Applying to grad school

College Majors Engineering Majors
21

Getting an MS and PhD at the same school is sometimes just a matter of convenience. I was able to get a MS from UCSD while I was in the PhD program by passing the qualifying exam. My students do it also. However, you also need to realize that it is possible and sometimes advisable to go right into a PhD program bypassing the MS. This is often the case in my field. However, in other fields, a MS with a thesis is preferred when applying for a PhD (not usually in engineering though).

Getting the MS and PhD at different schools can be a good idea if you are using your MS to improve your academic record in order to apply to the program you really want (this is the reason the MS only schools are useful), if you find that the research area you want to pursue is not really an option at your first graduate program, or if there is no Research Assistantship available at your current graduate program.

22

I was simply talking about my personal observations as a student. I attended both directional state and flagship state schools and tended to notice where my profs went to school. Obviously someone is teaching at the Ivies :).

As you said, the PhD program is a lot more ‘personal’ in the sense that it is advisor related as much as school related. I had an awesome advisor for my MS CS and he fully expected me to stay for PhD, but the academia model was not for me. I wanted to write code for a living. I played the grant-writing, publish-or-perish game for a couple years while pursuing a thesis MSCS and that was it.

I have worked in Industry for 30+ years (consumer electronics) and in my experience (again, YMMV) I did not think that the PhD’s we hire got paid enough or got ‘appreciated’ enough promotions wise. In my wife’s industry (pharmaceuticals) the PhD is far more useful and ‘appreciated’. Likewise I did not think we got enough from our PhD’s because we did not ask them to do enough. This is more a verdict on our company culture than anything else. But we’re in the rust belt.

In other forms of engineering, I don’t know. I used to work at the R&D laboratories of a major Fortune 10 company and we must have had hundreds of PhD’s in engineering or sciences. The idea behind this was that the labs would make a handful of big inventions a year - which we did - and pay the bills. They even let us publish papers. That being the 80’s it worked well and we did some crazy research and developed some technologies that are space age even by today’s standard. By 1995 the labs were dismantled because the execs did not think they were getting ROI.

23

It really depends on the company how well PhD employees are utilized. I know people at companies that really enjoy what they do and feel fulfilled and I know some that feel like it was a waste to get a PhD for the job they now have. It doesn’t seem to be a general rule that industry is just bad for PhDs. That said, it’s still not where I want to be at this point.

Also, one shouldn’t do a PhD for the money. In general, the pay does not match the level of schooling and is not dramatically different, on average, than someone with just an MS. It is more about the different job types for which a PhD qualifies you than additional salary.

24

That’s my experience as well - I had about a dozen PhD friends when I started, all from my birth country (gotta hand it to Elbonia, we produce good grad students :)) and most of them ended up back in Academia, achieving significant success (dept head, dean, university president). When my company dissolved the labs in the mid 90’s, most of the younger PhD’s ended up in what would now pass for ‘startups’. A number stayed in industry and achieved success, but they were driven enough that they could have made it PhD or not.

25

In my experience with Masters/PhD in general: How important it is depends very much on how technical/“academic” the company in question is. For relatively low-level work, experience is valued more than academic knowledge because most of the day-to-day work is simple and requires “tricks of the trade” and “practical knowledge” more than knowledge of advanced material. No one likes to think that their work is simple, but some lines of work are objectively more academically difficult than others. Education is more valued in the more difficult ones.

MS is very often worth it, especially if acquired on the cheap - I’ve noticed that people with MS degrees do in general get more respect and are treated as specialists rather than as children/blue collar workers/hacks/etc. You will generally be given higher-quality work with a better degree, which does lead to cumulative gains in respect. Often, a BS level worker will never (or not for a while) get a chance to prove themselves, because it’s not particularly impressive to be given easy work and to do well at it. The value of a PhD varies greatly by specialty, because you are treated as a narrow specialist in a field. If you choose this route, you would be wise to tailor your specialty to something that you know for a fact there is a demand for.

On environmental engineering in specific: it’s a field where it’s hard to find a job unless you have the exact background that the company/government is looking for. Government work also very strongly favors at least an MS level of education - look at some salary tables and you’ll see what I mean very quickly. I’d recommend further education here for sure.

26

@NeoDymium after reading your post I’m wondering what your frame of reference is. As a non-technical person I never thought that any level of engineering would be considered “easy” or “low level”. It’s a surprise for me to see that.

