<p>I am a junior at UCSD with a ECE GPA of 3.25. I am currently doing research for my professor in various electromagnetic devices including novel transparent conductor waveguides and electromagnetic therapy. I also have an internship at a semiconductor corporation, which I have had for around 6 months. </p>
<p>I want to get into a top 5 PhD school, particularly UC Berkeley. </p>
<p>Am I on the right track? Am I already in trouble with my GPA? I've also heard that upper division ECE classes have more weight than lower division, so am I still in a recoverable position for consideration for a top school?</p>
<p>The information I’ve read about graduate school is that there are 3 main things that factor heavily into graduate school admissions. Those are:</p>
<p>a) Letters of recommendation.
b) Research experience.
c) GPA</p>
<p>Optional: GRE</p>
<p>My perception is that letters of recommendation and research experience are slightly more important than the GPA. To me, this seems logical, since most of your time in graduate school will be spent doing research under the supervision of an advisor.</p>
<p>Here are the good news: you are already doing undergrad research for your professor; to me, that means he/she thinks you are good student that may be relied upon to conduct some research. Talk to your professor, I’ll repeat that again, talk to your professor. Your professor must provide you with feedback as to how you are performing; your professor will also provide you with feedback about whether or not you are cut out for graduate school.</p>
<p>What I would do is focus on raising my GPA to 3.5 and maintaining it there. If you manage to obtain 4-5 strong letters of recommendation, you will have a strong chance of being accepted to a top 20 institution. What you want to do is impress your professors and show them you are a good researcher. Recommendations from professors carry more weight than GPA, imo, because very few people will vouch or put their reputation on the line for mediocre candidates.</p>
<p>If I maintain straight A’s from now until graduation I’ll get a 3.75. I had personal issues this year and I think I can accomplish straight A’s without major constraints. </p>
<p>What are my chances at Berkeley with a 3.75 GPA, assuming I keeping going on my research path I’m currently undertaking?</p>
<p>That depends entirely on Berkeley and many other factors that may be out of your control. If you think you can maintain straight A’s, excellent, but we both know that’s not a certainty. Your best approach is to build a good professional relationship with your faculty professors.</p>
<p>Your faculty professors are more than likely Ph.D. holders with connections to other professionals and institutions. They know how the system works better than any person here, even the grad students. If or when you enter grad school, you will be working under people like them. </p>
<p>Yes, maintain a high GPA but you seriously need to start getting more familiar with your faculty.</p>
Sharp upward trends are, more often than not, wishful thinking. But if you manage to pull it off, you would still be a little below the average for UC Berkeley grad EECS as it’s about ~3.9 (and the acceptance rate is ~5%). However, 3.75 is close enough that GPA doesn’t matter much anymore. I would be more worried about actually getting those straight A’s.</p>
<p>You’ll hear plenty of fluffy talk about research/LoR outweighing GPA, thus giving low GPAs a chance. The first part is a truism, but the world is big enough that a top 5 EE school doesn’t need to make such hard choices - there are enough PhD applicants strong in all three aspects to fill all the spots. This is particularly true for EE, as the major is worshiped in Asia and so it always has a strong international applicant pool. The lowest GPA of the top 5 in EE PhD programs is Illinois, and it’s ~3.8 there. These averages speak for themselves. There are always successful outlier applicant, but don’t count on being one of them. MS programs are another story (much less competitive since they’re cash cows for the departments), but Berkeley doesn’t have one.</p>
<p>You say MS programs are cash cows for the department, do you mean to belittle them? (Not meant to put you on the spot) Aren’t they also respectable and marketable degrees, or no?</p>
<p>Ah, I see. Well Berkeley will still be my aim, and I understand the wishful thinking logic, as most of the time it is. Yet this is how I’ve operated before, so I trust myself.</p>
<p>enemyunit, it depends on your undergrad school, but above 3.6+ is competitive from a top school and 3.8+ from unknown/international schools. Note that only Illinois and Stanford have MS programs at the top 5. MIT, Berkeley, and Caltech assume everyone entering is a future PhD (although you can of course drop out after the MS you get along the way). For a terminal MS, research is a plus rather than a requirement and your letters can just be “this guy is smart” rather than “this guy has research potential”. In other words, the letters from profs you just took classes with or even from managers are adequate (for PhD you almost HAVE to have at least one letter from someone who oversaw your research work).</p>
<p>EngineerHead, I was referring to top programs only, not MS degrees in general. If it meets three criteria: 1) large number of MS students, 2) no funding for MS students, and 3) top private, then it’s fairly likely that the admission standards are much lower than you would expect for a school of that caliber because it’s a money machine. For example, it’s well known that the Stanford terminal MSEE is fairly easy to get into (comparable to schools ranked around 10 while Stanford is top three; this doesn’t sound like much but admissions in EE get much easier very quickly as you go down the top ranks, particularly outside the troika of MIT/Stanford/Berkeley) and it’s also large (200 graduates a year). You can even consider it overexploited, in that its value is lower than you’d expect of a Stanford degree because so many people have it or know someone who has it. Let me emphasize that it’s still better than an MSEE from somewhere other than maybe the more selective among the top 10.</p>
