Chance me for MIT EECS Graduate School?

Graduate School
1

<p>Not sure if it's an appropriate question, but hopefully I could get an answer, as well as further advice out of it.</p>

<p>The reason I am posting this question here is that I am feeling very unsure and insecured about myself. Please offer me answers and advice. Any other thoughts would be appreciated.</p>

<p>So, I am a junior student at Stanford, majoring Computer Science. I want to continue my study for a PhD degree at MIT. My focus is apparently Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. Following, I will describe my achievements at Stanford and hopefully, you could estimate my chance to get into MIT, or give me advice on what I should and could do in the remaining time.</p>

<p>GPA: 3.85. My major GPA is (much) better, but cumulative GPA is low for the general required humanities courses that I screwed up in my freshman year.</p>

<p>Coursework: I have taken courses that are considered hard at Stanford, to some extents, including MATH 51H and 52H. I also took a lot of other MATH classes: 113, 120, 161, 171. I got A+ for all of them. For Computer Science, I have taken the bases like 103, 106X, 107, 108, 109, 110, 161. For the major track, I have 221, 224n and 229. For electives, I have 261 and 265. Except 110, for which I got B+, I got all others in A range. I'm taking 334a and 229t, and plan to take 224u and 276 in Spring.</p>

<p>Research:
- In high school, I did a research in Ramsey theory, which qualified to the semi-final round of Shing Tung Yau math research competition.
- In my freshman summer at Stanford, I did a research in Number Theory, which turned out to be very unimpressive, and is the reason why I dropped Math major.
- From now until when I apply, I plan to have 2 more papers in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing published.</p>

<p>Rec letters: I am not sure about this, so let's assume that I could get three average letters.</p>

<p>Experience: I will be interning at Google in Summer 2014. I had another internship in Summer 2013 at VMware. Both my internships involve Machine Learning, but apparently the one at Google will be much more professional and should lead to a paper.</p>

<p>Other activities: (not sure if this counts as an activity though) I am quite introvert, so I am not involved in clubs or fraternities. The only activity that I try to maintain commitment with is the ACM ICPC contest (in case you don't have an idea about it, ACM ICPC is the parallel version of IOI for college students more informations are available at icpc.baylor.edu). I am one of the members of the team of Stanford which is going to World Final (I have heard that this does not mean much in graduate school applications, though).</p>

<p>That's it. I am not sure it is appropriate to ask a "chance me" question for graduate school application, so if anybody thinks it is bad, please remove it. As mentioned, I am posting this simply because I am feeling very insecured about myself. Please offer answers and advice. Any thoughts, I will appreciate.</p>

<p>May the force be with you :D</p>

2

<p>GPA: Looks good - a higher GPA would not really improve your chances.</p>

<p>Coursework: No idea, but your potential advisor will care a lot about the specific courses AND the grades you got in them, so just make sure that you have good grades in the area where you want to research!</p>

<p>Research: Your high school research is just about meaningless at this point, but if you can have two papers published in peer-reviewed journals by application time then you will be in a pretty strong position in this area!</p>

<p>Rec Letters: “Average” letters are, for MIT EECS, a BAD thing. Your letters are a huge part of your application, and a program at this level is really looking for letters that say “Aaron Aardvark was one of the finest student researchers I have advised in the last decade” or such. Do you consider yourself an “average” student? Is there a reason you expect “average” letters?</p>

<p>Experience: Looks good, but not likely to be a big differentiator with the exception of that paper.</p>

<p>Other Activities: Mostly meaningless. Grad admissions doesn’t care about extra-curriculars, other than that it might show some enthusiasm for the field.</p>

<p>Overall: Pretty strong… which means that you have a small chance. Seriously, NO ONE has a good chance at programs at this level, the competition is too high and too variable, and you are essentially competing for only a couple of actual spots (since the other hundred spots are for people NOT in your specialty). You could have the strongest application in the world, and still get passed over because the only professor taking students in your specialty decided to go with a student they already knew.</p>

3

<p>20% Chance</p>