<p>"I guess it is time to go find a very high ledge… "</p>
<p>lmao!!! I didn’t know the engineering sub-forum was so sarcastic! :rolleyes:</p>
<p>Prestige ALWAYS matter :P</p>
<p>"lmao!!! I didn’t know the engineering sub-forum was so sarcastic! "</p>
<p>I try.</p>
<p>And as hasuchObe said, prestige matters. Maybe not as much in industry as it does in academia (and even that is debatable based on WHICH industry), but that grad school prestige can definitely help bump your resume to the top of the pile instead of the middle.</p>
<p>I can’t speak for all grad schools, but prestige doesn’t matter when you’re not going to academia</p>
<p>An employer will look at your Ph.D in engineering from Stanford. Would it kill an applicant who went to GaTech or Michigan? Probably not… but it will kill everyone else. Plus, Stanford’s a brand name, and obviously you must be at the very least hard working if not gifted to get into a school like that.</p>
<p>You’re being ridiculous now. Probably it doesn’t matter as much in industry… but I mean come on. Stanford grad or West Iowa grad? Like bonehead said, at the very least it’ll give you a little edge.</p>
<p>I think often times on this board, folks deal far too much with extremes. Nobody (even me) never said that the subjective “school prestige” did NOT matter. What is often pointed out is that NOT going to a prestige school but still staying in the Top-50 to Top-100 will still give you opportunities…especially at big state schools for the fraction of the cost.</p>
<p>There is a whole 'nother world in life when it comes to income, debt, assets and net worth and it would be wise to factor ALL of that into your academic decision-making.</p>
<p>Yeah, you don’t want to be paying off your own student debt once you have kids and need to be saving up for THEIR college costs!</p>
<p>You are overreacting for nothing.</p>
<p>
Um yeah you can. Studying too much in college takes away opportunities to do fun things, like party, get drunk, get action, go to football games, take short trips, play IM sports, get more action, whatever. </p>
<p>
OP don’t listen to him. Trust me.</p>
<p>btw props to Boneh3ad. That joke made my hour.</p>
<p>Yeah maybe. But only because it sounds like you might have lost a lot of real world experience that would give you a more mature perspective on life than you currently express. </p>
<p>Good lord. So all of your education thus far has been entirely instrumental? You were not really interested in maximizing your intellect and skills with your hard work, but just to game the system and jump through hoops?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Here’s one possibility. You could perhaps leverage your high GPA into a fellowship in grad school and therefore *get paid<a href=“as%20opposed%20to%20having%20to%20pay”>/i</a> for your degree. Given your grades, it seems likely that you could find some engineering master’s program, albeit perhaps at a low-ranked school (yet which you’ve said doesn’t really matter anyway), that would fund you. </p>
<p>Or, you could apply to PhD programs in engineering, which would also be funded and for which a high GPA would be useful in terms of gaining admission. Given that you stated that you were more interested in theoretical work, a PhD might be more of more interest to you in the long run anyway. </p>
<p>The fact of the matter is, engineering and physics, on the higher-end academic and theoretical reaches, are not particularly different from each other. You may be working on similar topics, investigating similar research questions, and perhaps even publishing in the same journals. I can think of numerous physics undergrads who went on to obtain PhD’s in engineering, with some even become engineering professors.</p>