Did I just lose my chance at grad school?

Graduate School
1

<p>Well so far I've been doing well in school. I had a 3.75 GPA (UCSB, Electrical Engineering). This quarter (grades in yesterday), I got a 3.46 (First time off the Dean's list) bringing my total down to 3.69 (All brought down due to Fourier Series and Differential Equations B-). </p>

<p>I wanted to go to Stanford/MIT for graduate school. How do you think this will look? Do you think they'll treat it as a small bump in the road?</p>

<p>Hopefully meaningful research and internships will even things out?</p>

<p>Scared out of my mind,
phpguru</p>

2

<p>I also wanted to take this opportunity to ask if there is anything in particular you guys know about Stanford EE or MIT EE. I REALLY want to attend one of those spectacular programs.</p>

<p>Any advice on how to get in?
- rec from well known prof.
- publications (working on this one :)
- research experience (working on this one too! :)</p>

3

<p>I'm an EE grad student at Stanford (rejected from MIT), so maybe I could give some advice. The average GPA in the program is around a 3.9 (both technical and overall). Unlike most programs which consider your major and overall GPA, Stanford considers your technical and overall GPA. Also, if your college gives A+, Stanford will count them as 4.3, which most other grad programs also don't do. I'm assuming that you're a freshman, so you still have plenty of time to raise your GPA to around the 3.9 average. Other things you will need are 3 letters of recommendation (preferably from well-known professors, which shouldn't be hard seeing as how UCSB has a pretty good EE program), a year or two of research experience (internships are much less valuable), and high GRE scores (close to 800 Quantitaive and at least 600 Verbal). Publications are almost unheard of for undergrads, so they're not really necessary.</p>

4

<p>Hey im_blue,</p>

<p>I am actually ending my sophmore year here at UCSB. Mathematically, if I were to obtain a 4.0 from here on out (which is unheard of), I'd only have a 3.86. I also had a quick question: When do undergraduates usually take the GREs?.. If its coming up, I better start studying. On the positive side, I already have a little research position next quarter designing a controller for an optical delay line which should yield a pretty good letter of recommendation.</p>

<p>I appreciate your time and effort im_blue. By the way, how do you like it there? Was it easy to find funding?</p>

<p>phpguru</p>

5

<p>Why must you go to Stanford or MIT? There have been many, many great engineers who didn't go to schools of that caliber.</p>

<p>Who cares about the Dean's List? I wasn't on it even once as an undergraduate. After I graduated, nobody cared.</p>

<p>And what's wrong with a GPA of 3.46/4? I have my Master's Degree in EE, and I haven't had a GPA above that level since first semester of freshman year. And guess what? NOBODY CARES!</p>

<p>How well are you learning? Do you have an EE-related hobby? (I am an amateur radio operator. I wish I had been a ham when I was an undergraduate, because I would have been able to relate to everything so much better.)</p>

6

<p>phpguru, I was once a charter member of the Academic Performance Cult. If you want to communicate further in private, my email is <a href="mailto:collegeconfidential@jasonhsu.com">collegeconfidential@jasonhsu.com</a>.</p>

7

<p>"When do undergraduates usually take the GREs?" Usually the summer or fall of senior year, before applications are due in December or January."</p>

<p>"On the positive side, I already have a little research position next quarter designing a controller for an optical delay line which should yield a pretty good letter of recommendation." That's a good start, but try to get 3 good letters of recommendation.</p>

<p>"By the way, how do you like it there?" I like it a lot here, but it is crazy competitive. The average grade is a B+ = 3.3, and you need a 3.5 GPA to take the PhD Qualifying Exam, which has a pass rate of roughly 1/3 for first time and 2/3 for second time. You're allowed two tries to pass and become a PhD student. Otherwise, you have to leave with the MSEE.</p>

<p>"Was it easy to find funding?" Funding is actually pretty hard to get at Stanford, especially for MS students and for the first year.</p>

<p>phpguru</p>

8

<p>Thanks for answering all of my questions im_blue and jhsu.</p>

<p>phpguru</p>

9

<p>Ask close profs to make phone calls for you to the department head of the department you are applying (better than anything you will write or any recs). Also, publishing articles and giving presentations at conferences will definitely make you look good.</p>

