I need help as well. I am a master student at ETH Zurich and this fall I would like to do a PhD in one of the top ten universities... I have finished my BSc in Europe(Serbia) in not so famous university with GPA 9.4 / 10 and have received many scholarships from the state, based on that score. Now I am at ETH, having GPA around 5/6. ETH has the most strange scale and this GPA can't be translated to any other scale... there are so many rules involved in this scale...
This summer I have done cs research and I think that my professors and me are going to publish some paper very soon. Also I have another paper in preparation but I am not sure if those papers are going to be published till the application deadline. Beside these two papers, I will take my master thesis project starting from the 01-September. I will work on that for 6 months and I will certainly try to publish some part of it... but of course that's again the future... Also, I can get 2 recommendation letters from quite famous professors from ETH(one is the main founder of the group) and one from a recent PhD graduate.
Preferable universities are : Stanford, CMU, Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard...
I would not go for a less famous group of universities as ETH is also in top 11 in the world according to this list:
http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2011/subject-rankings/engineering/computer-science
Also I was thinking to skip applying for this year and to apply the next one. In the meantime I could do 2 more different research projects in one year and increase my chances to get in this schools...
Can you give me some suggestions what should I do? Should I try this year as well?
