Help about Graduate Admission at MIT, Standford and other top ranked graduate schools

Graduate School
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<p>I am sorry for taking your time by making the post so long.</p>

<p>My main question is that will my low gpa (3.54/4.00) and undegraduate Pakistani School jeopardise my chances of graduate admisson at MIT, Stanford or other top schools? Keeping in view my research profile detailed below. My field of interest is Information Security and Cryptography (Computer Science department). </p>

<p>I have done B.Sc. Electrical Engineering from University of Engineering and Technology, Peshawar, Pakistan with CGPA of 3.54/4.00 (ranked 6th in batch of 114). Will my low gpa creates problems for me to get admission in top ten schools, despite my otherwise good profile?</p>

<p>My GRE Scores are Total: 1350 (Quantitative: 750, Verbal: 600, AWA: 4)
I have given TOEFL and waiting for result</p>

<p>Currently I am Lecturer in Department of Computer Science at IQRA University, Peshawar teaching subjects in which I want to purse my Masters and PhD.</p>

<p>I was Research Assistant at University of Engineering and Technology, Peshawar, Pakistan for 1 and half years.</p>

<p>I have also done one year R&D project with government of our province here in Pakistan (though not related to field which I want to pursue).</p>

<p>I have 7 research papers in international journals and conferences, all publications in my field of interest. (3 papers as single author, 3 papers as first author and one paper as second author).</p>

<p>I also have one short book published by German multinational publisher and available on Amazon.com for sale. (as first author)</p>

<p>I also have one book chapter (proposal accepted and full chapter under process). (as single author).</p>

<p>I am reviewer and program committee member of 4 international journals and 9 international conferences.</p>

<p>I have done CCNA, CCNA Security and CNSS 4011 (American Government organizaton certification), which are all internationally recognized certificaitons in my field of interest. I also have 5 Juniper networks certifications also related to my field of interest. </p>

<p>I have done non-research internships at Alcatel-Lucent (Country Head office), Nokia Siemens Networks and Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited.</p>

<p>I have received MOL (Hungarian Oil and Gas PLC) merit based scholarship worth $3000 USD.</p>

<p>You can view my complete details and my CV at my personal homepage: <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/naveedisp/%5B/url%5D"&gt;https://sites.google.com/site/naveedisp/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>I would be really grateful for your help and time.</p>

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<p>I’d say holy s*** dude, your experiences alone make you stand out of the rest of the applicants. I’ll dare to say that even if you have 2.3 GPA you could still get in.</p>

<p>I have a friend who had 4.0 GPA from UC Berkeley Engineering (omg), with 1550 something GRE 6 AWA (omg), but only 3 months of internship, he didn’t get into Stanford, MIT, Caltech. He got in Stanford with probation the second time he applied.</p>

<p>Plus your GPA isn’t even bad, ofc 3.56 isn’t 4, but this is not med school, grad school doesn’t care as much about GPA as long as it’s above 3 (3.5 for those schools). Your experience alone shows that you are a good researcher. Grad school cares about Research > Recommendation Letters > GPA > GRE</p>

<p>So I guess if you can get a stellar rec letters those schools will instead beg you to join them.</p>

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<p>@vitiatethis</p>

<p>Thanks for the encouraging reply.</p>

<p>The other thing I asked is about my Pakistani undergraduate school?</p>

<p>My low ranked undergraduate school will not lower my chance of getting into these schools?</p>

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<p>I think the way they admit their apps is, they give about 5-10% of spot for internationals. So you won’t really compete against anyone from US, you will compete with everyone coming from international schools.</p>

<p>Judging from your experience you should win hands down provided that the other international applicants doesn’t have crazy stats as you.</p>

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<p>Thanks for your concern.</p>

<p>Can you suggest me some US schools that are ambitious, moderate and safe for me?</p>

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<p>I would still say T4 schools are extremely ambitious. The conferences and journals you’ve refereed/published in are unknown to most CS departments in the US, so they won’t hold much weight. 750 QGRE is a little low, though MIT doesn’t even look at GRE.</p>

<p>Vitiatethis… of course international applicants have crazy stats. Those 5-10% of slots are under competition from the best international students in the world, which is more than the number of US students applying. </p>

<p>I think you have an okay chance at T25 schools for PhD and a good chance for MS, but I would be very surprised if you got into a T4.</p>

<p>The best way to find schools to apply to is to check out who’s publishing at top conferences. This site has a good list:
<a href=“http://faculty.cs.tamu.edu/guofei/sec_conf_stat.htm[/url]”>http://faculty.cs.tamu.edu/guofei/sec_conf_stat.htm&lt;/a&gt;
Look at who’s doing papers you’re interested in, and also look at who’s on the program committee.</p>

<p>Then you can look at US News for rankings… In general for PhD, T4 is very very hard to get into (~4-6% admission), T10 is ~10%, T25 is ~10-25%. Avoid applying to Ivy Leagues and small schools because they don’t have any slots.</p>

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<p>@trout</p>

<p>Thanks for your reply.</p>

<p>I understand your point of few. I am program committee member and reviewer of a conference at GWU at America, International Arab Jounal and a 13th IEEE conference as you can see it in my homepae. I have also served as a reviewer for a Wiley Journal. Ofcourse they are not popular venues, but do you think its reasonable to expect from an undergrad student to be reviewer for IEEE Transactions and very popular conferences?</p>

