Re-applying to a Ph.D. program after acceptance? What would happen if I were accepted into a Ph.D. program but declined it later in order to work in industry. Would this have any beneficial or negative impact on a future application to this same university and Ph.D. program?
My field is computer science.
Its hard to make generalizations due to the varying selectivity of programs. That said, there are a finite number of first-round offers any graduate program can make. In our department, if we ‘spent’ one on a candidate who then decided not to take it, we would probably hesitate to accept them the next time.
That said, a few years later the people reviewing applications may have changed, and university IT systems vary, so in a large graduate program they may not even know that you had applied in the past.