bgk

I thought I'd add my 2cents and basically agree with everything that has been said already. You'd be competing with a lot of very qualified people. Some with "connections" (via letters of recommendation), some with publications, some with perfect numbers, some with all of the above. You should do everything you can to improve your chances., which probably means summer projects, try to get a publication, doing well in classes, generally making a good impression so that you can get 3 relevant letters of recommendation. Use the projects to get an idea of what you want to work on in grad school. EE is a big field and being able to articulate clearly what you want to do can help you in two ways: 1) It can help you select schools with professors who work on specifically the problems that you are interested in 2) When the time comes to write your statement of purpose, you can talk more thoroughly about research and goals Hope that helps a bit too.

Hi Guys! There were some technical issues earlier with the server (caused by an incredible number of requests to the website) I think everything is fixed now. Sorry for the down time :-). Let me know if you spot anything amiss.

OK, but under which 'category' should it be? :-) Social Science, Humanities, Life Science, Government?

Thanks Ammar! Interesting story!

Hmm. Well it's hard to put down the big names, MIT and Stanford. The most important thing, I think, is to find a good advisor, or at least to know there are several good names you could work with. Even some large schools have deficiencies in some areas. Nothing worse than arriving at BIG School, and finding that all the Widget guys are leaving or on sabbatical or not taking students... Speak to the other grads on visit weekends, get a feeling for the 'grad quality of life'.

What's your interest? Looks like you'll have an interesting decision to make :-)

OK, OK !

Depends on the source and the purpose of the funds. If it is a US fellowship for study for living costs, and you're a student, I believe the tax rate is 14%. You should check to see if your country has a tax treaty with the US, which may reduce the liability somewhat.

And I'm in Ithaca too! ... and even know a Romance Studies person

Can't help with that one! :-) I'm sure you'll hear good news soon.

Of course! Forgot to 'check the box' when I set it up yesterday. It's done now.

Thanks Raf.. I'll do that now!

Very well!

For NYC .. you can use shortline busses, of which there are are around 5/day, at a cost of about $90 roundtrip; the journey is about 5 hours. If you're loaded you can fly from ITH to LGA. Or, you can hitch a ride with another student arranged via the rideboard/facebook/craigslist. Ithaca is small, but not that cold. The locals are friendly and there's a pretty vibrant grad life. There's actually a lot of variety here!

Never tell an Engineer that something is too difficult ... !

.. you're right! I decided this was harder than I originally thought ... so things will be in a state of limbo for a few days.

Hi Guys, Over the next few hours I'm going to create some subject specific forums. The current "menu" forums will become parents of those new forums. If that makes no sense, just wait a few hours and you'll see :-) I'll probably miscategorize a bunch of things, if you think so, let me know. Sorry for all these changes, but for the long run it is for the best!

Well, if you decided you still wanted to go to grad school. You could write to the chair of the admission committees to get some feedback as to why you were rejected and see if you can do anything to improve your application next time. One idea might be trying to do some free/volunteer work with a professor at a local university or at your undergrad place. E.g. a research project/literature review/simulation or something similar and applicable in your field.

Hi Guys, I've started showing a program field in the poster information (on the right, where it lists your user name, number of posts, etc.). If you haven't set this yet, you can do so via the user control panel. Let me know if there's anything I can do to improve the forum!

good luck!

Interesting idea - but that is why I re-wrote it! Looking at the logs for the old system, many people were just entering things into any box like a search engine. So I figured I'd give them that. If you want to do specific search, you can still use the old interface. I have no plans to delete it :-) Cheers

OK. I'm done for now. Unless the thing explodes and dies horribly, this is the new interface for the rest of the admit season. I need to get back to my REAL work :-). If you have any MUST HAVE features ... post them here and I'll see what I can do :-) Good luck with your admits all! I'll keep checking in on the forums to make sure all is well.

Thoughts now? I've added a sort and a number of results. I'll have to do something clever with the front page, and seeing most recent results ....

What particularly do you like? What's missing? I designed the old interface, and it seemed to have everything I needed at the time. But I did some research over the past few weeks and saw that people really didn't like that interface! So I thought that if I made it more like a search engine, which is fairly intuitive to most people, I should please everyone... I guess not :-) ... Happy to take on suggestions!

Hi All, I've put a new search interface together. Let me know what you think!