lenzslaw

Are you applying for the IME program in UTokyo? I am, in direction of Electrical Engineering. I also had an interview in early January. On their webpage it says that the results are announced in mid-February. I am wondering whether anyone has get any news...

Thanks for your reply! Feeling better now... I was worried that a lot of EE applicants for PhD are holding first-author publications, or second/third author publications in top journals, while I don't have one. It seems to make me less competent, since that my undergrad univ is also not a high-ranking one in engineering world (we do have good anthropology/Chinese medicine/Chinese literature etc. o.o). I applied to six US grad schools this round, not all of them are the top-ones (say among top-10), but still I haven't heard anything back, thus I am a bit anxious. I sincerely hope that all labs could take undergrad research more seriously though...It seems extremely hard to have some grad student helping in fabrication devices (since we undergrads are not paying them) and also, undergrads are not allowed to fabricate anything. Maybe not everyone does, but I do take my senior project seriously. I talked with my supervisor earlier yesterday and I think the focus of the project turns into simulations now. Anyway thanks a lot for your kind reply.

Hey guys, I am a senior undergrad applying for EE 15 Fall PhDs, in the field of nanophotonics. While I changed my major from Biomedical Engineering to Electrical Engineering during sophomore year, two of my somehow fruitful research experiences in CV are not relevant to EE at all (genetic engineering actually) and the only related research I do have is my senior project, which I tried to mention in my SOP/CV...but now I am trapped in a dead-end bad project. How should I prove that I may be as qualified as other applicants while having no publications/research progress when contacting a potential professor? I am attending my undergrad is in a 3rd-world university. It has a super-mini EE department (<30 Profs and half of them are actually in BME) The group I work for senior project has no serious publication for two years...and what they (try to) do is silicon integrated optics...after desperately working on some nonlinear in silicon devices(nonlinear in silicon devices!) with NO permission to clean room (a.k.a waiting for some post-doc to make device for me to test on) and get NO workable device actually...see, that's the dead-end of the first semester. My supervisor says, well-yeah, why don't we start to work on nonlinearity on photonic crystals? So now, I (am being forced to) try to work on nonlinearity in photonic crystal while NOBODY else in this university has ever worked on PhC, (except a new-coming AP who just had a fresh start and hasn't got any PhD candidates yet) and I have less than 3 months left to make some 'reportable results', and it must to be linked to nonlinearity since it has to be a continue of my one and only one senior project, for me to graduate (as defined by the department). Meanwhile, I am trying to deal with the fact that I got ZERO phd offer up to now... I don't want to give up though. I am still working on things desperately, self-learning everything...I think I'll keep a log of my updates here if it's not too disrupting. Anyone get similar experiences? I would super-appreciate it for your comment/discussion....