foo23

This certainly isn't what you want to hear, but here is some raw feedback:

You need to seriously work on your personal pitch. It sounds like the projects you've been involved in haven't gotten off the ground, and it comes through that you don't really have valuable expertise that you bring to the table.

Either 1. become an expert at something 2. start coding or 3. get a job that most companies/startups have a need for:

- find an IT job at a startup, often these help out with engineering or writing internal applications

- Move into operations (i.e. setting up machines, systems, administering backend systems and applications) for a company that has a massive number of servers (like facebook, google, rackspace) or is in the process of scaling (twitter?, digg, etc).

Those two positions can be used as a springboard into dev jobs, but if you can get your projects to launch, you're going to learn far more from those experiences.

When reading your app, professors are trying to tell one thing:

Will this person be a good academic researcher? To figure this out, they will look at:

1. Can you already do research? If you've published at academic research conferences, they'll read your paper and judge you by it. If you have good recommendations from people they trust, or are known in their field, they will read those and rely on them heavily. Otherwise they view your application as a crapshoot (why would they want to take on a student they're not sure will succeed?)

2. grades, programming abilities, and other things are all secondary. If they pass the bar, that's good, but they're not going to get you in.

My advice: get a programming job working in a research lab, then apply to places the people you're working with have worked with before. Look at MSR (Microsoft lABS), Intel Research, and Google. Otherwise go to a startup.

Really? Surely you have figured out a more productive use of your time at 38. Phds are really good if: - you're young, have found a subject you're fascinated with and are willing to live and breathe every day or - you are absolutely sure you want to be a professor and can do top notch research

but otherwise it'll be a long time until you're able to payback the lost opportunity costs of being in grad school (no career advancement, little pay), since other than being a professor, it's unlikely having a PhD will get you any different job than before (if you're in CS).

(I was a PhD student at a top 3 cs program and left for a startup years ago)