On your mention of environmental engineering, it would seem that it would be virtually impossible to align your back ground with “exactly” what the government/company is seeking because it is an evolving field. I would hope that the education would prepare the student to adapt with the twists and turns of the times. Is this a naive way of thinking? Also could you be more specific about the salary tables you are talking about?
Just a brief update my son met with 2 profs since I started this thread. I haven’t heard details yet but it sounds like they were positive and helpful and that the profs were supportive of whatever decision he made regarding staying or going to another school and had suggestion abut schools and profs he might consider…It also sounded like funding was largely influenced by GRE. Oy, something else to stress about. If it were about GPA and soft factors he’d definitely be competitive, the GRE at this point is an unknown.

27

Of course there are some jobs that are easier than others. For example, it’s a lot easier to be the engineer running cases in a finite element program than it is to be the guy coming up with new finite element algorithms that are faster or more accurate for inclusion in a future version of that program.

To some extent but as long as you have a set of related skills that can help you make the transition most reasonable companies will be fine with that provided they don’t have another candidate with exactly the right experience (which will be just as hard for said other guy to get). When it comes to graduate school, most research is on the bleeding edge anyway so no matter how the field is evolving, most freshly graduated students with an MS or PhD are up to date.

That’s the general idea. How well it works depends on the student and the advisor. When I first started, my PhD advisor told me that the point of the PhD is not to become a subject matter expert in whatever field. That will happen along the way, of course, but the true purpose is to learn how to perform good research. If that theory works out, any recently-graduated PhD should have the tools to adapt to whatever changes are coming or even move into other related fields if they so desire (and have a job that allows it).

Funding decision factors will vary from one professor to the next. My experience was that professors will generally fund as many of their students as they can. Basically all PhD students will be funded and as many of the MS students as a professor has funds to support. Some professors won’t hire MS students without funding support, and some wills it also varies by the department within a given university and from university to university. There are no hard and fast rules here.

28

The extent to which a non-exact background will allow you to get a certain position really depends on how picky the employer can afford to be. While it is most certainly true that a 70-90% match will easily be able to pick up the rest, some employers may hold out for a 100% match because they can or they think they can. And that isn’t good for you if you a degree in a field that has those kinds of quirks. I will also mention that it’s probably an objectively bad idea to wait for a 100% fit because waiting times are expensive for companies (much more costly than salaries for critical positions), so it’s a short-sighted decision. Not that that fact will get you a job if they do want to do that.

It varies job-to-job, but I’ll say that this is probably true to scale (multiply all numbers by anywhere from 1.0 to 1.3 depending on optimism) for working for government:
Bachelors: 40k starting, 60k max
Masters: 65k starting, 80k max
PhD: 75k starting, 90k max

In this case it’s pretty clear that a Bachelors degree is a horrible deal. The high quality jobs start as low as $50k for salary with a BS degree.

29

If you pursue a technical masters, say in ME or EE, you will learn a lot of the theory behind the plug-and-chug equations that you plow through say junior year (fluids for ChE, lots of canned equations that you had to plug in appropriate values/units from basically the equivalent of a word problem). In a graduate fluids class, you look at the fluid contours along the pipe wall or aircraft wing or study turbulence, which then explains what all those terms in the plug-and-chug equations really mean.

So if you are technically inclined, a bit academically focused, and go through the masters program either full-time or employer paid at night (terribly time consuming and invasive if you have say a family), you can then use these skills to do difficult designs or figure out new algorithms or understand test results or do difficult analysis or understand controllers or whatever.

You can also get a masters in systems engineering or project management or an MBA, where you are learning how to manage a team or how to combine 6 specialty inputs into a single product or whatever. You are then more suited to a management or systems role.

Or , with a bachelors you can use superior people skills or marketing skills or get it done skills or learn on the job or pick the brains of 10 experts in your organization and be really successful, possibly even doing really difficult technical work (although it may be hard to get assigned this over the obvious choice of person with the masters degree).

You can also change employers or even fields to move less technical (some people never want to see a textbook again after 4 years) or more technical (subject matter expert or inventor or whatever) or towards management.

The easiest path to more technical work is likely a technical masters that your employer or future employer finds related to the work they do, the easiest path to management coming from outside an organization is likely a technical management or systems type degree … but don’t discount high-achievers with less education ending up being king of the hill either.

Also some experimental type work or prototype development is actually really technical requiring advanced coursework … and requires hands on mechanical skills and interests …

So there is no one path fits all. I would also argue that at most your degree affects starting and low-mid-level salaries, there are huge ranges of individuals with different talents, engagement in work, ability to please their management, good or bad fits to company culture, etc that really affect whether you are making 100K or 150K or 200K at age 50. I don’t know if putting off employment for 2 years and earning 0 really will be offset with a 20K jump in starting salary … again lifetime earnings will really vary wildly based on a lot more factors than education.

