<p>I am looking into MIT and Harvard for graduate school. How hard is it to get into their graduate engineering school assuming I have a GPA 4.0/4.0 from Cornell Universit and at least 1500/1600 GRE and awesome recos?</p>
<p>Those are pretty grand assumptions. Are you near the end or just starting undergrad? A lot of emphasis is placed on quality research experience and letters of recommendation. Needless to say anyone with those stats you mentioned will be considered competitively but having the numbers alone will not get you in.</p>
<p>Research experience? What is your research experience like? I fail to see how your recommendations (please don't call them recos) could be awesome if they are not from professors with whom you did research or for whom you worked as a research assistant.</p>
<p>EDIT: By the way, the GRE isn't looked at as a score out of 1600, but rather as three separate scores out of 800, 800 and 6 respectively. Depending on the program you apply to, different portions of the test will have different degrees of influence in your application.</p>
<p>I'm sure if you have a 4.0 from Cornell engineering undergrad, it'd look very impressive. I'm pretty impressed. 4.0 from Cornell is not easy I assume. Wouldn't Stanford or Caltech graduate engineering programs be better than Harvard's? Do people even associate Harvard with engineering? I'm sure they have a decent program, but is it well known? I'm at Harvard now, and I don't really hear much about Harvard engineering. I don't really know how much GRE's matter. I think letters of recommendation and aptitude for research is more important than the GRE's. I had a friend who had a 3.8 in electrical engineering from Penn, and he's now a graduate student at MIT. You'll probably get in. I hope you didn't take easy classes to get your 4.0.</p>
<p>I think this is a recently accepted student (international?) at Cornell, making some big assumptions about the future and then asking hypothetical questions about his chances based on those assumptions.</p>
<p>Cornell_freak, if you aren't even in college yet, there is no way to just assume you will get a 4.0 GPA. College is a lot tougher than you may think, especially at schools like Cornell.</p>
<p>Another thing, are you set on engineering graduate school? A 4.0 from any Ivy League institution opens could a myriad of opportunities. I know someone who had a 3.8 from Penn bioengineering and is now studying at Yale Law hoping to be a patent lawyer. I also know a chemical engineer who had a 3.9 from Penn and is now at Johns Hopkins Medical School. If you're interested in going to business school, a couple of years of work experience coupled with a 4.0 from Cornell could make you extremely competitive for b-schools like Penn, Stanford, or Harvard. You gave law, medicine, or business any thoughts? You should be proud, because you have the whole world ahead of you! I'm sure anything you choose to do, you will do very well with your academic caliber. I only knew one person from college who had a 4.0, and he absolutely defined the world "genius". You must be one too!</p>
<p>...assuming I have a 4.0 from Cornell...</p>
<p>then assume what I just said to be the case...</p>
<p>Right, he must be a genius if he assumes he'll get a 4.0 in engineering at Cornell! :) (jk jk)</p>
<p>4.0 at cornell will open doors to many grad schools (esp with great recommendation) even if it's just a hypothetical question</p>
<p>Cornell's GPA is out of 4.3 (A+ scale). I graduated last May with over a 4.0 in engineering. But it took a ****load of work and it doesn't really matter how smart you are or how much you prepare. The homeworks take a long time and the tests are always stuff you have never seen before. I think it's pretty arrogant assuming you'll definitely get a 4.0, but it's doable.</p>
<p>In regards to graduate school (from personal experience), you'll be a complete shoo-in to the very very best schools in the country. But it's also very possible that other top-5 schools have no openings in your concentration and you don't get in because they simply have no space. Grad school can be a crapshoot.</p>
<p>A 4.0 doesn't guarantee admission. In top computer science programs, for example, 4.0s with no research experience are rejected. A 3.2 with stellar research experience has a decent shot.</p>
<p>More details at <a href="http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/%7Eharchol/gradschooltalk.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/%7Eharchol/gradschooltalk.pdf</a></p>
<p>This is a retarded thread.</p>
<p>Oh yea and Harvard's engineering program is a complete joke. I understand ignoring that because of the overall name, but it's just pitifully small and the opportunities are limited.</p>
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Oh yea and Harvard's engineering program is a complete joke. I understand ignoring that because of the overall name, but it's just pitifully small and the opportunities are limited.
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<p>Uh, Harvard's grad engineering program is ranked around #21 or so. Is that a complete joke? Then what does that say about the vast majority of the hundreds of programs that are ranked even lower?</p>
<p>I'm sure dontno meant it as a comparison to MIT since that was what the OP was interested in.</p>
<p>Engineering at Harvard?</p>
<p>Really? I know that Harvard's got billions of dollars to help third world countries but do they really have the engineers to pull off these tasks aside from their economists and political scientists? :)</p>
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Engineering at Harvard?</p>
<p>Really? I know that Harvard's got billions of dollars to help third world countries but do they really have the engineers to pull off these tasks aside from their economists and political scientists?
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<p>Yes really.</p>
<p>Harvard</a> School of Engineering and Applied Sciences</p>
<p>Now, is it as good as MIT? No. But hey, they're ranked around #21 or so. That's pretty darn good when you consider that there are literally hundreds of engineering programs out there.</p>
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I'm sure dontno meant it as a comparison to MIT since that was what the OP was interested in.
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<p>It's one thing to say that Harvard engineering is not as good as MIT's. It's quite another to use inflammatory verbiage like "a complete joke" to describe the program. Like I said, if the #21 ranked program is "a complete joke", then what does that say about most of the other programs that are ranked even lower? The truth is, the vast majority of engineering programs in the world aspire to be as good as Harvard's.</p>