canuck

Hello fellow Canuck. Both are very highly regarded as engineering schools. Pretty much equivalent. With schools of such similar reputation, the overriding factor should be who you want to work with. I mean its a long hard four years, I've heard horror stories about some advisors, while others can be so great. Talk to people get a feel for different professors. I picked my school because a) my advisor is a star he is fantastic to work for.

I got my PGS letter in San Diego last night (Friday) so the mail seems to have made its rounds. Are you sure it didn't go to a different address?

Yes you can downgrade your CGS to a PGS. There's not much of a difference for the M's, the D's you lose 14k

I'm almost completely convinced that the people behind application/scholarship process don't set firm dates in order to test your ability to endure a mountain of stress before you even get to graduate school, otherwise there would be no sane reason not to let you know in advance what day you will get notification and how. I am in San Diego, I will be checking my mailbox like a lunatic probably for the next week...

Anybody on the west coast get their results yet?

You are a freshman? Probably the first thing to worry about is learning some mathematics; you could find out you are mediocre. You should probably focus on classwork and maybe even reading some papers for a couple of years to decide that you want to be a professor at an American university. You'll have to be miles better than everyone else if you want to start thinking about Harvard.

Alternatively you could do an MS and find out that you are an utterly ordinary researcher or worse. The point is that by assuming you could do an MS and get into a better school, you have to concede that there is an equal chance you will only get into worse schools. In the end, unless you had a disasterous application strategy, you are probably only about as good as the schools that accepted you.

hooray, I was dreading a visit to the American embassy and being herded around and interrogated.

I think if you're unsure about whether doing a phd or doing a phd at UCSB is right for you then do the MASc. UBC has a great mech department particularly in fluids. Overall I think UCSB and UBC are roughly equal (according to ARWU). I know going straight to a PhD is common in the US but it is unheard of in engineering in Canada, usually MASc's are funded however.

I've read that we do not require a F1 visa. All we have to do is present our I20 at the point of entry and we are good to go. Anyone else know of / have experience with this?

I love Bukowski, particularly Ham on Rye, but I would have to say he'd be the last author I'd point to in order to expand your command of the English language. He writes about as bare and as terse as is possible.

I was actually told specifically by a professor that the department is more likely to give you funding if they think you might go elsewhere otherwise. If you accept and they think they have you regardless they might not find the need to splash out the cash.

I think theres really no question that there are very good students and very good professors at smaller schools; perhaps not world class, nobel laureate material, but very good nonetheless. However I think some of what santana is saying is very true, no matter how indelicately put his comments are. In my own experience applying to engineering programs, looking through the entire faculty directory at all the schools I applied to I could probably count the number of professors who did their PhD's out of the top 30 on one hand, maybe two. Out of hundreds of professors thats a pretty terrifying thing to realize. Even more horrifying is that probably around 50% did their PhD's in the top 10. It's a bit sad really. There are no doubt a myriad of reasons not the least of which is that a department may receive 80 applications for a single tenure-track opening. It's hard to stand out, we've all learned this from the grad school application process and it seems like it gets worse... but at least you get to do what you love.

UC San Diego, Mechanical Engineering PhD. Hooray! Turned down Toronto, McGill, Imperial College and a Cornell M.Eng consolation prize. Was turned down by Berkeley.

I mean if the schools are roughly equivalent in stature which they are you should be focusing on much finer details, like advisors and research and even if you like the city, that should be pretty obvious though.