Hello,
I am an undergrad mech eng student going into my senior and last year and am planning on taking my GRE and apply for grad school. I have a low GPA at 3.30, but have been involved with senior design projects from when I was a sophomore, am doing research related to material science, and have an internship under by belt. My project, research, and internship experience were focused on composites and related material science fields.
I guess my question is for the following schools, do you recommend I apply to Material Science Engineering, which I really enjoy, or should I apply for Mechanical Engineering, considering there are usually more spots in a broader major. Also should I just wait till my senior grades come in before I apply (can likely improve my GPA significantly to at least a 3.45).
These are the colleges I am interested in:
UCD, UCI, UCSB, UCSD (UCB but not likely)
University of Wisconsin
Cornell
Duke
Schools in Germany I heard are good, any in Italy?
Any recommendations based on my situation and interests would be greatly appreciated
Many thanks, I appreciate it
Don’t worry about the label on the department. In terms of research, there is a lot of overlap. What you should be doing is looking at the research groups in both departments at those schools and figuring out which ones are best aligned with your own research interests. Then apply to those departments.
Otherwise, you are in a better situation than you think you are in terms of being admitted. It sounds like you’ve probably got enough of the rest of the boxes checked that you can make up for that low-ish GPA at most (if not all) of the schools you listed. It will vary on a case by case basis, though, so there’s no way to say with certainty if you’ll be admitted until you apply.
Thanks man, appreciate the advice and positivity.
Well I was in a different engineering field, but I applied to graduate schools with roughly a 3.4 GPA and was admitted to a few “top 10” departments (and rejected from a few) and admitted to most of the “top 25” departments because the rest of my application was strong. That was a mix of MS and PhD programs. The bottom line is that graduate school admissions are more holistic and more subjective than undergraduate admissions. The general rules are more easily navigable, but making any sort of prediction is basically impossible.
You sound well prepared to me too.
If materials science is what you’re interested in and what you have a strong background in, apply for those programs. I recently applied to master’s programs with a lower GPA than yours and got into a program I thought I had no shot at but was perfectly aligned to my background.
If you plan on starting grad school Fall of 2018, you’re going to need to start applying this fall/winter so you’re not going to be able to wait for your senior year grades to come in. The grades from your upcoming fall semester/quarter might count depending on when each application deadline is but don’t count on it.