<p>I'm wondering if anyone here knows much about Dartmouth's admissions to its PhD program (Thayer school, engineering). I applied around Jan 1, and I'm curious how good a sign the following development is:</p>
<p>Recently they emailed me asking if I'd like out come out to Hanover to visit the school, and they offered up-front to pay for everything -- plane tickets, hotel, local transportation, etc. I know that it's not uncommon for engineering departments all over the country to lay down four or five hundred dollars for a visit like this -- for PhD applicants they've already accepted. The thing is, to my knowledge they've not made any decision on me yet.</p>
<p>So how should I take this? How unusual is it for any school, or Dartmouth in particular, to bring out a guy at their own expense <em>before</em> letting him in? All I can figure is that either ivy league schools have way more money than they know what to do with, or they're just short of certain that they want me there.</p>
<p>Caltech did the same for me last year. Form what I've heard since then, it was just to let students see if there actually were any advisers they were actually interested in here and advisers see there were any students they made a poor decision on to fly out.</p>
<p>In the end pretty much everyone got an offer to attend.</p>
<p>No prob, here's me: BS GPA 3.7, MS GPA 3.8, did pretty decent on the GRE, though not as well as I should've. One of my LORs is a tossup, but the rest I expect were totally wonderful.
I think the two things that helped me most were that the school where I did my MS is very, very strong in the fields of engineering I specialized in, and that I had some very relevant industry experience. My background is in math-heavy stuff like optimization, optimal estimation theory, control theory, and the like. Applicable to almost any field within engineering, which makes matching up with professors an easier thing.</p>
<p>I got the distinct impression that they really do pay attention to everything about an app, which is nice.</p>
<p>My ugrad gpa won't be that high when I finish, so it might be best for me to do a masters part-time or something while working. I have a LOT of research and leadership experience, but I don't know how much would be enough to offset a low gpa.</p>
<p>Thanks again for your input, it's greatly appreciated.</p>