Some fields where scientists and engineers intermingle might require more education to be seen as a core team member or a technical person, if everyone has a PhD in physics, that PhD in engineering might help you get invited more into the inner circle …

For a junior in college, these discussions with professors are sort of the understand the graduate student reality but also to see … are you really more academically focused or not ?

Rule of thumb is that you get 2 years work experience credit for a masters, but salary and work years don’t really correlate that well out past 10 or 15 years since you are the product of how hard you work and how much you learn and how useful you are more and more as you continue working.

And some companies do want masters degrees for their managers or technical senior staff.

And education is becoming higher with time, way more PhDs now than in the past, but engineering is not really rife with MS vs BS degrees even now, even in technical fields.

30

Here’s a bit of an update and a question which I’ve also posted on the Graduate GRE forum. Since starting the thread my son has decided to apply for a masters rather than Phd. He may go onto a Phd but doesn’t want to commit to applying to a Phd program right now. He has spoken to some of his professors and was given some ideas about schools to consider, he was at first hesitant about talking to them about applying to other schools but they encouraged him and helped steer him to a couple of programs. At this time he is looking at applying to:
Stanford
Berkeley
Colorado
Michigan
Washington
Penn State
UT Austin
His current GPA is about 3.95 with just one B in a humanities class. He also has well rounded resume with extracurricular involvement, research, tutoring etc. He started his GRE review and took a practice test in which he scored a 161 quantitative and 153 verbal. He’s considered a few strategies to improve this score including lots of study next semester but possibly sacrificing a couple of grades in his courses getting a couple of B’s instead of A’s; putting heavy focus on killing the quantitative section with light practice in vocabulary and the verbal section or putting heavy emphasis on verbal and reviewing the sections he missed on the quantitative section. Please share any thoughts on stategies to achieve admission to at least one of these schools with funding. Thank you for your thoughts.

31

Probably don’t need to worry about “strategies”. There are no general strategies for grad school. He has a high GPA and has done research. Presumably the research means he has a good relationship with at least one professor which will lead to a good reference letter. Just don’t bomb the GRE and things should be golden.

32

Thanks @boneh3ad thats encouraging! He is set with references but can you define “bomb”?

33

Depends on the school or even the department within the school. Most will expect nearly perfect on math. I’m pretty sure when I was applying even a 500 (do they still use the 800 scale?) was fine on verbal most places. But I think they recently changed it so the expectations are probably different.

34

A 161 (86%ile) in the Quantitative part is approximately equivalent to a 770 in the old system. The 153 (62 %ile) in the Verbal is approximately equivalent to a 500 in the old system. These are typical scores for Engineering students. If he is applying for a MS at those schools, it is likely that he will be expected to self fund the degree and if so the admission standards may be a bit more relaxed. In any case, if he can raise the Quantitative score a couple of points to the 90 %ile level and the Verbal about 5 points to almost 80 %ile, he should be a good candidate for a number of his target schools.

35

Hummm…@xraymancs and @boneh3ad seems like you are saying different things. From what Boneh3ad said it sounds like his record may carry more weight than the test from what xray says it sounds like funding decisions are about the test. I’m guessing it co.es down to who is doing the evaluating

36

For top schools, GRE is just a minimum competency cutoff. For mid-range schools, GPA and GRE play a decently strong role in getting admitted.

37

I don’t think anything he or I have said contradict each other. Funding for an MS will vary wildly by school, department, and professor. There’s just not a good way to give advice on that without just asking the target department. Admissions decisions are only somewhat less opaque, but in general the GRE scores can’t really help you much; they can only hurt you if they are too low. All I’m saying is that there is not a recipe for admission (or funding) that is universal, as each department will have its own formula. Based on your son’s stats and record, I think he will be fine, though.

38

I am pretty sure he will get into several of the programs that your cited. The question is whether any funding is offered to M.S. students when they have Ph.D. students in the department. Some universities do support their M.S. students, others do not.

As for the GRE scores, you mentioned some highly selective schools and often the number of applicants are reduced by putting a GRE cutoff in place. For M.S. admissions, this might not be the case if the schools expect the applicants to self-fund.

Bottom line, he should apply to the schools he likes from the list and see what they offer in the way of financial assistance.

39

The next question to ask would be what percentage of MS students are funded, and even more important, what the funding formula is. No fun receiving a ‘full ride’ only to find out their idea of ‘full’ is full instate tuition waiver, leaving you responsible for the out of state portion…

40

He just took the GRE 147 verbal 164 math, he’s pretty crushed.