - PhD Students - Cornell Applied Math ColloQuium - Lynah Rink - Swiss Club of Cornell - Cornell ORIETennis Ladder - Uportal - Video (colorado Eng Coffee Cart) - Webcam (Duffield) - UniX Online Reference - Cornell TheorY Center - ETH Zurich

Colleagues from Cornell ORIE:
Tuncay Alparslan	Pascal Tomecek	Anke van Zuylen	Frans Schalekamp	Peter Richtarik	Sam Ehrlichman	Chandra Nagarajan

Colleagues from Colorado Applied Math:
Saverio Spagnolie	Tye Rattenbury	Karl Obermeyer	Alejandro Cantarero	Darin Gillis	Jesse Larner

Sexy Pants Hot Carl I love Rose Warner