ShogunT

The prof I contacted at MIT told me that she only talks with students with admission. You've got one, so go ahead and do some PR to your POIs. I have a feeling that you are gravitating toward Berkeley and almost make up your mind. Otherwise, relax and write some emails. Note: peruse the profs' website to see if there is any guideline for contacting him/her. I know some profs ask prospective students to include some specific keywords into the email subject to show that it is not a spam; otherwise they won't read the email.

My wife was in your situation. She needed to do 4th lab rotation before striking a deal with 2 PIs who agree to co-advise and share her study/research cost. Some programs have the emergency funding that can be used to cover the expense up to a year for exceptional PhD students who could not finalize the funding with potential PI after 3 or 4 lab rotations. Best of luck!

I am not sure whether the meaning of comprehensive exam in my field is similar to yours, so I just give my 2 cents. My sub-field in ECE no longer has academia grant support. I started my grant/research proposal to a large research company in my 2nd semester in grad school. I failed miserably. Reason of failure: did not have enough strong results to back the proposed idea. Experience: some friends told me to get my own research done first, but not publishing right away, then submit a grant and write a paper. For comprehensive exam/proposal that will be the prerequisite for dissertation writing: publish a paper first, which is one of the bullets in your proposal. Published works carry weight. After the first work published, you may expand it into future research and build your comprehensive proposal around these ideas. I personally think that you need to have at lease one goal in your proposal already implemented/published before going into the comprehensive exam. Otherwise, some strict professor in the committee would question the feasibility of the whole proposal. But again, I may not be the right person to give you this advice due to the difference in our field of research.

Thank you a lot for your comment.

Really grateful to your input. I appreciate all constructing opinions from different backgrounds. Actually, I received 3 funded RA offers from other profs in the same dept. and else where, whom I share a little research interests with. The one that I want to work with and seems to be liking me, very unfortunately, does not have funding allocated. Also it seems to me that the dept does not hand out school fellowship to internationals. Therefore, TA becomes an option at hand. However, to my collected knowledge so far, the TAship the dept. is very competitive considering the large number of candidates competing for a much smaller number of positions. Regards

Hi my fellow gradcafedrinkers, I received admission with no funding from Texas A&M, College Station, ECE Ph.D. program in Fall 2016. The professor I want to work with in the ECE Dept. has no funding but encourages me to take the English Test (they call it ELPE - English Language Proficiency Exam - in A&M) to be eligible for applying a Teaching Assistant position. I am an international student, and the dept requirements for TA includes passing the ELPE (cannot use high-scored TOEFL as waiver). There is no verbal/written guarantee for a TAship after passing the ELPE. Having not known any friend from A&M, I want to hear from you about: 0) Should I take the offer and go to A&M? 1) What is the current TAship funding situation in the ECE Dept at Texas A&M? How hard is it to get a TAship there after passing the ELPE? 2) I check the ELPE section in A&M website, but the test sample seems to be extremely limited. How hard is it for the real test? Does any A&M TAs here have some more test samples to share? A&M allows test takers to take only one test in a 3-month period, and the re-test requires complicated procedure involving multiple bureaucratic parties. Therefore, I want to maximize my chance getting good score at the first try if I choose to go to A&M. Thank you very much, Cheers

Regarding to DSP: as far as I know UCSD Prof. Truong Nguyen is a good one. No one sticks with solely filters design anyway. Regarding to internship: don't worry. I am an international student and did my summer internship at a good tech company in the U.S. (the like of Google, IBM, Qualcomm..). I don't think being an international student is a problem for getting summer internship in tech companies.