I’m currently a sophomore electrical engineer in college at an average school and I am considering going to graduate school at a more selective university to take advantage of the universities better recognition. I was curious as to what the most important criteria for admissions are for a masters program. I’m aware that research and recommendations are most important for PhD admissions but do they carry the same weight for MS admissions?
At moment my grades are good (4.0 GPA) so I’m wondering what else should I do with my remaining time as an undergrad to improve a grad school application. Outside of class, I am a teaching assistant but I am yet to do any research. I have not done any internships either though I do plan to do a co-op for two semesters.
For this summer I am considering either an internship or doing doing research with a professor on campus. Would one be better for MS admissions? And is it critical that I do research during my remaining 4 semesters as the co-ops would prevent me from doing research during the summer? And for that matter will co-ops even help with admissions or should I just forget them?
So guess what I would really like to know is if it’s still possible to gain admission to an MS in EE at a top school like Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, etc and if so what do I need to do?
I appreciate any feedback and thanks for reading!
Go check out gradcafe forums for your field and see what the stats/profiles are for people getting accepted at/rejected by various top schools. Most likely you need a very good GPA with hard classes from a tough school, strong GRE scores, great LORs and SOP, at least a year of research experience, a bunch of grad classes, and some luck.
@ClevelandsFinest Hey! I’m actually in the exact same boat as you (sophomore electrical engineering major), though my GPA isn’t as good as yours since I had a bit of a rough start in college. Although I’m not an admissions officer myself, logically it makes sense that it depends on the type of master’s degree you’re interested in. Some MS degrees culminate in a thesis, while others are awarded after merely completing a certain number of credits in graduate level classes. So for the thesis-based master’s degrees, I would imagine that research experience would be comparatively more important, and the admissions process for those kinds of programs would also be more similar to PhD admissions in terms of how various components of the application are weighted.
On the other hand, the course work-based master’s degree programs would most likely not emphasize research experience as heavily, and would probably also accept co-ops/internships in lieu of it. So it completely depends on which path you intend to pursue. Most people who are initially set on pursuing just a master’s degree want to leave open the possibility of pursuing a PhD later on, so for them it would make sense to get some solid research experience. But for people like me who prefer the course work-based MS and have no intention of pursuing further studies beyond it, the lack of significant research experience would not hurt admissions chances as much as it would in the other case.
Hope this helps!