Engineering Grad School

Colleges and Universities A-Z Worcester Polytechnic Institute
1

<p>Is there a reason that there are so few engineering graduates of WPI who decide to do graduate school in Engineering or Computer Science compared to RPI, Illinois, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Stevens Institute of Technology, University of Rochester, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, and other peer-range schools.</p>

<p>This seems random, but I saw a book about the Ivory Tower listing these statistics about how RPI engineering graduates around 12 students a year to UC Berkeley, around 16 to Georgia Tech and around 5 to University of Illinois-Urbana Champagne. Many other schools, like UIUC, graduated 300+ students to its own graduate program. WPI seems to place its very top students into lower first-tier grad schools like Brown, Maryland, UC Irvine, and UCLA.</p>

<p>Is this because students at WPI are more interested in entering industry immediately (and pursuing grad school later), because they choose the 5 year BS/MS program, or because grad schools look down upon WPI. I was surprised because I saw (and know) a lot of people at WPI who are at top companies like Microsoft, Intel, Google, AMD, NVIDIA, Apple, among other top tier corporations. </p>

<p>How are the research opportunities at WPI and how does one make the most of them to get into one of these top engineering grad schools. I love WPI and that's why I chose it over RPI and others and will be attending this fall it but I also want to know what I can do at WPI to maximizing my chances.</p>

<p>These figures surprised me because I will be attending WPI and I am preliminarily interested in doing research at a top tier (probably not MIT/Caltech-tier, but close) grad schools like UC Berkeley, Illinois, Texas, and GA Tech.</p>

2

<p>It might just be that WPI is a smaller school. If that doesn’t eliminate the difference, WPI might simply have a slightly weaker applicant pool than the other schools you listed. </p>

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<p>Recommendations: </p>

<p>-Keep your GPA strong. 3.5+. It really cannot hurt and if you choose at some point to go into patent law or medicine, it will save your life. </p>

<p>-Try to do advanced classes in your area of interest. </p>

<p>-Apply for REUs starting your freshman year. They pay good money, build connections in the field, and look good on your resume. I only applied to 2 my freshman year and one professor asked me to read his research paper (but ultimately choose someone else). Remember to apply to more than 2 and get your application in well before the deadline!</p>

3

<p>Thanks. I am interested in doing research/internships and while courses are not my favoirte thing in the world, I will fortunately have the luxury to choose the course that I want to do at WPI and I guess that will help me do well.</p>

<p>I think size is probably the main issue along with the fact that there is a lot of international competition for electrical engineering and computer science grad school compared to mechanical/civil engineering and the BS/MS program also looks like a good program for someone who wants to attend a high tier doctotal program. Plus they have good industry relations that will ensure me a good job if I do reasonably well.</p>

4

<p>Research at WPI is a bit weak, and since the professors are not at the top of their fields, recomendations from WPI carry less weight than recomendations from more well known institutions. However, there are some advantages to undergrad research at WPI. Because there is less competition for undergrad research, it is easier to get research oppertunities and publish. A friend of mine who goes there says that the more ambitious students can definatly publish at least once, if not two or maybe even three times. After you get a good grasp for your field, make sure to ask your professers if they would let you work with them on research every term until you get a research op. Also, you should take courses witch will give you more backround in the research projects going on at WPI when you are there. I know currently WPI is doing some decent AI research, so consider taking an AI course earlier than you may otherwise have in order to maximize your chance of getting an op earlier. If you do an REU or two, and try to get some on campus research done each year (and hopefully publishing), you can go to a top engineering grad school from WPI.</p>

<p>You seem to be a bit paranoid about your choice for college. Don’t be. Remember that in the worst case scenario of you hating WPI, you can always transfer to a different school. However, you will probably find that WPI is a great school with decent research opertunities, and won’t want to.</p>

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<p>Hm. When you say professors at the top of their fields, are you talking about professors at Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Caltech? </p>

<p>Also, off topic but I love the Futurama Space Pope gag.</p>

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<p>Professors at the top of their fields, I’d say, don’t necesarily have to be at the tier one schools you describe. Many not-so-prestegious schools have professors that are at the top (notably big, research oriented state schools)</p>

