puertorrob

50% of people pass quals the first time and 70% pass The second time. Although Ive heard last year the percentage was higher.

My acceptance letter said I had no funding and I was invited to visit day with no reimbursement. The funding came later when I was invited to grad diversity day.

Look, Stanford is for adventurous people that are willing to take risks. They will never offer guaranteed funding for 5 years like other schools do. You have to take the risk off going through the masters program and showing to the university that you are PhD material. If you feel like stanford isn't good enough for you because it may have a slightly higher acceptance rate than other schools, then go somewhere else. All I can say is that is that I had 5 years of funding at 2 other top 5 schools and decided to go to stanford instead and I do not regret it.

This morning I was having a conversation with the CEO of a company in the aero industry about an idea that i have for a startup. I can say that this was only possible because of the powerful network that you become a part of once you join the stanford community.

I feel like letters of recommendation are extremely important and MAYBE your references are not very recognized in their field. For example, most of my references are world leaders in the fields of aircraft and spacecraft propulsion and they know people at most if not all universities that I applied to. Coming from embry-ridle (which is mainly an undergraduate institution), it will be hard to get those types of references. A lot of the people that apply to the schools that you mentioned have excellent GPAs, GREs, and research experience. It is your SoP and letters of recommendation which are going to set you apart.