<p>I want to go to grad school for engineering, but I don't really know the first thing about it, but my first question is this: is work experience looked upon more favorably than volunteer experience? I'm volunteering for the Wildlife Conservation Society this summer.</p>
<p>I do have work experience. I've been in a neuroscience lab for over a year but this summer, things will be a bit different.</p>
<p>Grad schools will be interested in the following things - your undergrad GPA, your GRE scores, your undergrad research experience, and your letters of recommendation. If you have engineering work experience or an internship, that would also be good. However, if you are want to volunteer for the summer instead of doing work that is unrelated to engineering, it won’t matter.</p>
<p>^Exactly. Grad school admissions are much narrower than college admissions, aka your mission trips and soup kitchen work matters naught.</p>
<p>Extra-curricular for grad schools are really co-curricular activities. As in, if it’s not tightly related to what you’re doing now and what you want to do in the future (in grad school) it doesn’t matter either way.</p>
<p>Many masters and all PhD programs want to see research. It doesn’t matter if you volunteered or got paid. It only needs to be vaguely related to the program you apply (I did yeast ecology in UG, but did rotations in the biochem dept for the PhD). They look for: how well do you know about the subject you’re researching? do you know why it’s important? Can you communicate your research through presentations and writing? What did you have to troubleshoot to get something to work?</p>
<p>Your neuroscience lab experience would help for Engineering. If your wildlife conservation position involves collecting and analyzing data, that might also help. But if you really want to up your chances for grad school in engineering, join an engineering or physics lab after the summer’s over and focus on a project. Wildlife conservation can help, but not alone get you into grad school.</p>