Prospective CS Ph.D. Students Visit UMD

The Department of Computer Science held its annual Graduate Visit Day on March 13, 2026, welcoming admitted prospective Ph.D. students to the Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Engineering. The event gave visitors the chance to meet faculty members, speak with current graduate students and learn more about the department’s research environment before making final enrollment decisions.

The University of Maryland’s graduate computer science program is consistently ranked among the top programs in the United States. According to U.S. News & World Report, the program is ranked No. 16 nationally.

Research-based rankings also highlight the department’s publication output across several fields. CSRankings.org, which evaluates universities based on faculty publications in leading computer science conferences, ranks Maryland No. 9 overall among U.S. institutions and places the university among the top institutions in artificial intelligence research and within the top 10 in robotics.

As part of visit day, the program included one-on-one faculty meetings, lab tours and a graduate student panel. Admitted students also had opportunities to interact informally with current Ph.D. students and with other prospective students visiting campus for the event.

One of the admitted students attending the visit was Despoina Kallirroi Kosmopoulou, a senior at the National Technical University of Athens who traveled from Greece to participate in the program.

“Machine learning and natural language processing are the areas I’m most interested in,” Kosmopoulou said. “I’m particularly interested in large language models, although I’m still exploring the specific direction I would like to take.”

Kosmopoulou said Maryland’s faculty research played a role in her decision to apply.

“I really like the papers from the labs I’m interested in,” she said. “There are also many faculty members working in related areas, so there are opportunities for collaboration.”

Meeting students and faculty in person, she said, helped her better understand the department’s academic environment.

“The people here are very welcoming,” she said. “Current students are willing to talk and share their experiences, and interacting with other prospective students has also been nice.”

Senior computer science major Aadi Palnitkar (B.S. ’26, computer science) also attended the visit day and plans to focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Palnitkar said the department’s research opportunities initially attracted him to UMD as an undergraduate.

“I always wanted a school that was strong research-wise and had a large computer science department to explore,” Palnitkar said. “Over the past four years, I’ve worked with several professors and written multiple research papers. When I first came here, I wasn’t planning to become a researcher.”

He said that his perspective changed as he became more involved in research projects with faculty members.

“As I spent more time doing research, I decided I wanted to continue with it,” he said. “Staying here for a Ph.D. makes sense because I already know many of the people I’ve worked with, and the department has also grown with new faculty joining, which creates new opportunities for research.”

—Story by Samuel Malede Zewdu, CS Communications