DiscoTech

This is overly dramatic, but the basic point is right. If folks get the feeling you are using recruitment funds primarily as a way to see your boyfriend, it will leave a bad impression. FWIW, my SO joined me on my recruitment visits. None of the visits involved bunking up with someone else, so we did not have to deal with paying for the other half of the room. My recruitment visits were not jam-packed with events and there were always a couple of blocks of "free time." However, the expectation was that students would setup individual appointments with professors when there were no official events. I ended up meeting with professors during any open block of time. So my SO and I never spent much time together, except later in the evenings. However, the point of the visits wasn't pleasure. My SO checked out potential housing options and job opportunities during the day and never joined me at any recruitment event. Keep it professional and you will be fine.

Short answer: yes. Long answer: If one, two, or all of your recommenders have either the stature or personal connections to professors at the universities you are applying to, that will help a lot. Basically, the schools you've applied to need have someone THEY trust/respect/know vouch for you and your UG institution. It helps that your GRE scores are stellar. Also, good choice of schools. You have clearly done your research. Vazirani, Childs, Aaronson, Vidick, .... you've covered all the places with top notch faculty. I have no idea if this is too ambitious though.

LOL. No one's going to crack that mystery. Strong profile, especially given that you're a D-I athlete. Good luck.

Huh? I believe everyone here agreed that there are inefficiencies when it comes to how departments handle prospective candidates. Talk to some department administrators and faculty. I will note that every substantive reply offered you both positive and negative feedback. If you can''t stomach a little criticism about a seemingly glaring issue with your proposal, how will you pitch your idea to skeptical investors/benefactors?

No. Between Google Scholar, faculty maintained websites, and departmental profiles, I had zero trouble finding folks in my area. I would, but it is not clear what the supposed benefit to faculty would be. Now professors get to waste time with prospective students before students even apply? Yippee! Also, short of someone perfecting teleportation technology or offering free plane tickets, I do not see how you could offer a medium more conducive to building chemistry than phone conversations. (a) Research openings (b) Skills needed (c) Type of support envisioned (short-term/MS, long-term PhD). You know, the stuff faculty already put in their vacancy announcements. What @TakeruK said. I also second @TakeruK's point that faculty would have almost no incentive to participate in this service. The starting point for this venture should be conversations with faculty members or college/department representatives to identify what tools/processes would help them better sort through thousands of applications. I know that this is in fact a real problem. My old advisor once joked that she would have liked the department to attach OCIS codes to applicants. Honestly, I thought she was onto something. Getting schools/faculty involved is the basically the whole ballgame. It is clear that you have not really looked at this scheme from their perspective. Be open to the idea that the solution to their problems is not a cell phone app.

(1) Context matters. Someone who got into Princeton, without a doubt, had good scores test scores. They weren't important in the sense that everyone else who applied also had good scores (155+). Mind you, I am not talking about great or perfect scores. (2) If someone spent months studying to get a 170, that does seem like a waste of time. Again, context matters. This alum is likely suggesting that there are more important things than pushing a 160 to a 170. You are not remotely in that situation. I would reconnect with this alum, tell them about your scores, and see what he/she thinks about you the GRE with regard to your situation.

It is odd that you are certain your scores would not improve. Especially given that you do not appear to have given the GRE your best shot. At the end of this journey you will have sat through 3 application cycles. In all that time, you could have easily devoted 5-6 hours a week (over a 6-8 month span) to work on the GRE. It also seems possible that your application results have been influence by more than just your GRE scores. For example, you said - "I took one look at the quant formula list and I said “NOPE.” No memorizing formulas?" If this attitude bled into other aspects of your application like your SOP or your reference letters, it would be a good reason for a department to not want to take you on as a funded student. Also, at this point, I would not be surprised if your references are suffering from letter writing fatigue. Especially if you've put no effort to improve the one glaring red flag on your application. Doing well in coursework is not a sufficiently good indicator of your potential success as a researcher. Moreover, your research will involve a lot of tasks that will make you feel the same way you did when you looked at a GRE quant forumla sheet. Without out the drive to power through some unpleasant tasks, graduate school is going to be a miserable experience. Here's the good news. The GRE is learnable. You most certainly don't have to memorize every formula on a damn formula sheet. Like with any other field, when you put in sufficient practice, you will remember the important formulae and be able to reason through problems where you don't remember the exact formula. We don't really know what your verbal and analytical scores are, but they are below 155 and 4.0, respectively, I would consider beefing those up too. Foreign engineering students with a limited command of English manage to work their way up to scores in this range. If they can, so can you.

http://www.ndsegfellowships.org/faqs Spell check. How does it work? Web design. How does it work?

LOL. The new contractor clearly is on top of everything.

US News is really ranking everything these days, eh? You should probably ask Ranil if he has any thoughts on what schools you should consider. Chances are he has a good read on the quality of schools he thinks would be a good fit for you.

