fenasikerim

Andrew I feel for you. I'm somewhat an insider so let me tell you what happened. Your resume is nice however as you know in electronics, writing journals is not a big deal, in fact lots and lots of people write journals easily these days. Unless you have some truly extraordinary work and if it is known by people in MIT, your work will not make a lot of difference since everyone applying to MIT have those. Also having a professor ready to take you in his/her group means very little sorry. They have a commitee and if the person you have contacted is not one of the legends then it will make very little difference. Believe me once you are in MIT no matter how good/bad you are you are pretty much guaranteed to find a professor to work with and that's how they look at it that's why the guy you contacted probably told you that he would work with you IF you get admitted(this is an important statement)... Again if you are not lucky or really extraordinary they won't hesitate to reject you since they feel like they can find another person who will do a similar job for them and most of the time they are right. Finally, today the signals they are using are extremely noisy, I have seen lots of people having below average intellectual ability (sorry but that's it) BUT having 3.9-4.0 averages , and\or meaningless papers (again sorry but really most of the papers are written just to write it without a lot of meat or thought in it) and you have to compete with them. It is not fair and it will be worse since number of engineers increased exponentially (their quality did not go up but their signals did) for the last 10 years. If it was me who decided these admissions today I would NOT admit someone who comes with 3.99 gpa and 5-10 papers out of ug or 1st year of masters because this %99 of the time this shows that this person did all those things to give signals rather then for the love of research, instead of deeply understanding a subject he/she understood every subject at a level enough to get an A (means nothing) and from the number of papers it is nearly certain that all of them are the result of very little thought and they are only good for showing on cv. At this moment your best strategy is to finish phd in you current university, you are saying that it is a top 5 university then just be patient and finish it, and if you are close enough find a coadvisor in MIT or whatever university you feel suitable. And don't think about it, in your situation it won't make any difference if you graduate from Mit or your top 5 university...

Although it depends on your field between those two definitely Caltech. I know this will offend some of you but Berkeley @ EE is vastly overrated. I have seen lots of outstanding people getting rejected while I saw below average(even I may call idiot) people getting accepted to that place. In terms of research, I have been to presentations of some Ph.D. candidates and I have witnessed some notoriously poor explanations, unbelievable mistakes that you don't expect from an ug student. I heard very similar things from other people too. You may think it is prestigious but I would say Berkeley EE is on par with maybe princeton, USC, UCLA as far as I see. On the other hand although Caltech is small, if you can work on the field you want then go for it. It seems to be just as good as MIT or Stanford and I have met with a lot of outstanding people who graduated from that place. Their presentations were nothing like the ones I have seen from those graduating from Berkeley. The only problem is it is a small department you may not find the exact field you want to work on. As for the after graduation, I again believe, from Caltech you have a far greater chance to be an academician (if that is what you want) in a respected university like Mit, Stanford (even Berkeley ), EPFL then from Berkeley. Finally Caltech seems to be in a more convenient place. And yes I like Caltech a lot, and unfortunately I have not been admitted to there.