Stanford Symbolic System
Program Overview
A research-based program. For positioning, refer to MIT CSE. Symbolic Systems is an interdisciplinary program where the department expects students to be knowledgeable in at least two of the following areas: computer science, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, mathematics, statistics, communication, and education
You must complete a thesis and have research experience. Recommendation letters should ideally be research-focused.
The program places strong emphasis on diversity and expects applicants to demonstrate their contributions to "Humanities and Social Sciences."
One Rice Physics + English undergraduate with a DS minor attended this master’s in 2024–2026, interned as a Customer Success Engineer at a small company in 2025, and joined Apple’s Battery Analytics & Machine Learning team as an intern in 2026.
Admission Threshold & Data Points
External admission rate is 5%.
- Stanford Symbolic System undergrad, GPA 3.9, 3x Microsoft internships
- Rice Physics+English+DS undergrad, GPA 3.93, one publication
- Duke Kunshan DS undergrad, GPA 3.91, two and a half years of RA, two second-author papers
- Indian student, GPA 9.25, three accepted CV conference papers at time of application
- Vassar College Cognitive Science undergrad, one accepted ICCV paper at time of application