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I'm an undergrad student in computer science. Throughout my undergrad studies, I did a few projects trying to solve problems that interested me. This necessarily meant something novel had to be done, although small advances early on and larger advances in more recent projects. I've shown my projects around to a few professors and was recommended to write a paper on the projects and submit it somewhere; however, I always pushed it off as writing the paper would interfere with actually doing the next project and I assumed I would do it later.

I am now applying to graduate school and have been informed that, while the projects are indeed good, it will not come off as such because I have not written papers on them; given how easy it is to lie about this and the relative difficulty of coming up with these methods, the signal/noise ratio is too low and so it will be discounted. To clarify, I'm not claiming that these projects are each solving major unsolved problems of the field; I'm just proud of what I have achieved and would like it to be actually considered appropriately.

Given that I only have 1.5 months until graduate school application deadline, is there any way to fix this issue?

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There is no fix to the issue that works in a time scale of 1.5 months. A typical research paper probably takes 6 months to write, even if most of the results are already there, primarily because (i) it takes time to actually write 15-20 good pages, and (ii) one always realizes in the course of writing that something isn't quite right yet, was correctly understood, or for which one has the appropriate references to cite.

Then there is also the issue of publication. In most fields, one has to expect that it takes at least 6 months between submitting a manuscript to having it accepted for publication (and then another 6 months for it to actually become part of an issue of a journal that is "published"). This can be cut short by posting a "preprint" of the article on a web site such as arXiv, though publication there does not carry the same kind of prestige as something that has been published in an actual journal.

In summary, I'm afraid you left it for too late. That doesn't mean you shouldn't work on this -- it will always look good on your CV in the future, even if it isn't of much help right now!

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  • Is there any way to add a note or something so that the projects are actually considered and not just thrown out of consideration by the committee?
    – yjx78903
    Oct 15, 2021 at 17:59
  • You can (and should!) always mention it in your essay. The question is how much weight that will be given. There is a difference between someone tinkering with a toy idea and getting something published in a professional journal. Oct 16, 2021 at 1:10

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