HassE

Well lets face it. Very few students get any type of financial aid in graduate school, so if you have loans and bills to pay, then how do you expect to pay them when your in a master's program gaining no salary paying 75k for it? First things first, you really need to decide how dedicated and devoted you are to this. You come from a top-5 electrical engineering program, surely someone will accept you. MOST importantly for you, you said the GREs are the last of your worries, but if anything, that should be your biggest worry. You have a low GPA, but you come from a top school. Your GREs could either make or break your application. If you do exceptionally well on your GREs and come up with a very good statement of purpose explaining what you want to do and briefly why your grades your bad and how you've improved, you have a very good chance to attend a very good school. For your masters, letters of recommendations rarely count, if they read them at all. Now don't go applying to MIT and Stanford for your MS, but lower tiered schools and I think you won't have a problem. There's no way you can contact an old professor or adviser and see what your chances of being accepted into Gtech are?

Straight up Sabdo. Theres nothing to worry about. Even after that one rough semester, you still have a very high GPA in engineering. Graduate committee will see you have nearly a 3.5, and if they even inspect your transcript, they'll see that you have a 3.8 your last two years. They only care about the last 2 years anyways. You have nothing to worry about UC San Diego is what maybe the top-5 school in Cali for engineering as well?

FINALLY....just heard back unofficially from USC about an accepted offer. They sent me an email this morning, should be getting the official packet in the mail sometime next week. Anyone else hear back?

i woudlnt retake it. You have a high GRE score, and rarely does the admissions committee look at the AWA score especially for engineering majors. 3.5 isn't that low either. I'm a US Citizen and I only got a 4 on mine.

Listen, you guys are nit-picking this way to much. Stanford is a very large school with a large engineering department. They are also one of the best. The point is they can accept a large number of students and need to fill sits. For most Ph.D students, they are going to reserve the funding (RA/TA) for them. It's called a cash-cow because as mentioned, it's a big school and they need to fill these seats. No one is saying getting accepted or attending Stanford is easy. It is very difficult to get get accepted into Stanford, but just not to the same degree as other top-5 schools. To the OP, if you plan on attending Stanford, plan on attending Stanford from your own pocket. The odds of you getting funding from Stanford for your MS is very unlikely. Like mentioned, there are plenty of other unfunded students hoping to do the same, and there isn't enough funds to go around. If somehow you are funded during your MS, then congratulations, but it won't be common. To the person who said why don't they accept nearly all of their applicants: Stanford is a large reputable top school. They clearly do not have the seating capacity, nor do they want to accept unqualified students to their program either. Remember there are plenty of "smart" engineers out there applying to graduate school. Do you want them to accept every student? Where would they put them all? Clearly, this is not what we mean by a cash-cow. It just simply means that, they know people want to attend Stanford. So it you want to attend, you can fund your own way. If you can't afford it, they know theirs hundreds of other well-qualified applications that would be more than happy to fund their own way. It's simple. Why fund a student if they have others begging to fund themselves? This is the definition of a cash-cow. To conclude, as one of my engineering professors once said, "Engineers should be funded through graduate school". Plain and simple!

your correct. A salary should not be the main driving force. I only know US schools, so I can only advise in terms of them. Outside schools i'm not sure how theyre ranked or respected. Don't go just for the money, but if your torn and can't decide, remember it's about 5-7 years. A higher salary when you are already excited about the school will make those 5-7 years a little more manageable.

As one of the other posts said, if you plan on going into teacher, you really only have one option, US schools. If we're talking about US schools, there is absolutely no reason you would choice UIUC over USC, so you can throw USC out the question. I've never heard of a graduate student getting paid $50,000/year, so that is an amazing offer. Normally US schools give you generally about the same. I would double check that USC fellowship, very rarely are they up in the $30,000, UNLESS you mean all year around, Fall/Spring/Summer semesters, then this is plausible. California is one of the highest places to live (especially LA, where USC is located) so take that into consideration, I'm not sure how the other schools fairs in terms of expenses and locations, that is important information. Here's my straight up advice. If your looking to become a professor, you really only have one option UIUC. However, if this is not your main goal, I think it would real hard to turn down your offer from the school who would be willing to pay you $50,000, especially since you could visit your family often. Goodluck

Those are very good universities especially the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois, some of the top in engineering. The rest are all very good schools as well. I'm not trying to discourage you, but the likelihood of you getting funding from any of those schools in an MS, is less than rare. You really need to graduate from MIT with a top GRE, with research experience, with high GRE scores, and do an MS thesis. Normally all funding is reserved for Ph.D candidates regarding of how well your profile is. It's still very well possibly and likely, but since Michigan and Illinois are top 10 schools, don't count on it there. As far as you being admitted, I think all of these schools you have a very high chances of admitted.

Anyone heard back from USC yet? Anything? This is horrible, how do they expect students to wait this long when other schools have gotten back MONTHS ago!!

What exactly are you talking about then? I think a lot of us here are interested including myself.

