I am an international applicant from an unknown undergrad program, planning to apply for PhD programs in Signal Processing for the Fall 2013 session. The popular view on PhD admissions is that its the research experience that matters in the admission process. But, after a lot of personal research on the admissions process, and a few interviews, I have discovered that people who make into top 20-25 PhD programs in US are those who were either among the top 2% in their undergrad (usually without any publications) or had a Masters degree with thesis and a few publications. Because I am an undergrad, I am concerned about the roughly top 2% policy of top PhD programs regarding undergrads.
I am among the top 15 - 20 % of my undergrad batch (3.67 gpa). Do you people think I can compensate for my apparent academic non-awesomeness by publishing at reasonable-to-impressive conferences/journals ? I am currently a Research Assistant at my undergrad institution, with 2 publications in the pipeline, but I am not sure now if even publishing will make me eligible for top 25 EE PhD programs in US. Another problem is that I may be lacking the math coursework for a highly mathematical area like Signal Processing, so I am not sure if publications will fill that gap (I have math coursework in Calculus, Differential Equations, Linear Algebra, Probability and Stochastic Processes).