<p>Pemo, I forgot to mention that it’s not your GPA at graduation that counts, it’s what you have at the end of junior year. You apply in late fall, before fall grades are finalized (in a semester system). There is almost no way you could get to a 3.75 from a 3.25 with just one more year (I assume you just finished your sophomore year?). Assuming equal weighting, you could get around 3.25<em>2/3 + 4</em>1/3 = 3.5 GPA by the time of application. I would aim for publications and/or letters from well-known tenured professors as it’s hard to otherwise overcome a 3.5 for top 5 EE PhD programs. Like I said, you might be good, but there are enough people that are better.</p>
<p>What’s interesting is I actually did much better in my classes than expected this quarter, and have a GPA of 3.4! </p>
<p>So now, even considering the fact that I apply next year, my max GPA is 3.7. </p>
<p>Also, I am willing to retake classes/stay another year to improve my GPA to get into an amazing grad school. Where does my motivation come from? I found a passion in the field, and I don’t want to end up a grunt.</p>
<p>What is the viability of taking classes over? I recieved a B - in a tremendously easy class, and a B in another tremendously easy class, would it be a good idea to maybe retake these? </p>
<p>Also, how about the viability of waiting an additional year to go to grad school if I don’t get accepted, and taking on more classes / research opportunites?</p>
<p>Don’t retake classes unless you are required to or unless the grade is completely replaced in the GPA calculation. Else it merely makes it look like you needed twice as many tries as others to understand the material. Also, you should be going off of technical GPA, not EE GPA.</p>
<p>Staying longer won’t look bad, but you need to seriously consider whether you want to spend an additional 1/80th of you life in school merely to improve your chances at something where 95% of applicants are unsuccessful, many of them with stronger profiles than you. Why so set on top 5? Only the top few out of a class will be competitive for MIT/Stanford/Berkeley. At 3.4, think about how many fellow UCSD EE students are beating you out right now, and many of them are also thinking “I’ll get straight A’s from here on out.” Don’t get obsessed with attending a top program, which you seem to be doing if you’re seriously considering delaying graduation just to improve chances.</p>
<p>Higher ranked undergrad is better, but top 20 is nothing remarkable for top PhD programs, although you instantly have 90% of the internationals beat.</p>
<p>I’m that set on a top school because I am under the impression that the education received there is that much better, and because I want to do research / attain a job as a professor as my final goal, I want to do as much as I can to do something I love to do, and I realized that only recently, when I got my grunt internship job and saw what a majority of real life engineers do.</p>
<p>I am not 100 percent dead set obsessed with a top 5 school; I am dead set obsessed with a top twenty school, however. UCLA is probably the minimum I would want to get, with Cal Tech probably being my most realistic high end goal.</p>
<p>I love school, I love my major, I wouldn’t consider the extra year a waste, if it’s for a chance at doing something great. </p>
<p>If I fail to get straight A’s in the following years, my goals will change. But for now, I do have hope. Also, those that do have a higher GPA than me and have the same goal will have a maximum of .25 grade points higher if I achieve what I am setting out to achieve. You don’t think I can compensate for the 3.75 GPA with more research, considering I’m already on a pretty fast track in that department as it is?</p>
<p>Thank you so much for your help, by the way</p>
You won’t need to. If you’re at 3.75 and they’re at 3.95 (from the same school), you’ll both be judged on letters and research experience. But: 1) I never take “A’s from here on out” claims seriously; I don’t care what the story is. 2) Plenty of people with 3.9 and research experience get rejected anyway. For example, there used to be a poster here, im_blue, who had a 3.9 from Illinois (4th in EE) with a REU and a senior thesis and he was rejected by MIT and Berkeley. Now he was a smart guy - went to Stanford instead and got a PhD there. But I guess Berkeley didn’t recognize his ability. And that’s why you shouldn’t get caught up in getting into a top school. It’s a crapshoot to some degree, and in your case, you are already sort of on the lower end. Once we leave the top 5 programs, EE admissions become MUCH more reasonable and predictable so getting hooked on getting into a top 20 is not a problem.</p>
<p>Also, Caltech may be the single hardest to get into because the annual intake is only 20 EE grad students. Moreover the number of professors is low, so there needs to be a strong match. That’s true anywhere, but the others are big enough that chances are that someone in the department does research that suits your interests. Out of the top 5, Illinois is the easiest followed by Stanford. Note though, that Stanford doesn’t fund most of the PhD students until they pass the PhD qual, which is why it’s bizarrely easier to get into than MIT and Berkeley, despite being just as good.</p>