FAQ for Prospective Postgraduate Students

Please refer to the Application Procedure in the HKUST Fok Ying Tung Graduate School (FYTGS) Website.

Please refer to the Admissions Timeline in the FYTGS Website.

Applications will be processed on a continuous basis as they arrive until positions are filled. You are thus recommended to apply as soon as possible.

Yes, you can still apply in the regular phase because the 2 phases are independent, and we reserve a number of quotas for the regular phase.

There are no hard-and-fast rules for admission to the MPhil program. We rank applicants based on our judgment of their background and general ability to do a research thesis. In practice this usually means that the two most important criteria are your CGA and your letters of recommendation.

Good letters of recommendation are essential. A letter from a faculty member that states he/she is willing to be your research supervisor is even better (but uncommon); one that states that she/he is willing to supervise you AND fund your studentship directly out of his/her research grants is even better (but even rarer). We want to emphasize that the CGA is not everything. An applicant with a very strong letter of recommendation might be admitted over one with a slightly higher CGA but weaker letters.

In the past most students with B+/A- CGA or above (the exact CGA varied from year to year) and good letters were accepted. The exact number of students accepted depends upon many factors including number of studentships available to the department and a forecast of the number of students expected to graduate that year.

The letters of recommendation are used to judge your ability and fitness to be a MPhil student so you should ask someone who knows you well enough to write something substantial about you, including your creativity, intelligence and ability to do research.

Your FYP advisor is a good choice. Another possibility is the instructor of any course that you did very well in (a useful `trick' is to find a course that you really enjoy and are doing well in and make sure that the instructor knows who you are as a person, not just as a name and number on assignments. One way of doing this is by asking good questions in class. Another is to go to the instructor after class and ask for extra reading material and then discuss it with him/her. Who knows; you might even find an advisor this way.

Finally, if you have worked outside UST, especially in an IT related job, you can ask your supervisor for a letter.

The current university guideline is that all full-time research PG students should be funded 12 months a year. The studentship support can come from the supervisor, the department, the school, and/or the university, and can be in the form of Fellowship, Teaching Assistantship or Research Assistantship. The support may be dependent on satisfactory progress in the PG study or satisfactory work.

We normally prefer to accept applicants who are applying for full time studies. Only in special cases as described below, will we accept part-time applicants.

For applicants to the MPhil and PhD program the applicant must already have found a faculty member who has agreed to be the applicant's thesis supervisor.

Anyone, no matter where they are from, can apply to our department. HKUST will consider the suitability of candidates to receive the PGS while reviewing their application for research postgraduate programs.

As a general rule we require that all non-local students must take the TOEFL exam. The only exceptions to this rule are students who received their undergraduate degree in an English speaking institute.

Yes, you are encouraged to contact faculty members whom you are interested in working with.

However, mass emails to the faculty are unlikely to be effective (they receive many such emails). If you would like to contact individual faculty members, please try to differentiate your email from hundreds of others: Why are you interested in his/her research? What qualities of yours make you a good student of his/hers? If you have read one of his/her papers, do you have some comments and further ideas?

You may refer to our faculty page for individual faculty members' research and contact information. You may also refer to our research themes and the affiliated labs and centers to discover more.

For further information, please contact:

Dr. Yangqiu SONG
PG Programs Coordinator
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Email: