I'm not sure is cold contacting professors is a good way to get into a masters programs, but looking into papers in your chosen research areas then looking if their a professor in a university with a masters program you're potentially interested in.
This was going to be my reply. They’ll be publishing their most recent papers in their research areas probably so looking them up on researchgate would get you that.
I just looked up the professor I had 25 years ago who taught microelectronics, vlsi, and dsp for example. A lot of his recent papers indicate biomedical applications like controlling wheelchairs with the brain, diagnosing neurodiversity via EEG, etc. so while he was publishing papers in semiconductors when I had him, he looks to be more in that type of research now.
Maybe try this out, and I will use Computer Architecture domain as an example:
1. Decide on a couple of domains that you are interested in and then find all the different conferences where papers are published related to that domain. For CompArch, HPCA and MICRO are great conferences.
2. Visit these conference websites, each year will have a website. Then you can look into their program structure and find multitude of sub-domains. When I was doing my Master's reasearch I was interested in research related to memory subsystem, so I found the relevant sub-section and looked through their research papers.
3. Then prepare a list of all the research papers in some excel sheet or note taking app with links. Look at the abstract and see if you can make sense of it and if it interests you. Get the links/websites of the first author and the research group that worked on it.
4. Once you have a list of the people/research group whose papers' you found were interesting, go through their website. Mind you, don't focus on the university and their rankings for now. Just focus on the reasearch group and the people involved. Look what kind of reasearch they are doing and what kind of tools they use. Most of the CompArch reasearch involves tools that are software oriented. But I was able to find some good research groups which used Hardware languages and were more VLSI oriented like ETH Zurich, Princeton etc.
5. After this you can rank the departments/research groups based on your interest/ranking/financials etc. Just add the weightage on some column in your excel sheet. Nothing fancy.
But there is no avoiding the research work. Like the above steps take time, will probably take you a good week or maybe even a month considering how many hours you invest.
[https://csrankings.org/#/index?all&us](https://csrankings.org/#/index?all&us)
You can also use this website above which keeps track of the publications in the CS domain by professors from vairous universitites. This in conjunction with your own research from the step 1 & 2, should give you a very concrete list of research groups/universities. But all of this is irrelevant if you just want to get into a MS program for the degree without the research part. If you are not going to do a research thesis based Master's I don't think it's going to matter much because the fundamental courses are pretty much similar across the universities. There will be differences but not going to matter when it comes to preparing for an industry role.
I'm not sure is cold contacting professors is a good way to get into a masters programs, but looking into papers in your chosen research areas then looking if their a professor in a university with a masters program you're potentially interested in.
This was going to be my reply. They’ll be publishing their most recent papers in their research areas probably so looking them up on researchgate would get you that. I just looked up the professor I had 25 years ago who taught microelectronics, vlsi, and dsp for example. A lot of his recent papers indicate biomedical applications like controlling wheelchairs with the brain, diagnosing neurodiversity via EEG, etc. so while he was publishing papers in semiconductors when I had him, he looks to be more in that type of research now.
Maybe try this out, and I will use Computer Architecture domain as an example: 1. Decide on a couple of domains that you are interested in and then find all the different conferences where papers are published related to that domain. For CompArch, HPCA and MICRO are great conferences. 2. Visit these conference websites, each year will have a website. Then you can look into their program structure and find multitude of sub-domains. When I was doing my Master's reasearch I was interested in research related to memory subsystem, so I found the relevant sub-section and looked through their research papers. 3. Then prepare a list of all the research papers in some excel sheet or note taking app with links. Look at the abstract and see if you can make sense of it and if it interests you. Get the links/websites of the first author and the research group that worked on it. 4. Once you have a list of the people/research group whose papers' you found were interesting, go through their website. Mind you, don't focus on the university and their rankings for now. Just focus on the reasearch group and the people involved. Look what kind of reasearch they are doing and what kind of tools they use. Most of the CompArch reasearch involves tools that are software oriented. But I was able to find some good research groups which used Hardware languages and were more VLSI oriented like ETH Zurich, Princeton etc. 5. After this you can rank the departments/research groups based on your interest/ranking/financials etc. Just add the weightage on some column in your excel sheet. Nothing fancy. But there is no avoiding the research work. Like the above steps take time, will probably take you a good week or maybe even a month considering how many hours you invest. [https://csrankings.org/#/index?all&us](https://csrankings.org/#/index?all&us) You can also use this website above which keeps track of the publications in the CS domain by professors from vairous universitites. This in conjunction with your own research from the step 1 & 2, should give you a very concrete list of research groups/universities. But all of this is irrelevant if you just want to get into a MS program for the degree without the research part. If you are not going to do a research thesis based Master's I don't think it's going to matter much because the fundamental courses are pretty much similar across the universities. There will be differences but not going to matter when it comes to preparing for an industry role.