7

<p>
[QUOTE=SpacePope]

Professors at the top of their fields, I’d say, don’t necesarily have to be at the tier one schools you describe. Many not-so-prestegious schools have professors that are at the top (notably big, research oriented state schools)

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<p>Right, also it would make sense that WPI would have fewer professors at the top of their field simply because of their size. Even if professors at WPI and big research universities are equal on average, we’d expect the big research university to have a greater number of professors at the top of their field.</p>

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<p>I’m looking at a paper from the WPI Career Development Center that lists the Grad Schools that WPI students have attended. Some of them include Brown, Caltech, Cornell, both Dartmouth and Harvard med schools, MIT, Princeton, Berkeley, and Yale. Given this, I would say that WPI students are definitely capable of getting into prestigous grad schools. I don’t know why Illinios or GTech is not on the list, but location might have something to do with it. With the exemption of Berkeley and Caltech, all of the school are in the Northeast.</p>

<p>Now back to the issue of why only about 20% of WPI students attend grad school. I think this is most likely because they feel prepared enough to tackle the real world right out. The same thing happens at Rose-Hulman, another small private engineering-dominated school.</p>

<p>The fact of the matter is that it is entirely up to you to get into one of these prestigious grad schools, not WPI, even though a WPI education is undoubtable a good one (or at least from what I’ve heard, I am an incoming student).</p>

9

<p>I won’t let a Space Pope insult the faculty at my mighty school. Just joking… I love the Space Pope.</p>

<p>But a lot of those large state schools have extremeley competitive graduate students and that was why I chose WPI over UMass and other large state schools, for example. Because UMass has 300 grad students who are all pursuing Ph.D vs 17 at WPI. And WPI has 2/3 as many tenure-track faculty, so the ratio to students is quite decent and professors probably by necessity assign more of thier research to undergrads, since they are researchers even though they might not recieve quite as many NSF grants or corporate donations as an MIT professor, for example.</p>

<p>I don’t think that WPI recommendations are valued less than most schools (except MIT, Caltech, Berkeley, Princeton, Harvard). They are probably valued equally since at a large state school, a lot of the “top professors” you mention almost exclusively teach grad courses and work almost with grad students and your interactions with them will be more limited. To them, you will likely be a random number and they would likely write a fairly generic recommendation unless you do something exceptional. I also liked the career center since they help place many students into good internships where I can build my professional/academic resume. The limited availability of interdisciplinary work seems to be an issue but I think that there are probably a lot of projects people do at WPI applying combinatorics and game theory to biology/etc. </p>

<p>The research opportunities are also augmented by the nearby UMass Medical Center and the numerous corporate and academic project centers.</p>

10

<p>Next question for you guys:</p>

<p>90% of students at MIT EECS do undergrad research through the UROP program. Will they necessarily be preferred by corporations and grad schools over a student from WPI or another strong undergrad engineering program solely because they are from MIT and did undergrad research or will other factors such as GPA/quality of work matter as well. I heard somewhere that recruiters at Stanford and MIT just hire them on the basis that they are from a top school without even looking at GPA. I don’t doubt that the students at MIT aren’t brilliant but it seems like a top 1% student at WPI would easily be at least top 15% (if not more) at MIT.</p>

<p>I always thought talent is more important than the school you go to and I need some of you to provide feedback. Does ability matter the most, is it professional networking, or is it the school you go to, or a certain combination of all of them.</p>

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<p>
[QUOTE=IndianPwnerDude]

I always thought talent is more important than the school you go to and I need some of you to provide feedback. Does ability matter the most, is it professional networking, or is it the school you go to, or a certain combination of all of them.

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<p>It really does depend on your field. In engineering, what school you go to is not that big of a deal. But in law of investment banking it makes all the difference. </p>

<p>It’s also important to remember that while the average WPI student is less academically inclined than the average MIT student, the international student body at WPI is extremely strong. When I took my first class at WPI I was blown away by how much more experienced they were than the domestic students.</p>