I realize that these “chance” posts are kind of dumb to make, but I just wanted to hear other people’s thoughts.
I’m currently going into my 4th year of aerospace engineering undergrad at Ohio State. Right now my top choice for graduate school is University of Michigan, but Penn State and Purdue are also in the running. I would also be fine with going to OSU again because it’s a good school and I enjoyed my time there, but there are very few professors doing research specifically in the astronautical side of things there which is what I want to go into for grad school.
Anyway, here are some of my qualifications so far:
GPA: slightly over 3.5.
GRE: I’m taking the actual test in 4 weeks, but so far on practice/diagnostic tests I’ve scored around 157-160 Verbal and 162-165 Quantitative. Still in the process of studying.
Internships: not sure if this really matters much, but I’ve had 4 internships at NASA Glenn. One of which (the current one I’m in) is a research position.
Undergraduate Research: Currently I have none, other than the research internship I’m currently in the process of completing at NASA. I’m trying to talk to some professors to get some last minute research experience before grad school. I’m in the process of working things out with two different professors and we’ll see what happens. (sidenote: does it matter if my undergrad research isn’t in the field I want to go to grad school for?)
Letters of Recommendation: I realize that most grad schools put emphasis on the academic letters of recommendation rather than the employer letters of recommendation, but I'm hoping I can get through with what I've got. Currently have a letter of recommendation from my test engineering mentor at NASA as well as my research mentor at NASA. Neither of these are academic, but I'm hoping to ask some of the professors I'm talking to about last-minute undergrad research about writing me a letter since I was in their class (even if I didn't talk much) and got A's.
So what do you think my chances are of getting into UofM? Purdue? Penn State? OSU? Or should I lower my standards a bit?
Your own professors are your best source for advice about this. They know exactly where everyone from your program has been admitted in recent years, and they know all sorts of insider information about the various departments because of their old grad school pals who are now professors there.
@cosmicspiderman - PhD or Masters? What are you interested in studying/researching in aerospace. It’s a very broad field.
I ask these questions because my son is privileged to begin his AE Phd next month at Michigan. Over his first three years undergraduate at Texas A&M, he refined his focus like this:
There are three main areas in Aerospace Engineering (both at TAMU and Michigan): Materials & Structures; Dynamics and Controls; and Aerodynamics and Propulsion. My son determined early in his junior year that he wanted to focus on space propulsion. He already knew what TAMU had to offer, but wasn’t sure whether he was most interested in chemical propulsion or plasma propulsion. He visited Purdue (extremely solid in chemical propulsion) and Michigan (probably number one in plasma propulsion) over winter break, and Georgia Tech (strong in both areas) over spring break. Ultimately, he decided that he was most interested in plasma propulsion.
But he still narrowed his focus further. Michigan has its Plasmadynamics & Electric Propulsion Laboratory (similar lab at Georgia Tech), which focuses more on hands on research (gross Dad generalization!) and its Nonequilibrium Gas & Plasma Dynamics Laboratory, which focuses more on modeling. After taking aerodynamics plasma propulsion and computational fluid dynamics classes, and working with two plasma researchers at TAMU, he decided that he loved plasma modeling, which has all kinds of applications besides propulsion, including Hypersonics, Ablation, High Altitude Flows, Nonequilibrium Plasma, Radiative Heat Transfer, and .Materials Processing.
Anyway, my main points are that you need to determine what you are interested in studying/researching and then look for schools that offer programs that match your interests. Fit is very important, both for you and the schools you apply to. For example, my son got turned down by Princeton. They did not say why, but generally it was a bad fit for him in their aerospace engineering department. Princeton does do cool plasma research in their physics department, but he had not taken enough of the required undergraduate physics classes (quantum mechanics, relativity, etc.) for admissions to that department.