<p>What about MS at MIT? What about my chances to get into MS at MIT?</p>

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<p>@trout</p>

<p>Thanks for your reply.</p>

<p>I understand your point of few. I am program committee member and reviewer of a conference at GWU at America, International Arab Jounal (its ISI and JCR indexed journal, will have impact factor this year) and a 13th IEEE conference as you can see it in my homepage. I have also served as a reviewer for a Wiley Journal. Ofcourse they are not popular venues, but do you think its reasonable to expect from an undergrad student to be reviewer for IEEE Transactions and very popular conferences?</p>

<p>Regarding publications, I know I don’t have state of the art publications, but I think my publications shows my research aptitude. Publishing at a popular conference, without any funding and guidance for research and publications was almost impossible for me.</p>

<p>What about MS at MIT? What about my chances to get into MS at MIT?</p>

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<p>Naveed, I think you have a good chance at those schools. Your research and publications are indeed going to make you stand out. I suggest that you apply not only to the best-of-the-best but also to a few programs a little lower down the list. If you don’t get into the top 4, it won’t be because of your Pakistani school; it will be because of numbers (for example, MIT takes only a small percentage of applicants, and it gets a lot of them) or because of research fit/funding. </p>

<p>You are applying for PhD programs, right? If you want to continue in research, that’s the way to go. Don’t even bother with M.S. programs. I’m fairly confident that a good US PhD program will take you. The only question is, “Which one?”</p>

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<p>MIT doesn’t have an MS program. However, you could look at Stanford and CMU’s masters programs (though they are expensive). </p>

<p>Publishing is good of course, even in lesser known venues. It’s just that Vitiatethis seemed to be overreacting-- if your papers were all at top security conferences, then I think you’d have a very good chance. As it is, I think you’re an above average applicant for those places, but that’s not good enough to guarantee a chance at MIT/etc. when you’re competing with top students from every other country.</p>

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<p>MIT have that SM Program. By MS I meant MS by research. Ofcourse my ultimate goal is to get a PhD degree.</p>

<p>And MIT wants you to do SM before PhD, if you have only done bachelors.</p>

<p>Do you think, I should apply for PhD or MS by research? I need funding in any case.</p>

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<p>

What is probation? Also did he have no research experience? I would think that those stats should get him into Stanford at least.</p>

<p>naveed, apply for PhD. MS students must almost always fund themselves. trout is correct in saying that MIT doesn’t have an MS program. It has an MS degree, but not an MS program. Everyone is admitted to the PhD program and therefore you have no choice when filling out the application. Of the top EE and CS programs, only Stanford EE, CS and CMU CS have MS programs. These are easier to gain admission to, but as I said before, you MUST fund yourself unless you have an external fellowship. TA/RA opportunities are all for those who pass the PhD qualifying exam or are PhD-track and know faculty members personally.</p>

<p>It’s hard to gauge your chances because these schools are all strongly biased against international schools, even those of the caliber of Tsinghua/NTU/NUS/IITs. Coming from an unknown international school, you virtually must be THE top-ranked student with faculty recommendations stating that you were the best student in years. So it does hurt your case that your GPA is 3.5 and there are 5 students ahead of you. You have a very good chance at other top 25 schools, though. GRE math is a little low but enough to not get rejected outright so they’ll look at your research accomplishments and hopefully dismiss the 750Q.</p>

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<p>I understand that my gpa is low, but, I am the first undergraduate student of my university who was able to publish three papers during his study. This has made me popular in my university and my professors are very happy.</p>

<p>So, I can really get strong Recommendation letters too.</p>

<p>Basically I want to work with a prof at MIT, I like his work.</p>

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<p>@GShine_1989</p>

<p>Can you explain what do you mean by “TA/RA opportunities are all for those who pass the PhD qualifying exam or are PhD-track and know faculty members personally.”</p>

<p>You were saying about funding in MS program?</p>

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<p>At Stanford, you typically have no chance of getting a TA or RA position until AFTER you pass the PhD qualifying exam. Until then, MS students fund themselves (i.e. they pay $40,000 in tuition instead of having tuition waived and getting paid $30,000 stipend - a swing of 70k). This is because the qualifiers have a low passing rate and Stanford has no interest in funding students who might need to leave the program because they couldn’t pass that exam – it’s too big of a risk.</p>

<p>However, some people enter Stanford already knowing some professors (these are pretty much always Americans). Some collaborated with Stanford groups or did summer research at Stanford, and some have connections through their professors at other universities. These people might get RAs before they pass the PhD qualifiers, but as an international, this isn’t available to you anyway.</p>

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<p>@ naveed and trout
I’m sorry for saying something that might be too exaggerated, I seriously thought that naveed’s stats were indeed great, considering that: My friend was also international student (although he graduated from Berkeley) didn’t get in with such a great stat and 0 exp (3 month company internship and no research exp). What he told me about probation was that he got in, but they want to see good grades and good lab work. He asked advisor at Stanford, which said that they weigh experience much more than stats, and “someone with publications or national Olympic participation record have a much better chance to get in than having 4.0 GPA/1600 GREs”. Well you can disregard my comments as just FYI though, since that’s only something that I heard from a friend. Good luck in applying!</p>

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<p>@vitiatethis
Its ok. I am grateful for your reply and time.</p>

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<p>I have to say your activities are amazing. If you were American, the best schools would pay to get you. However note:</p>

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<p>Exactly. Graduate schools tend to be biased against international schools+international students significantly. And not just in Pakistan but even in countries with good university systems like Canada or the UK. I don’t know if this is because they dont trust the quality of the school or just the significant caliber of international students that apply making it impossible to say extremely qualified students.</p>

<p>Your chances are decent but apply to tons of places.</p>