College confidential helped me so much with undergrad college admissions and it’s so weird to be back here years later! I miss the gray background.
I am coming in with no understanding of what the environment is like for aerospace grad school, since I only started to consider it pretty recently. I’m interested in studying something that would land me a research job related to spacecraft/rovers, and I don’t currently have an aspiration more specific than that. I would be interested in a Phd, but don’t need it if its not required for the jobs I want.
Relevant info about me:
- Graduated in 2014 from MIT with degree in aerospace engineering.
- GPA: 4.2/5.0 (MIT uses a 5 point scale, this converts to 3.36/4.0)
- I’ve worked as a software engineer (at established companies but not in aerospace) for the past 4 years.
- I will be able to get great recommendations from work, but I have not kept in touch with any of my old professors (nor was I particularly close to any of them during undergrad)
Possibly irrelevant info about me:
-I had summer internships at aerospace companies while I was an undergrad, but that was so long ago that it feels slightly irrelevant now (compared to my work experience).
-I was the captain of a sports team in college and performed well enough to get some titles, would anyone care about that? During job interviews, people seemed to use it as an indicator of work ethic (and perhaps to explain my not perfect GPA, since it was such an enormous time commitment). Do grad schools care / is it still relevant as it was 4 years ago?
I have a biased idea about how I’m doing relative to other grad school applicants, just because everyone else I know also went to MIT and many had better GPAs than me, so I really don’t know if I’m a competitive applicant and I want to narrow my search down to schools that I can realistically get in to. Unlike undergrad admissions, do networking/“soft skills” matter, as far as just getting a professor like you enough to want to work with you? Do people typically apply to dozens of schools and only get into a handful (like with med school), or does it just depend on the person? Without revealing too much about myself, do professors care about having diverse labs?
Thanks a lot for taking the time to read this, I really appreciate it.