starofdawn

I would only disagree if we are including TAs. Otherwise, I haven't found a single fellowship/RA/scholarship/etc that doesn't heavily prefer PhD students. Including STEM.

I completely bombed my final exam and I'll be happy to end up with a 3.0 this quarter. I poured many hours into this class, and completely flubbed the final for lots of many stupid, little reasons. Sigh. Definitely feeling inadequate right now.

Other that doing some research (which I don't expect will take up 8 hours in a day), I plan on improving other skill sets, like learning MATLAB and LabVIEW.

I think out of all the CSU campuses, the "most prestigious" campuses are San Luis Obispo, San Diego, and Pomona, and Long Beach. I also had many friends who went to San Francisco, San Jose, Chico, Fullerton, and Northridge (but maybe that's because I grew up in LA and also lived in the Bay Area for a few years). I don't know anything about their specific Masters in Political Science programs.

GradCafe has provided a lot of insight on how to be a productive graduate student. One valuable piece of advice I learned before starting is to not let classes/coursework be your priority; research should be your priority. I have tried to keep this in mind during this past quarter. It's proven to be more difficult to implement. So many more hours of my time are devoted to coursework than to research. I know that grades aren't super important, but everyone in my graduate school classes are motivated and hard-working, the homework assignments/projects are challenging, and it seems half of everyone is not even performing research (at least not yet). I feel some more internalized pressure to do outstandingly well because I would like to talk to my advisor about switching from a MS (thesis) to a PhD track. I don't know what my question is exactly.... am I having a hard time letting go of my GPA-perfection-obsession that I had in my undergraduate years? Has anyone else felt this way when they started graduate school? Can anyone provide insight on letting go of grade-obsession? Or am I right to push myself hard to get good grades?

Your GPA is low, possibly too low for most BME programs... most of the schools I looked into had a 3.0 GPA cut-off. I checked the California State University, Channel Islands website (just to get a feel for the GPA cut-off for graduate admissions to the CSU programs) and it requires a 2.5 GPA for the overall degree, or a 2.5 GPA in the last 60 semester units (or 90 quarter units) of the degree. jetvermillion, if your latest 60 units (or 90 quarter units) is 2.5 or above, you could check out some CSU programs. Here is the Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_University) with a list of all campuses - it's possible that not all of them will offer BME Masters programs.

You're making me blush thank you!

The California State University system does not require letters of recommendation if your GRE is above a certain score (I think it was 310?). CSUs do not offer PhDs, though, only Masters. Edit: Realized I was in the SLP section! Oops - although I'm pretty sure CSU's offer SLP degrees?

Wow! Did that change recently? I remember being sad because I thought I couldn't get a PE license without a BS in engineering.

What's going on, amigo? Share your thoughts - either with us or with someone else.

I think that's your answer. I know that sometimes people know when they've found The One, even if they have only been dating for a little amount of time. My parents got married after dating for 3 months - they just celebrated 31 years of marriage last month. I was going to offer a counter-opinion and say that it's OK to choose schools based on location of your significant other, but when I re-read your post, I saw this line - and realized that I should echo what everyone else is saying. Choose the school. From your post, I think it's what you want. Good luck in making your final decision. Sometimes doing the right thing is very difficult.

I know that the Silicon Valley heavily recruits from schools in California. An Ivy League school may hold prestige to your resume, but I know tech companies in the Bay Area don't care about Ivy League prestige. My vote would be for USC. But that's my opinion and you may find that people will disagree with me. Both are great schools. Unfortunately I do not know enough about courses offered to know which program is better overall.

ERR_Alpha, I'm in the same boat. I think I did poorly on a midterm, even though I feel like I understand the material. I know this happens all the time, but when you're in the thick of it, everyone seems to be doing much better! And it's hard not to compare yourself to others, since professors compare us to each other (in terms of averaging the grade). Eigen, your thoughts are comforting. Thank you.

I think you have a few too many dream schools, I would apply to only 2. Add more schools to the crapshoot, since UT-Austin and UCSB are still top ranked for MatSci. Perhaps UC Davis, UCLA, Purdue, Rice.

There are a few California State schools that do not require the GRE, I would suggest looking into those.

Where have you read that? I would imagine AW scores are more important than verbal scores because schools need people who are good writers, regardless of concentration - that's just my opinion.

Do you have any free sick days to take off so that you can study for the GRE? I know what you mean that working full time and studying is draining - I did the same thing and my scores weren't great. But this is CMU... one of the best schools for your field! I can't speak for every school, but in my opinion: the GRE is the least important part of the application. On the other hand, CMU is a fantastic school and they will get applicants with great credentials and better GRE scores.

I can't offer advice on EE v MatSci but you should definitely replace or add some lower ranked schools in the mix. Berkeley, CMU, Stanford are all at the top in those fields and your GRE scores are a little low. Maybe try reaching out to other great engineering schools, like UCLA, Purdue, UW-Madison, University of Washington, USC, UCSD, UPenn. Everything else on your application looks fantastic, but grad school admissions are so finicky. Even if someone has perfect scores, great LORs, multiple publications, etc they could still get rejected from top schools. Play it safe and throw in some non-top-10 schools.

I'm not sure if this helps - even though your combined score for verbal and quantitative is higher on the first sitting, your overall percentage points are better on the second sitting.

Whoa! Already?!