<p>...or any other school of similar caliber.</p>
<p>Coming out of high school, I promised myself that I'd learn about and do everything necessary to be able to try and get into a "stellar" grad school. The problem is, that I don't know what these things are.</p>
<p>In high school, it was important to have good grades, test scores, ECs, research, and rec letters.</p>
<p>I'm sure grades, test scores, and rec letters still matter a lot... but what about ECs? What type of ECs look good when applying to these grad schools? What would be your personal advice to someone who wants to get into a school like this? What would you do?</p>
<p>Engineering grad school doesn't care about ECs, unless they are very closely related to engineering such a solar car maybe, or a robotics competition. The best thing you can do is join a good research group early on and do well, get as good a rec from your research professor as you can. If you can your name as a coauthor down on a paper, that's even better, but it's not necessary.</p>
<p>You're talking about a PhD program?</p>
<p>Research. Research research research.</p>
<p>I could go into more, but read this (written for applicants to top 10 computer science programs, but probably applicable to other engineering fields, and the author has been a graduate adcom at MIT, CMU, and Berkeley):</p>
<p><a href="http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Eharchol/gradschooltalk.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~harchol/gradschooltalk.pdf</a></p>
<p>Thank you very much for that excellent resource, jessiehl. I read most of it immediately.
At this point I'm not really thinking of a PhD program but rather a masters. However, its really too early to say so thanks for all the useful info.</p>