How can I improve my chances of getting into the top 3 grad schools for EECS?

[Fawad Ahmad]

I completed my bachelor's in electrical engineering in June 2014 from UET Peshawar, Pakistan and am a prospective PhD student with 3 years of research experience in real-time scheduling, wireless sensor networks and intelligent transportation systems. I have a patent filed for my senior design project based on wireless magnetic sensors, 4 research publications in ICCVE 2013 and 6 upcoming ones which are being reviewed/submitted. Out of the six upcoming publications, four of them are in journals in IEEE. I'm expecting the decision regarding one in the next month. I have a strong programming background with experience in working with embedded systems and I've worked on a number of simulation tools. My undergraduate CGPA was 3.98/4.0.

I am interested in doing a P.hD in EECS from a top tier grad school in the US. I talked to some P.hDs from Princeton and Stanford and they keep telling me I have to publish papers in SIGCOMM/EWSN/Sensys/NSDI in order to get a chance of getting into MIT, UCB and Stanford. As the application session is about to start, I don't think I have enough time to work on a paper for those conferences because I've heard they take at least an year of hardwork. I also haven't given my GRE and TOFEL yet.

Can you guys kindly suggest to me what I can do this year to make sure I get into these three schools for Fall 2015?

Edited July 10, 2014 by Fawad Ahmad

[EngineerGrad]

First thing you need to do is to get rid of Comic Sans...