Hi,
I study Electrical Engineering at a top 10 university in Latin America and will graduate in the Spring of 2018. I'll apply for the graduate programs starting on the Fall of 2018, therefore I still have, roughly, 1.5 years to improve my profile. My ultimate goal is to enter a PhD program in EE for Communications/Information Theory at a top university in the US, but since I'm an international student, I'm thinking on applying for a MS first in the US or Canada and then for the PhD program. My profile is:
- GPA: 4.84/5.00 (highest in my class).
- TOEFL: scored 110 without studying, so I think I can score around 114 on my next try.
- GRE: no score yet, but I hope to get a high score.
- Research experience: 1 year on image processing (no publications, but presented the results inside my university department at a graduate-level workshop)
Ongoing research on smart grid communications (1 first author conference publication so far, but I expect at least 1 more conference publication in the future). This research project is going to last one more year and part of it will be done at a TU in Germany (1 month internship next winter).
Will write a bachelor's thesis on my final year, which may result in publications too.
- Other experience: I've been a teaching assistant for 5 different courses, so far, and now I'm a teaching assistant for a communications course and will start developing new study materials with the professor, such as simulations, etc.
I've done an exchange program in Singapore. I took 2 courses during the summer at NTU (Nanyang Technological University) and did well on them.
How's my profile? To which MS/PhD programs should I apply? Is it too unrealistic to aim for Stanford MSEE, University of Toronto masters, Georgia Tech masters, Harvard PhD, Princeton PhD, MIT PhD, CMU MS, etc.? What can I do to improve my profile?