<p>Junior in mechanical engineering here - </p>
<p>How realistic are top tier engineering grad schools for someone with no publications as an undergrad? I'm talking MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon among others. I'm seeing a lot of my peers apply to these schools and it seems to be a dividing characteristic between those who are accepted and those who are not.</p>
<p>So clearly your observations show a tipping point for those who have publications. But I doubt everyone admitted does. All you can bet on is that they have excellent research backgrounds. My daughter got admitted to a top 10 in her area (but not top 4 gold standards) with no pub’s. One project did get a pub the next year, but that didn’t help with admissions, only that she was on a good project with a known supervisor.</p>
<p>It’s not about publications…anyone can put somebody’s name on a paper…and the level of contribution of authors can vary tremendously.
It’s about the quality of research you’ve done and the resulting letter you get. </p>
<p>There’s multiple cases where MS students get into the top of the top (i.e. Caltech - the most selective school in all engineering) with 0 publications, but an excellent research background.</p>
<p>Then why do so many people ask this question and why do so few people have publications when applying?</p>
<p>Like others have said above, it is the quality of the research that matters. When you get published, it usually means your research is high quality stuff.</p>
<p>Keep in mind a lot of getting a publication is luck. Does your project work? Do you get interesting results? Do you actually have enough data to publish it? I’ve been included on papers where I did fairly small amounts of work, and I’ve been on papers where I’ve done all the work. I’ve also had a ton of work which has never been published because even though I’ve felt it was great, I had no real way to thoroughly defend it through the review process.</p>
<p>I got into Caltech in the PhD program (I believe only a small handful of departments take MS students, and they’re often either sponsored by a company or foreigners) with only one publication, and it was in a really low tier journal. The work wasn’t poor, it just didn’t turn out to have any exciting results that were of interest in a country that, for the most part, doesn’t care about non-specialty steel production anymore.</p>