Please advice on my chances of getting PhD

[pran]

HI All,

Can you help me in evaluating my profile.

GRE - verbal 590, quant - 750, analytical - 3

TOEFL - 107/120

Undergrad (ECE) GPA - 8.63/10, one of National institute pf technology in India

Graduate (communication)GPA - 6.8/8, Indian Institute of Science (Top institute India)

Three publications in international conferences(all first author) + 1 publication during undergraduate

Recos are OK types

My concentration is mainly on applied probability, stochastic process and optimization, wireless communication/networks

Sent the application in USC, Univ of Pennsylvania, UT Austin.

Planning to send to RPI, Caltech, Texas A&M, UCSD and (Rice or Purdue not decided)

Can you guys help me out and suggest me where else i can apply and evaluate the chances in the univs where i am planning to or have appplied.

Thanks In advance

Edited December 23, 2010 by pran

[calahas]

I was a former PhD student who applied only to three universities for under-graduate studies - UT Arlington, UT Dallas and UT Austin (that was my strategy; all in one geographic area).

I did half of under-graduate studies at NIT Warangal in 2001. I wrote my SAT and finished my under-grad and grad degrees from UT Dallas finally. I left my PhD degree track at UT Dallas to join industry but re-applied to get into all three campuses again. I was initially rejected at UT Austin when I had no work experience out of under-grad but accepted after I worked for 2 years in the networking industry in an important technology startup in optical switching. But I did not take my final PhD admission acceptances into UTA, UTD and UT-Austin. All three have very good Communications and Nano-technology research groups (UT-Austin ranks somewhere in the top 3 and UT-Dallas ranks 4 or 5 in USA for Nano-technology research; Similar rankings exist for Optical Communications research).

So if you have a graduate expertise from IIT or NIT in India, then it will help with your letters of recommendation - atleast one professor must be known in the areas of digital communication or wireline or wireless networking fields of applied computing (CS). If you cannot get such a letter of recommendation, I would recommend highlighting your conference papers and the peer professors who reviewed it as well as the conferences where they were sent to. Did you visit those conferences and talk about the papers? Were the conference papers good ideas to be published into some journal (IEEE Journal of Communications, SIGMOBILE etc)?

Your GRE scores are good in Quant and Verbal but Analytic is weak. So you might want to point out that you are actually a serious journal/conference author and that the AW score is one-off.

What is your final aim if you know of one? I am sure aims keep changing but there has to be an initial aim.

If you want to be an academic, then a top-20 university PhD counts in CS or EE. In such a case, I would suggest a strategy where you choose atleast 4 to 5 universities from the top 20 and 3 universities from the next 20 and atleast one from the next 20 (40 to 60 rankings). Remember private universities may give you admission for MS/PhD programs but will not give you financial aid right away unless you are unusual in every aspect of the admissions process (GPA, GRE scores, LOR, SOP, journal papers etc). So choose wisely. The economy is bad in USA and will be so for computing and other industries for another 10 years (my estimate).

In your list, Caltech, USC, Rice are private and so will be costlier than UT Austin. Even UCSD is costlier than UT Austin. Purdue is a good choice. I would suggest you add UCSB and UCI to UCSD. UCB is not known for networking specialization. UCLA is known for that research. Other public universities include SUNY and its campuses, some of which are known for networking research. Even University of Michigan at Ann Arbor is known for communications/networking research. A lot of the mid-western universities do not have that well-known a specialization in communications research. University of Washington at Seattle is another good choice. University of Oregon is a decent tier-3 choice. UT-Arlington and UT-Dallas are decent Tier-2 choices, especially for optical communications much like UC-Irvine. Washington University in St. Louis is a good choice. Harvard University and RPI are good east-coast choices. Ivy League is not known for Communications research. Stanford is private but is a great choice for networking research. So is USC. Caltech is a great choice but is private and exclusive by nature. Less than 25 under-grad students get in in a normal year and the number of PhD students in CS is probably the same. Caltech admission rate for CS is probably worse than Yale or Princeton for CS. So I think you should exclude it unless again you think you are unusual (meaning top on everything).

Further, please choose your specialization accurately - it cannot be stochastic processes and wireless communications at the same time. If you go for stochastic processes and its applications, then that list has a large number of engineering, economic and mathematical disciplines to account for. And stochastic modeling is a tool widely used in economics, finance, communications research, psychology, bio-statistics, phamacology etc. So I believe you are talking about wireless communications and that you are very thorough with stochastic modeling application to communications research. Which is how you should state in your SOP as an aim. But that is how focused a SOP can get and how I would write. You can disregard my advice in this specialization case.

If you want to get a PhD to satisfy your mental discipline or to get those 3 letters next to your name before getting a job in the industry, then the same strategy can be used for selecting universities but in a more relaxed manner - like 4 from top 20, 4 from next 20 and 2 from next 20.

Hope all experienced writing helps.

Calahas