anotherflunky

Heh, I left this forum for a while and the clown goes crazy. His "verifiable evidence" includes a "late" NAE member immediately after quoting me saying "active" NAE member and 2 ISI highly cited in what? It ain't engineering. Sigh. "Ashamed of me as a fellow electrical engineer"? Rofl. The pomposity and fake enlightenment is palpable. Stop trying. Your English is too poor to pull it off. The point of a private message is to not drag out arguments that the public doesn't care about. This guy has an inferiority complex and that's that, as we can see from his flipping out over a trivial statement. You'll see from my other points that I *don't* worship MIT/Stanford/Berkeley and repeatedly give advice suggesting taking up other options. Three weeks ago I was almost certainly going to pick a not-so-famous school over Stanford before changing my mind for personal reasons. But anyway, as I said. OSU is not even in the game to top students as UCSB is. We don't get to pick our own reality and there's no reason to give shitty advice to other students just to make yourself feel better. Get over *yourself*, was1984. Think a little and don't just on bandwagons.

Your threshold for considering something "top" is remarkably low. Not a single active NAE member, not a single ISI highly cited. Who are you referring to that makes OSU "top"? OSU is not even in the radar for top applicants the way UCSB is. So it's not even in the game while plenty of talented opto guys go with UCSB over big names. Without even having a sizable number of cross-admits, it's silly to compare. Like I said, top 30 is not bad in the bigger picture, but your perception of the school is simple self-delusion. I'll let you wallow in it. That was a direct ranking comparison, useful because MIT is typically ranked #1. Not "UCSB's X is so good that MIT uses it". Sigh. Does OSU not require English proficiency?

My three-quarter fellowship was going to pay tuition and a stipend of $8100 per quarter. But I recently won the 3-year NSF fellowship, so instead the departmental fellowship will go towards supplementing that for all three years with some minor benefits like a health insurance subsidy. It's not useful for you to know my profile as I'm a domestic student so it's not directly comparable. They give that hopeful admission letter to everyone, but only a fraction get funded. I personally don't recommend taking an unfunded offer, even for U.S. students.

All parts of this process are voluntary, so what's the issue? If one doesn't want to go to Stanford unfunded, then he can choose not to. He can even choose not to apply. Some people are willing to pay for Stanford -- why not let them? Stanford has more citations/paper than even MIT and Berkeley. And in industry impact, I don't even need to spell it out. Sounds like they know what they're doing.

Looks like someone got butt-hurt. There's a massive difference between being good in one "topic" vs. dominating in a very large area such as optoelectronics. Even people outside of optoelectronics know how good UCSB is. Ohio State? Yeah, OK. Name the "topic" and we'll see how broad it is. As the work of any group differs from those of others, any school can claim to be "top" at some "topic". P.S. A school that's good doesn't need validation from MIT. Sad.

Majority are not funded for the first-year. The top students get fellowships with their admission, the rest find RA/TA during their second year onwards (if they pass the qualifying exam).

So I declared tenure but my future grad school is being ambiguous about how they will combine the first-year fellowship I received and the NSF. Originally I was told that I still only get three years total because I'll officially be on the NSF and the school's fellowship goes into some internal accounting (since NSF doesn't fully pay tuition and Stanford tuition is ridiculously high). So I declared tenure on NSF beginning in fall. Now the school's saying they're still "working out" how the two will mix since the NSF changed the rules. My biggest preference is obviously to use them serially - i.e. 1 year of school fellowship and 3 years of NSF. If that turns out to possible, could I change my tenure plans? What's the final date for notifying them of that change? Still May 1st?

No. Same broad topic (graphene-based devices) but it was not a project I'd done or anyone at my university was doing. I just made it up.

So I presume you think that grad students' proposals should be judged at the level of professors? If not, then pretend it's a separate program for each of the four levels just as GRFP is separate from NSF grants. But if so, lmao.

Received fellowship: VG/VG VG/VG E/E E/E was nothing but glowing praise. 1st VG/VG was also a lot of strong praise, but no criticism or explanation for not getting Es. 2nd VG/VG just blandly repeated my experiences with no assessment of them whatsoever. These reviews are surprisingly useless. I'm guessing I just had guys that rarely hand out Es. They liked my writing skills and international experience especially. My "qualifications": Senior (overrepresented male), 3.9+ GPA, top 5 university in my field (electrical engineering), 1.5 years of research experience, including a semester in Germany (no pubs/conferences), lots of engineering/science projects that had been demonstrated to the public, helped out with summer camp for K-12 girls interested in engineering, international water projects for which I've traveled to Guatemala and Cameroon and done a lot of successful grant writing.

My question is if Stanford isn't just using the MS students for money, why not fund them? What was that endowment again? 15 billion? Who says they can double the number easily? The school has a limited number of professors, number of courses, number of housing units, etc. I'm guessing they're milking what they can reasonably get already. Besides, civil engineering admissions are relatively easier compared to other engineering fields. So it's more so that civil departments in general are easy to get into, rather than that Stanford alone being that way. This is a straightforward consequence of the marginal value of higher degrees in some fields vs. others. This is not the case in, say, EE or CS, where giant hordes of MS students get in and they're not even top 10 caliber, let alone Stanford caliber. It is what it is. I'm not complaining. The departments' wealth makes it better for those few that do become funded PhD students. It's just funny to see all these similar topics on Stanford engineering every year. Hope, delusion, worrying, all rolled up. Hey, I like Stanford too. I'll be going there (probably). But a more correct version is that Stanford chooses a *large* number of students, and this necessarily goes deeper into the lower-end of the academic totem pole. And even lower because they lose a lot of the best students to MIT, Berkeley, and even others which have better environments (thanks to not weeding students out or forcing them to pay). Graduate school is not meant to cost anything. Don't toe the Stanford party line just because you want to make yourself feel better.

Which is not what people imagine it to be in the case of MS degrees. Really, look at all those rejected from MIT/Berkeley/Caltech but admitted unfunded to Stanford MS programs. Then they desperately see this as their only chance to get an "elite" degree and take it. Why would it be that easy? Doesn't it seem a little too good to be true? There's no free lunch: the Stanford unfunded MS programs are easy to get into precisely because they're not really anything more than money-makers. You pay, you get a "Stanford degree". Good for bragging to clueless lay people but those in your field know that it's not particularly impressive. Stanford is prestigious because of its undergrad, professional, and doctoral programs. The MS just tricks the prestige-obsessed folks into making Stanford lots of $$.

The single most qualified person I know got an HM (she even had the advantage of being a girl in engineering). I got the award after half-assing my proposal (started on it Monday morning; it was due Tuesday at 5 pm) and I didn't even have any faculty input. This makes we very curious to see my ratings sheets but the arbitrariness of this process is astounding.

Back when it was awarded to 10% (about 1000 fellowships), I think scoring in the top 7% guaranteed you the fellowship regardless of any diversity criteria (this is called Quality Group I). And then the next bunch (Quality Group II) consists of 2/3rd HM and 1/3 awardee. Some of these QG2 guys are subjected to this sort of thing to pick out the 1/3 that gets it. Overall, it only affects a small number of borderline people. As to whether HMs are worth anything on a CV, I think it is while you're still in grad school. But remove it after you're done. I've never seen older CVs with it.

Search works for certain. I looked for several of my friends and saw awardees and HMs. Can't wait for the ratings sheets. Aiming for straight E's! lol...