10

<p>While I can't comment on what's going on in EE at Stanford, I can say that I know plenty of MIT EE graduate students who had undergraduate GPA's of far lower than 3.9/4. Granted, they all did their undergrads at MIT, so take that for whatever it's worth. </p>

<p>I would also answer the questions about the competitiveness of graduate-school EECS at MIT in this way. It's a roundabout way, so bear with me. Let me tell you about the MIT LFM program, which is basically the dual-master's degree program run by the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT School of Engineering, where students get both an MBA from the Sloan School and a MS (technically, an "SM") from any engineering discipline the LFM student chooses, including EECS. It's all completed in 2 years. </p>

<p>Think about what that means. An LFM student who chooses EECS as his engineering discipline must complete all the requirements of a regular SM EECS student at MIT, including the master's thesis, while at the same time completing all the requirements of the Sloan MBA. Think about that for a moment. Each one of these degrees by itself generally takes 2 years. LFM students have to do both in 2 years. </p>

<p>Nevertheless, every single LFM student in the history of the program (which has existed since 1990) has managed to graduate with both degrees. Every single one.</p>

<p>Now, you might be thinking, well, these LFM students must be geniuses. Well, in their eyes, they certainly don't feel that way. In fact, one LFM student said it best when he said "Compared to the regular MIT graduate engineering students, we're not as good as they are. If we were, we would be trying to get our PhD's, just like they are". Nevertheless, all LFM students have managed to get through the program.</p>

11

<p>Sakky, many MS Engineering degrees at MIT and other places are designed to be completed in 1 year, although many students do take up to 2 years to finish their thesis work. The MBA program is 2 years, but by double-counting some classes and taking summer classes, the students are able to complete 3 years of work in only 2. It's certainly not easy, but it's not superhuman, either.</p>

12

<p>Uh, first of all, MIT does not allow double-counting, at least for its graduate programs. </p>

<p>Second of all, I can say with confidence that the MS in EECS at MIT is specifically designed for 2 years. </p>

<p>Third of all, while LFM does get one 'extra' summer, on the other hand, they have to complete a required 6-month internship during which they cannot take classes, which basically means they lose an entire regular semester. Hence, LFM basically gets 4 semesters to complete everything (one summer, one fall, two springs). And the summer is not a 'real semester', simply because of the time constraints, (summer is 2.5 months long, vs. a regular semester at MIT, which is 3.5 months long). </p>

<p>Hence, the point is, LFM is doing something that I consider fairly impressive. Why don't you complete a MS and an MBA at Stanford, all within 4 semesters, before you start judging.</p>

13

<p>"S.M.: A one- or two-year program, beyond the bachelors, leading to the S.M. degree Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science." <a href="http://www.eecs.mit.edu/ug/brief-guide.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.eecs.mit.edu/ug/brief-guide.html&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p>

<p>The S.M. requires 66 units, which is the same as 22 semester hours of credit, which fits into one year.</p>

14

<p>Sure, you can do the SM in EECS in 1 year, but the reality is that very few people actually do so. It's just like you could complete a SB in MIT in 3, or potentially even in 2 years, but few do so. Heck, I've heard of certain legendary people getting their PhD's in 2 years or even 1 year at MIT. </p>

<p>We have to talk about what usually happens, and what usually happens is that the SM in EECS takes about 2 years. Most graduate students will take only 1-2 classes per term (which is 12-24 units), plus thesis work. </p>

<p>Expanding the discussion to not just specifically EECS, there are plenty of people who 3 or more years to get their SM. That's precisely what happened to Pepper White, the author of the Idea Factory, who needed 3 years to get an SM in mechanical engineering. </p>

<p>Nevertheless, the fact remains that LFM'ers have never needed more than 2 years to graduate. Heck, in the old days, I heard of LFM'ers graduating with both degrees in only 3 semesters, but Sloan now prevents anybody from getting their MBA's (including LFM'ers) frm doing that. </p>

<p>I wouldn't say that LFM'ers are superhuman either, but I would add in the following.</p>

<p>*LFM'ers have been out in the workforce and are therefore no longer 'tuned academic machines'.</p>

