<p>Has been a long time since I posted here :) Last year I graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from UC Berkeley. I had a decent GPA (3.8+). I actually wasn't intending on going to graduate school but I recently had a change of heart. Specifically, I want to get into the Stanford Master's program for CS.</p>
<p>That's where the problem lies. Since I wasn't interested in attending grad school for CS I didn't care about getting research experience or recommendation letters from professors. However, 3 recommendation letters are required for the application and ideally 2 of them should be from academic sources.</p>
<p>How can I go about getting great recommendation letters or getting to know professors now that I am not a student anymore? I took some advanced (grad) classes so I toying with the idea of simply emailing professors (not necessarily at Stanford) and ask for volunteering for their research projects. Does anyone have experience with that? Or do you have any other ideas?</p>
<p>You could try taking graduate-level courses at your undergrad institution as a non-degree seeking student (if you are still in the Bay Area). This way you’ll be in touch with professors in your field of interest, some of them taught you during your UG. You could discuss your intent to go to graduate school and latter on ask for letters of recommendation. As for research experience, look for job offers in a research lab at academia or industry. What are your specific research goals? Try to align them with your job position.</p>
<p>I sometimes get requests like these from students who have graduated some time ago. I generally respond better to students whom I had in a class and who did well or from my academic advisees, even if the did not do any research with me.</p>
<p>My suggestion is for you to contact professor from UCB with whom you took smaller upper division or graduate classes and did well. Reintroduce yourself to them and include your resume and some details about what you have been doing since graduation if it is relevant to your major. Be prepared that some might not respond but since you graduated only a year ago, there is a chance that you can snag a couple of references. If that does not work, then you might want to follow the advice of Dengue2011. Good Luck!</p>
<p>First of all, thanks for the responses and advice. I was hoping to specialize in “Recommender Systems”, a subfield of Machine Learning.</p>
<p>I’m sure I can’t just take a classes as a “non-degree seeking student”, especially not graduate courses. If it was a big undergrad class I could probably just sit in, talk to the professor and no one would realize though ;)</p>
<p>I don’t really wanna change my job to get into grad school. I’m currently self-employed and pretty happy. I am actually working on lots of projects that are related to the specialization I want to get into, but it’s not research. I am trying to read academic books and current research papers though.</p>
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I see what you mean but I really didn’t built deeper relationships with professors. I am pretty sure I could “snag a couple of references” but I think that template-based mediocre references probably won’t cut it at Stanford :(</p>
<p>Please let me know if any of you have any more advice. Really appreciate it!</p>
<p>I applied for a grad program several years out of college with a similar issue. I went back to my college and made an appointment with a prof I needed for a rec. I gave him photocopies of research papers done for him with his comments on them - he really appreciated that and I’m sure it helped him write a good letter. I did get into the school!</p>
<p>What do you mean? It is perfectly possible at Berkeley at least to take a course for a fee, through an extension program, even if you are not enrolled as an undergraduate. Just contact the relevant professor and fill out the paperwork, and you’re done. </p>
<p>If you like your job, I don’t think you should really change it. </p>
<p>The other thing is that you are applying to a master’s, not PhD, program, and I suspect that means that a professor would not need to comment as much on what it is like to work with you as a person. Rather, they would be useful, respected sources who could see what you have done and make a case for you (in particular, since the graduate program prefers to hear a professor brag about you rather than you brag about yourself). So it is perfectly fine if a professor does not remember you terribly well, as long as you go up, introduce yourself, and describe what it is you want from graduate studies, so the professor can comment intelligently on that and your potential for it, based on their opinions as scholars, despite potentially being scholars who have not known you closely for long.</p>
<p>My impression is that in a field such as EECS, there is not terribly much of the “chitter chatter with the right people” mentality, and that the professors will be happy to support you if you are objectively a dedicated student, and they can see it and write about it.</p>
You are right, I think you are talking about the concurrent enrollment program. I didn’t know about that possibility before. Unfortunately I moved away from Berkeley but it seems like other schools do have the same, or similar, programs. I’ll definitely look into that.</p>
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That definitely makes sense, thank you. I know that the Master’s program at Stanford is much less competitive than the PhD program but since most applicants probably have stellar scores I would imagine that letters of recommendations are one of the main discriminating factors. And with most people probably having some kind of research experience it doesn’t look to good for me without that.</p>
<p>Anyway, thanks for the responses so far, very helpful.</p>
<p>I am unfamiliar with how research experience factors into Master’s programs, but it seems like all the projects you completed should be just as impressive, particularly because a non-PhD-bound Master’s student likely is primarily interested in doing projects outside of academia.</p>
<p>Even if you didn’t “cozy” up to professors during your undergraduate years, your link to them via taking an advanced class or so still means a lot. And a sensible professor will ask you about your plans and not just write about how they know you through their class; rather, they will ask you to provide them with as much as possible to help support your case of being strong at what you plan to do. Pick someone to whom you feel you can explain what you have done, where they would actually listen and be willing to write your letter accordingly.</p>