Join Us

Are you looking for a research position to obtain a Master's or PhD degree or visit our lab as an exchange/visiting student? If you are interested in working in an international team of highly-motivated and enthusiastic researchers, you are welcome to send us your application and CV. The research carried out at the CSAP lab is of pretty low-level nature; therefore, prospective students should have some interest in system software, compilers, and computer architecture.

Keep in mind that members of our laboratory design, build, and evaluate systems. You should be able to put down your ideas and designs in writing. Building systems requires writing and debugging code. You should be motivated to work diligently and have sufficient experience in programming (we mostly use C/C++).

What we expect from you

More than anything, we expect you to be motivated and have a passion for computer systems, systems programming, and solving problems. Graduate school is a high investment, high reward environment; hard work almost always pays off and lays the foundation for your future endeavours. Research (and life in general) does not always go as planned, so there may be times during which we have to work hard to pull through to reach new insights and advance the state of the art in our research area. If you are the type of person who wants to push their boundaries and reach their full potential, you are very welcome to apply.

Application

If you are interested, please contact me by email (bernhard at csap.snu.ac.kr). Your email should include some evidence of past performance and a statement about your research objectives. The evidence of past performance includes a CV (2 pages at most), a transcript of your classes, and a list of 3 people who can provide information about you and your working style. We care more about the classes you took that are important for computer science; list those first.

You also need to include a statement of purpose in your application: Why do you want to get a Master's/Ph.D. degree? What interests you in computer science? What topics do you want to work on? What do you plan to do after you get a Ph.D.? If you participated in some research project as an undergraduate, then mention this fact. in your statement (and your CV). What did you learn? Why was your project interesting? What was difficult about it? What kind of programming projects have you done? You indicated an interest in software engineering -- what is your experience, building software? Please limit your statement to two pages.

Once we have established contact, you will have to go through the official application process. Check out our department's webpage on that matter: https://cse.snu.ac.kr/en/admissions

How to increase your chances

• if you have some creative ideas on how to improve existing research or an idea for a new project, include it in your statement.
• read our webpage carefully and only apply if your research interests match what we are doing here.
• tailor your application to our lab and address the recipient of your email. We do not consider mass-mailings or applications that are too general.
  If you do not address me by name I will not reply to your email.

Note: we usually do not offer opportunities for short internships, practical training, or traineeships.