<p>"There is nothing better than CalTech and Harvard. "</p>
<p>In engineering there certainly is. They weren’t even safety schools for me :)</p>
<p>Really? I didnt know Harvard was world renowned for its engineering program. I hear that little school down the street was just a little better. </p>
<p>In general, you cant always say school X is better than school Y for engineering programs. There’s some specialized programs that may be better at one school than another. Just because your degree doesn’t say Harvaaahhhd doesn’t mean you didnt get a good or better education elsewhere.</p>
<p>Also, I’m sure there’s lots of people with marginal undergrad GPAs who do a master’s program, write an awesome thesis, have a strong graduate GPA and are subsequently accepted for doctoral study at a “big-name” school.</p>
<p>@navyasw02, exactly, give me Stanford or MIT any day</p>
<p>@ polarscribe</p>
<p>“I’m sure there’s lots of people with marginal undergrad GPAs who do a master’s program”</p>
<p>How much easier is to get into a a master program at these universities?</p>
<p>Doesn’t matter where someone goes for their master’s - they can be judged on their thesis and research record. A stellar master’s thesis can be written anywhere. That thesis, and resulting publications, can then be used in application to a doctoral program elsewhere.</p>
<p>polar - Does thesis really matter for employers? A lot of schools offer masters without thesis options. I’m finishing up my thesis and I personally think it has been a waste of time and if I had a choice I would have not done one.</p>
<p>But I agree, names are overrated. In fact, school is overrated. It’s just a resume bullet. You build your reputation and worth on your performance. Your educational background may open the door, but your performance gets you in, keeps you in, and opens more doors down the road.</p>
<p>In general, non-research employers don’t care about the thesis. Thus the non-thesis programs. I’m applying for terminal master’s programs right now, but plan to write a thesis just to leave the door open if I want to go back for a doctorate in a few years.</p>
<p>How much does it help for PhD admissions? It looks like a lot of programs are open to BS holders even without doing a MS first. I’m doing the engineer’s degree and every school that offers it pretty much says its terminal and not a stepping stone for a PhD. I’m guessing that what they say and what they mean for admissions are probably two different things though.</p>
<p>It really depends on the field and the school. Different places and disciplines have different feelings vis-a-vis graduate study progression. I’ve seen several Ph.D programs in my field (natural resources/outdoor recreation management) that do not accept students without a masters.</p>
<p>But anyone in a master’s program who wants to end up with a Ph.D is well advised to write a thesis - because that research experience is what you’re going to be doing in a doctoral program. A coursework/comps-based master’s does not show research ability.</p>
<p>Good point. Do you know how grad school admissions work regarding GPA, specifically if they even care about undergrad grades after you’ve got a masters? I’ve done some searches and can’t find any info about that and most programs talk about undergrad gpa requirements etc.</p>
<p>Just heard a friend got admitted to MIT PHD program in material science. Good luck to everyone.</p>
<p>Regarding Harvard Engineering, even though public schools like Georgia Tech are ranked higher, but note it is much harder to get into Harvard Engineering than those. One thing is because there are many international applicants that just go for Harvard which raises the standard. Second, if you look at the faculties at their engineering program. They are very small but all the professors are the most renowned in their field. I heard in the past, Harvard almost have no tenuring process. They only hire those already famous people from other universities. Imagine those famous professors reading applications, I am sure they have very high standard. Also, their engineering programs have joint faculties with their physics, chemistry, and applied science programs which are no doubt top notches. I think it is very tough to get in.</p>
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<p>This depends on exactly which sub-field we’re talking about, but this statement is just not true. GA Tech engineering is just as competitive (if not more so) than Havard’s.</p>
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<p>I wish that were true. Unfortunately, there are plenty of highly desired employers who care a great deal about school name. </p>
<p>" For the most part, it takes a degree from an Ivy League school, or MIT, Stanford, CalTech, or Carnegie Mellon–America’s top engineering schools–even to get invited to interview. Brin and Page still keep a hand in all the hiring, from executives to administrative assistants. And to them, work experience counts far less than where you went to school, how you did on your SATs, and your grade-point average. “If you’ve been at Cisco for 20 years, they don’t want you,” says an employee. "</p>
<p>[Can</a> Google Grow Up? Google is one of the best things to happen to the Net. So will its IPO, expected this spring, be a must-buy? A look inside reveals a talented company facing trouble. - December 8, 2003](<a href=“http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/12/08/355116/index.htm]Can”>Can Google Grow Up? Google is one of the best things to happen to the Net. So will its IPO, expected this spring, be a must-buy? A look inside reveals a talented company facing trouble. - December 8, 2003)</p>
<p>…evaluators drew strong distinctions between top four universities, schools that I term the super-elite, and other types of selective colleges and universities.So-called“public
Ivies” such as University of Michigan and Berkeley were not considered elite or even prestigious in the minds of evaluators(in contrast, these“state schools” were frequently described pejoratively as“safety schools” that were“just okay”)…</p>
<p>[Rivera</a> forthcoming](<a href=“http://www.docstoc.com/docs/69081703/Rivera-forthcoming]Rivera”>http://www.docstoc.com/docs/69081703/Rivera-forthcoming)</p>
<p>I wonder if Google’s hiring practices are still the same over seven years later…</p>
<p>Agreed. I think that was before Google even went public. Quoting a 7 year old article about the tech industry is about as useful quoting the Old Testament about current events in Egypt.</p>
<p>Agreed. There are 24,000 Google employees.
They do not all come from Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT.</p>
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<p>But that’s the point: as that was precisely the time when you would have wanted to join Google. Certainly, I agree that Google is not as elitist in its hiring processes now as it was in the past, but at the same time, nobody is going to become rich by joining Google today. </p>
<p>On the other hand, I can tell you that Facebook runs a rather highly elitist recruiting process. And it is precisely now that you would want to join Facebook, not a few years later when they will have likely gone public and hence taken most of the quick stock gains off the table. </p>
<p>The point of this discussion is not to discuss how Google happens to be hiring today. The point is that Google is an indicative example of how many of the most desirable high-growth tech startups run their recruiting processes. For example, many of the early employees at Microsoft happened to be old Harvard contacts of Bill Gates - indeed, Steve Ballmer was Gates’s poker-playing pal at Currier House. Many of the earliest employees at Yahoo and Google were old Stanford pals of the founders. These are precisely the employees who garnered the lion’s share of the wealth.</p>
<p>I think that a common trait amongst startups that you hire your buddies to go into the biz with you like you’re saying, but that doesn’t have anything to do with where you went to school. Look at Apple, Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College and started Apple with his buddies. You can’t say that Apple hasn’t been successful because Jobs didnt go to Harvard, Stanford, Wherever. Apple was also a startup that started off with friends partnering in the business.</p>