I can list 100 good universities, however only you know exactly what your looking for. Take a look into rankings to get a better sense of where the school stands and if its above or below your standards. As far as funding goes, for a MS student it is extremely rare (but possible) to get funding. I don't have any actual statistics behind it, but i'd say maybe less than 5% of MS students are funded through either TA/RA, the rest is all for Ph.D students. Some universities flat out tell you theres no way you can get funding for MS. So, this is just a headsup to start looking for external scholarships, etc. If you narrow down your school list to a reasonable amount, put them up here and we'll gladly advice you as to which school would be a good fit.

I'm not sure if you specifically mean "transfer" out of the M.Eng into the PhD by not graduating with the M.Eng or by completing the degree. If you mean transferring out of the M.Eng degree, I wouldn't specifically advise it. It would definitely be possible, but my best advice for the greatest chance of admission would be to do exceptionally well at the M.Eng and then apply for the PhD. Your recommendations would be from Cornell Professors, your courses are from Cornell, if Cornell wouldn't accept their own kind into their program, then it doesn't speak to much of their masters program. I know an M.Eng is normally a professional masters. I'm not sure how long or how many semesters/courses you've done on the M.Eng, but i'd suggest switching over to the Master of Science degree with Thesis option. If you complete the MS degree you'll have research experience which MOST IMPORTANTLY you can have research under your belt and actually meet your potential PhD Advisor. When I spoke with the dean of engineering at the University of Michigan, I asked him about entering into the PhD program after the Masters and he told me it honestly doesn't matter about your GRE scores or about your actual GPA. If a professor goes to him and says he's willing to fund this student, not many people are going to disagree and reject you. Take that into consideration especially since your already at the school and can meet and perform research for these professors from now.

I can only speak as a student entering a PhD program in electrical and computer engineering. However, my theory is that although I have heard of that many times, I feel its just the opposite. The problem is that you just spent 4-5 years doing research aka "your baby" that doing anything else other than what you've been doing is uninteresting. At least thats what my biomed professor said. He had to give up his research and post-doc research to do completely non-related stuff. Unless its really a low-entry job, I see the only that will hurt you with the qualifications is that you'd be demanding so much money. Otherwise, what company wouldnt want to hire a PhD engineer and pay him like a entry level. This would be a disadvantage for us. This is why most PhDs go into the research route, they become experts and gain experience through that route, then they become Chief Technology Officers(CTO)/Lead Senior Principal Engineers/etc etc The CTO at my prior company, had his PhD and his MBA, was an older fellow but was working at a research lab then just kept moving up the chains to director positions and CTO positions- the ultimate highest position an engineer can be at the executive level while still actually doing technical work.

If your talking about using magnets to creating a spinning motion by using the earths gravitational pull to complete this continuous rotation, it's going to be a lot harder than you might think. I've already discussed this with my professor and he said the earths magnetic field is much to small to create anything significant out of it. Not saying it's not possible, but will involve significant amounts of research to create large enough magnetics that can actually generate some type of power. I'd start looking into Superconductors and using the magnet as the superconductor.

There are MANY MANY MANY people that will disagree with what i'm about to say and please bare with me as I try to explain my philosophy on this. As I have similar interests as you do (just in Electrical Engineering not entirely in Biomedical Engineering) The short and most typical answer? A master of science or a master of engineering will be sufficient enough for you to get where you want to go. The long answer and the route I plan on taking? Lets take a look back at about 20-30 years ago. The most common degree back then was what? An associates degree? MAYBE a bachelors degree? Once you held a "college education" you were considered "smart" and "educated" because you have a college education. However, very quickly those same people that still only hold an associates or bachelors degree are what now? Not really up to the level of education that many of the students coming out of college today have. The only way these lesser educated people succeed is because of their many years of work experience. Now let's take a look at today's society, getting a bachelors degree in today's society, is a great accomplishment, but eh it's only okay. Your not really considered "the cream of the crop" nor with just a bachelors degree today can you really hold any high level position in both the engineering or the business environment. A masters degree today seems like what everyone has or is striving to get. The guy on the cooking channel even has a masters degree from yale, i think a master's is the standard today If we take a look at the future, 10-20-30 years from now, will a masters degree be sufficient then? My guess, is you'll be lacking or at the bottom of the list. You better have darn good work experience to compensate and compete with others who have a PhD and nearly as much work experience. The point that I'm trying to make is, right now today a masters degree will allow you to be nearly head of your department or group in designing devices for medical use, but will you be that confident that your resume will be as attractive if you say lost your job in 10-15 years? That's your call. You said in your original message that "I know for sure that I want to end up in the forefront of medical device industry". How can you be on the forefront of the latest cutting edge technology if your not involved in the research stage at some point of the game? Even if it's the research division inside your work industry? I mean let's face it, every engineer is also a researcher once in a while, because well were creating something from scratch that hasn't been done before (or at least you haven't done it before). If you also want to be top of your engineering group, you'd want to hope their are no PhDs in your engineering team. Would be pretty tough to promote an MS as Lead Engineer over the PhD candidate, maybe that's just my opinion though as well. A PhD research does not have to be theoretical research. It can very well be practical research. For instance, if your research advisor is researching some new biomedical device that will better be able to see cancer (or whatever), you will need to perform theoretical research, but also practical research to acquire data from it. My professor at my Institute graduated from the University of Michigan with a PhD in Biomedical Engineering. Part of his research was create an extremely small circuit and chip (that was fully fabricated) and was then cut and attached inside of a mouse. Data and information was then captured from it. I'm not sure exactly what it did, but bottom line, he was in the lab most of the day playing and researching with actual components and hardware that was based off of his research. To answer your last question on the Doctorate of Engineering, i'm not sure there is such a thing of a doctorate for the industry. A doctorate means you are an expert in your field. An expert is someone who invented or created (researched) something new and contributes to the field of engineering. I know for instance MIT offers two doctorates, a Ph.D and a ScD. A doctor of philosophy and a doctor of science. Both degrees are exactly the same and require exactly the same. Do what feels best though. Any more questions, feel free to ask. Once again these are just my opinions and how I thought about this whole PhD road. Plus the added benefit of a PhD for me is when i'm sick of working that typical 9-5 job (or should I say 7-6, as engineers tend to work crazy hours) you always have the fall back option of becoming a professor at a university. Not saying it's easier, but the environment is most definitely different. More doors more options?

