darkacai

wow congrats. Funny how u got rejected from Umich but admited to MIT

I went to the UCLA open house and they really emphasized on entrepenurship, patenting, and startups. They were like "so UCLA has all these corporate businesses" lots of funding. Professors generally hold several patents and have venture capital pay them to try to do all the neccessary experiments to get FDA approval and whatnot. All I can say is, their medical center is largest on the west coast (so they advertised) and that they have an interdiscplinary research across many engineering disciplines and medicine. Also, their undergraduate bioengineering just got ABET accredited last year so its "fairly new". And the engineering dean got alot of funding to build engineering building (1 under construction atm, bioe shares building with material science/engineering)

I am confused about comprehensive vs preliminary vs qualifying exams. What are there differences? Also what are the written & oral qualifying exams like?

I think if you haven't heard back from schools that passed out interviews, you are either stuck with MS program (unless u already hold MS) or rejected. CMU - rejected PhD, gave MS option UPittsburgh - nothing, but people received interview Columbia - nothing, but people received interview Berkeley - rejected, they spammed interview, rejection, acceptance all together UCLA - admitted "possibly" to PhD, but no interview??? RSVP for open house 3/7 Cornell - some interview, but nearly nothing Duke - applied MS, nothing JHU - applied MS, nothing I think i'm already set on going to UCLA though. even though i only got notification from 3/8 schools...

i am new at this too but, If it was me, RI@CMU. Pedigree to some extent is important if you want to continue research. Rather than performing research what other(private sector) labs tell you to do, you can perform your own for them. Maybe in short-term outcome, the research lab probably have drooling financial packages. However if you look at the longterm investment, RI@CMU can get you into the top labs no problem (#1 in world where to find?). Not sure what your current financial situation is, but if you want to shape the world with robotics in the coming 20-30 years, I would assume that academia is necessary. Also, I would think the world's top & startup robotic companies would come to scout for CMU RI graduates --> and eventually work at paloalto/SV (potentially be co-founder and IPO/bought out by corporations). Then again, I've heard stories of a pair of Columbia Computer Science friends such that person A gets into PhD program at top 10 CS university. his friend B failed to get into any grad school (probably bad grades) and worked as early founder at facebook. 5 years after person A's phd program, he got an offer at microsoft at $110,000 as software engineer. Person B currently has $10m networth after IPO. Not sure if you heard of it recently, "Nest" the learning thermometer, 4yo 200employee company bought out by google for $2.3billion this january. The company was created by a group of iphone/ipod designers, former big company managers, and well-known roboticist. Just FYI, google just bought out alot of top japanese robotic companies. Microsoft is kind of laggying compared to google.

Between the 2 schools, I've applied to their biomedical engineering MS program. In terms of departmental ranking, cornell is much higher than Carnegie mellon(CMU), however cmu has more robotic oriented research than cornell. In Computer science, cornell only ranks behind berkeley/mit/cmu/stanford If say, I wanted to pursue MS in robotics/computer science or PhD in BME, CS/robotics after MS in BME, which school should i go to? Also, in terms of design competition and entrepeneurship in the respective fields, which school would be better?