<p>LFM requires at least 2 years of work experience to be eligible, and most LFm'ers have many more years than that - sometimes 10 or 15 years of work experience. The upshot is that they've been out of school for a while and are academically rusty. For example, many LFM'ers complain that they can't remember all their basic calculus and linear algebra, because the fact is, they haven't used it in years. Contrast that with people who most normal grad-students who went to graduate school right after undergrad, and thus have their academic skills honed to a razor-sharp point. Nevertheless, there is no mercy for LFMers - they are expected to be fully competitive with those other graduate students. </p>

<ul>
<li>Think of the academic environment. Where do regular EECS graduate students go after an EECS class? Probably to their lab or their office or to some other place where they get to be with other EECS graduate students and profs. Their whole life revolves around EECS. They can bounce EECS ideas off their fellow coworkers, they got lots of EECS reading material and lab gear just lying around that they can play wit, etc. Where do LFM'ers go after class? Almost always to Sloan. LFM'ers generally aren't provided with labs or deskspace in the School of Engineering. The LFM office is next to Sloan. Hence, LFM'ers have no supporting engineering environment to help them really learn the material. But again, there is no mercy, LFM'ers are expected to be fully competitive in class.<br></li>
</ul>

<p>Ask yourself - im_blue, how much less EE would you know if you had to spend most of your time at the Stanford Graduate School of Business?</p>

<p>The upshot is that I think we can all agree that LFMers are required to do more work than the typical Master's degree student at MIT (and presumably also at Stanford), despite having less resources and despite being rustier students, and also (in their own words) being simply worse students. Again, I would invoke the words of an LFM'er who said that if he was as good as those other graduate students, then he would be the one trying to get his PhD from MIT, just like those other graduate students. </p>

<p>Let's just say that it's extremely difficult to compete on a curve in a class where for many of the graduate students, it's the only class they are taking in that semester (plus their thesis), whereas you have 8 other classes to do (and also your thesis). Yet LFM'ers do it and manage to survive. Maybe not survive with the best grades. But they still survive.</p>

15

<p>I forget to add what may be the biggest impediment to LFM'ers in doing well in their engineering courses. Quite frankly - motivation is a problem. What I mean by that is that I think it's safe to say that LFM students care far less, on average, about their graduate engineering coursework than the other MIT graduate engineering students that they are competing with for grades. </p>

<p>Think of it this way. The average LFM student is about 28 (about the same age as the average Sloan student), which is significantly older than the average MIT engineering graduate student. The average LFM student has had significant work experience, some of them with significant managerial experience prior to LFM. And, unlike most MIT engineering grad-students, practically no LFM graduate students ever intend to work as a true engineer ever again in their lifetime. That is, after all, why most of them are getting their MBA's from Sloan. Sloan is one of the elite business schools in the country. Generally speaking, you don't get an MBA from an elite business school just to go back to being an engineer. If they wanted to continue to be engineers, they would have just stayed with their old jobs. They go to LFM to get into management. Obviously LFM'ers tend to take management-type roles that are more technically oriented than regular MBA students would take, like engineering project management, technology strategy, Director or VP of engineering of a small tech company, those sorts of things.</p>

<p>However, the point is, for the most part, they are never going back to being straight-up engineers. Hence, when push comes to shove, and it's time to crank out another impossible engineering problem set or read another indecipherable chapter of the textbook, a strong part of each LFM student asks "Why?". After all, they know that they are never going to use that stuff in the future. An LFM student knows full well that getting a good grade in circuit analysis isn't going to help him get a good management job. </p>

<p>Basically, regular engineering graduate students can get excited about the material because they live and breathe it every day and they know that they're going to be using it. LFM students lack that excitement because they're leaving the world of engineering and going to management. Hence, clearly, the mental drive of LFM students to learn engineering is a whole lot less than the drive of regular engineering students. </p>

<p>Yet the fact is, they all still manage to put it all together and graduate with their engineering degrees. They're always swamped with MBA stuff, they're academically rusty, they don't have the supporting infrastructure/environment, they're by their own admission not as good as regular engineering students, and finally, they're simply not as motivated to do well in engineering. Yet they manage to put it all together anyway.</p>