It sounds like the school saw these grades, decided they were willing to give you the benefit of the doubt for one semester of poor grades, and admitted you anyway. The condition sounds like their way protecting themselves in case a semester of bad grades turned into a year of bad grades. It doesn't matter that your overall GPA is higher than their minimum requirements. Schools reject the vast majority of students who barely meet their minimum requirements. If they thought of you as someone who can only meet the bare minimum requirements, they would not have admitted you. This is a stressful situation and I am sorry that you are in it. However, schools CAN rescind their offer if you don't meet their stipulations. They can obviously choose to waive the condition, but I don't see why they would. Conditions like this usually aren't added by individual faculty members. They are usually added by your department or, more likely, the Department of Graduate Studies. This is only my guess, but based on everything you've posted I imagine this what happened. Your professor liked your application and wanted to add you to his/her group even though you had low grades in one of the semesters in your final year. Your department/Graduate School initially refused to admit you, but your professor really pushed and they relented but wanted to add a condition to admission to ensure that the bad grades were an anomaly and not a trend. You can e-mail your professor about the condition, but I would assume this is out of his/her hands. Worse, they might have no desire to fight for you again if you complain about it.

Good. Because you have offered some comically dangerous advice. He only has to get "physically aggressive" once for your advice to turn out poorly for OP. The guy only threatened to divorce his wife because she won't let him hang a Nazi banner. He sounds really stable and like the kind of fellow who is unlikely to get physically aggressive. Are you for real? Holy mother of God, no! This advice is bad enough when offered to people in non-threatening relationships .... OP: fuzzy hit the advice head on. Please take care of your physical and emotional health. If want to try to help your husband, that is great (I think). But please don't believe that it is your responsibility or that you alone can change him.

Schools actual incentives argue against this being true. On a general level, faculty would probably love to enroll a class that looks like a United Color of Benetton ad. But at an individual level, when it comes to each faculty member's own research group, all of this goes out the window. The students who best fits what the group needs will get the RA gig. On the other hand, outside organizations have broader social goals than simply advancing a narrow line of research. If there is indeed a meaningful form of affirmative action in the graduate school process (in engineering), it is likeliest to show up in the awarding of external fellowships (and maybe some internal fellowships).

Was this reply meant for this thread?

Completing a PhD in 4 years (w/o an M.S.) is not unusual for someone with a theory-based or computationally intensive research project. OP indicated as much.

C'mon. You know you'll get in practically everywhere ....

I can't really offer much meaningful advice. I know little about the military service requirement, its terms, and its benefits/drawbacks. Someone with military service and an engineering degree in the US is generally looked at very favorably for leadership roles and management training. Learning C and Python seem like poor reasons to get a PhD, but maybe it beats military service in Korea?

I think answering the following questions would give people an idea of how best to advise you: 1) Why did you not seek an industry job right after undergrad? You seem to have no real interest in graduate school aside from what you think it can do for your business aspirations. If you want to ascend to a management role, going to industry right away is your best bet. 2) Do you have any technical interests? It sounds like you applied to graduate school without a clear motivation in mind (aside from becoming a CEO). If you don't really have any technical interests, you might be interest in analyst positions at consulting firms. Based on what limited information you've presented, it seems like you shouldn't go to graduate school. Excelling in graduate school is hard enough without coming into it with no motivation. Get a job. You'll get good experience and learn a lot about yourself in the process. It also pays more. After a couple of years you might have a good sense for where you passion lies and can then choose between the Ph.D, MBA, starting your own business, etc .... The fact that you're so set on a management role without any real industry or management experience suggests to me that school is probably not what you need right now.

What was the point of this post?

agree to stay for PhD + good mentor someone from MIT showed interest 3 years ago Should you potentially ruin a good situation because you want a different name on your diploma? Different people have different prestige needs. Figure out what yours are. I would recommend reaching out to people at MIT to see if you can identify a potentially good advisor (and fit) over the summer and then apply in the fall. That way, if you set you current relationship on fire, you can at least feel good about the situation you'll end up in at MIT (you know, aside from the name on the diploma thing).

Now I'm thinking graduate school was the right choice.

http://www.top-law-schools.com/ Your sub-3.0 GPA will be a more of a problem for graduate school than law school. Law schools are hurting to maintain enrollment given the terrible job prospects for lawyers who don't graduate from top schools. One of them will gladly take you loan money so long as your LSAT score isn't terrible. Graduate students aren't as willing as law students to sign up for hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, which is why graduate schools (even the diploma mills) maintain some standards. The better question is whether you SHOULD go to law school. The folks on the website above will give you the advice you are seeking. It will be frank/brutal, but it will likely be accurate.

I am sure you would have very little trouble getting good internships (Google, FB) during the summer if you decided to go to Princeton.

Big caveat. Also, there isn't a dwindling market for academics in engineering at research institutions. It is tight, but it isn't dwindling. OP, your perceived ability to bring in grants will be what gets you into academia. Since no one can truly know whether you'll flourish at bringing in $, hiring committees use proxies like citation counts, etc ... It would be foolish for me to suggest that the name on the diploma doesn't matter. However, you advisor's research output will matter much more. Or your postdoc advisor's. I am unfamiliar with your field, but I have seen doofuses in photonics turn down UC Santa Barbara for Masters diploma mills like Penn because ... Ivy! Same goes for morons who chose Yale over Colorado for optics. Look at the research output of your advisors. Talk to your mentors at your UG institution. Princeton might even be the better choice, but the name brand should not be the deciding reason. EDIT: You might find this useful regarding faculty hiring - (http://armani.usc.edu/advice/)

Well, it just seemed like we're missing the biggest piece of the puzzle, no? Your fiance might be perfectly fine with a move to Boston and then the decision really just comes down to staying within BigFed or going up to Boston. Also, should we infer that Boston's program is better for your career. It is not 100% clear, but sounds like it is.