The quick typical answer? Depending on how your GPA is, your GRE scores, your research experience, etc...yes I think you have a very great chance of being admitted. However, the most likely scenario is almost every department has breadth and core courses they want their students to take. You might know one category in ME, but chances are you'd be lost in all the other topics that they might want you to take. Worst case scenario? They make you take a couple ME courses and MAYBE make you do an MS in ME. My suggestion? If you aren't planning on it - and it's still early enough - i'd highly recommend doing a MS Thesis. Taking extra courses especially when you plan on swapping majors will do you no good. Proving to a school that you can and have actual research? Now your talking. You have something they like and want.

wait so you have about a 3.8 GPA and you have a perfect 800/800 GRE score? That has to not be common at all. With that GPA and GRE scores how were you not accepted into any PhD programs? What PhD universities in the US did you apply to?

Hey guys, I know quite a few people here have an MS degree. As i transition off to the MS/PhD route, I want to know how the MS/PhD classes are? Is there a major difference from the BS senior classes to the MS classes? any advice for success in these classes? thanks

I AM STILL WAITING. It's horrible how USC is making us wait this long. I already committed to another university, but still curious what it will be from them. They said it can still be months they'll make us wait.

Ya, I was thinking the same thing about the TA/RA, they made it clear to me about that which made me choice otherwise. In terms of jobs, sure theres jobs there, however, the vast majority of the "big companies" are going to be elsewhere, but don't let that think you cant still find a good company there. In terms of the drug scene, i'm not to sure (dont go there) however the drug scene is everywhere in every school. Like you said, this is a grad program your going to so your classmates will not be part of that group.

If you like the city, Providence is very nice. Its only about an hour away from Boston as well and maybe 4-5 hours away from New York. The people there can be nice, but many are and can be jerks at times as well though (just like everywhere). It is Brown - an expensive school - so expect snotty stuck up rich people, depending on your financial status they might look beneath you, however the people at USC might do the same anyways. I can't speak for Brown, but I was told flat out by the directors that there was absolutely no chance whatsoever for any student to receive a TA/RA at Brown for a masters program. They made this very clear to me, which what detracted my attention away from Brown. In other wards, do not expect to receive any financial funding from Brown. At least at USC, you'll have a chance to do it - although others might get it before you.

I only know US schools and not Canadian, but to put it in perspective, I applied to 11 different schools for the Fall 2011 semester. Two schools or even 4 does not show how desperate you are to get out that company. My best advice, apply to as many schools as you can afford and most, with that GPA I would be looking for low low ranked schools or even nonranked schools to increase your chances of admittance. Otherwise, I would just start taking graduate engineering courses at a nearby university where you can then reapply again and prove to them you have and can handle the graduate workload. goodluck

I think you have a VERY good chance of getting into a top-40 PhD program for chemical engineering. You have a BS/MS in the core of all engineering fields MATH. Your level of math well exceeds the level of math that an engineer has, however you have absolutely no true chemical engineering courses. Most likely what you will need to do is once you get admitted into your PhD, the school is going to make you do a masters in chemical engineering before your "officially" admitted into the PhD. Once your admitted into the PhD the MS courses should be paid for so it's not like you'll have to pay again. You have a MS degree, you have a perfect score on the GREs and you have a perfect score from your MS degree, whats stopping any school from accepting you? I see nearly nothing. Your lack of research experience will be supplemented when you do your MS degree (they might make you do a MS-thesis) or maybe not.

this is a tough one...anyway you can be a "special student" and start taking some courses at the school your at? My best advice is to possibly get on with a research program and start gaining experience with a research gig, although that won't be particularly easy either though.

my suggestion, go to cambridge university. Iowa state does not compare in any way to Cambridge U