Electrical Engineering vs Materials Engineering

[Tcmgrad]

I posted this on the Applications board, but this one seems to be more accurate for the topic.

 

I recently finished my Engineering undergraduate from a Canadian University in an interdisciplinary program that encompassed topics in Electrical Engineering and Materials Engineering. I have a 3.7 GPA on the American scale and I haven't written my GRE's yet but on average the practice tests show a Ver:157, Quant:159 and I'm hoping to improve it to Ver:158, Quant:162+ in the next two weeks before the test. 

 

I plan to apply to Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, U Texas-Austin, Cornell and maybe Stanford (skeptical of my chances of getting in) in the states but I can't seem to decide whether I want to apply for Materials or Electrical Engineering programs. My undergrad had a bit of both but most of my research experience is mostly in Materials ( two 4 month research co-ops). But I am a lot more interested in pursuing graduate school in Electrical Engineering, particularly in VLSI, IC design or Nanoelectronic devices design/fabrication.  I have take EE courses in these areas (except IC design) and my capstone project was related to micro-fabrication of solar cells which falls under both EE as well as Materials Eng. I also have industry level co-op experience with PCB validation which falls under EE but is not really research related. All of this half-assing was basically because I was  keen on Materials Engineering early on, but after seeing the job market this year, I feel Ill be much better off with an EE masters. 

 

So far, I have 4 professors/bosses willing to provide me with a recommendation letter, two of which are in the materials/chemical industry, and the other two who are in EE (they specialize in VLSI and Device fab which is what I want to do). I am confident that my Materials related references will be more personalized, while the EE ones are most likely to be more generic ( professors from classes I had good grades in.. but I havent had much personal interaction with them). 

 

Do you think I should apply to Materials Engineering which I have a better portfolio for or EE which Im more interested in? Also,  I am not really familiar with acceptance numbers to most of these universities and cant seem to find them. Do you guys have an idea of whether I am roughly in the ballpark for being accepted into these universities or should I be aiming lower? Sorry, I know this is very confusing and thats why I've been debating this in my head for a couple of month now.

 

[Jbenrod]

Go with what you want and that sure sounds like it is EE. 

 

I think you need to be aiming a bit lower.  That's still all good though since there are many good EE programs across the U.S.

Edited November 11, 2014 by Jbenrod

[starofdawn]

I can't offer advice on EE v MatSci but you should definitely replace or add some lower ranked schools in the mix. Berkeley, CMU, Stanford are all at the top in those fields and your GRE scores are a little low. Maybe try reaching out to other great engineering schools, like UCLA, Purdue, UW-Madison, University of Washington, USC, UCSD, UPenn.

 

Everything else on your application looks fantastic, but grad school admissions are so finicky. Even if someone has perfect scores, great LORs, multiple publications, etc they could still get rejected from top schools. Play it safe and throw in some non-top-10 schools.