<p>I'll be graduating from ucla this year. I major in engineering and planning to apply to graduate schools this fall. I will be done with my major courses by this quarter and I have two more easy quarters to finish up my GE and major electives. If I can keep up with my current gpa, it should be around 3.8. my gpa from cc is around 3.8.</p>
<p>I'm interested in control systems and I'vs been contacting professors for research experience in the field since I transferred here, but all I hear was that they don't take or need undergraduate students, even for volunteering work. instead of doing research, I took courses, some from EE, that relates to the field, and I have good idea of what I want to study in graduate school.</p>
<p>Should I apply for grad schools without research experiences, which will be the case if I apply this year, or is it just a waste of time?</p>
<p>because I love studying engineering, especially control system. However, the control classes I took in undergrad deal with toy examples. They are oversimplification of real systems used in industries. simplifications are good when you learn something new and conceptually complicated, but I don’t think I have enough knowledge to actually design something in this field with what I learned in undergraduate level.</p>
<p>Anyone that tells you you NEED research experience to be successful in your graduate applications is blowing smoke up your ass. You don’t. For some programs this may make or break you, but for some reason I can not see engineering being one of them.</p>
<p>ANDS, have you gone through PhD admissions in engineering? During all of the prospective student weekends I’ve both been a part of as a future PhD student and all the ones I’ve helped out with since being in a program one of the most popular topics is what sort of research have you done. The only students without research are generally those who did internships at companies over their summers.</p>
<p>There are probably some schools you’ll be able to get admitted to, but I’d definitely keep in mind what your competition will be and would cast a fairly wide net with the level of schools I’d apply to.</p>
<p>thank you for the reply. What I don’t understand is how can undergraduate students have research experiences in the first place if they can’t get into the labs because there are more qualified masters students who want to do research. or is this just the case at ucla?? anyway, I got admission from ucla, but I will never consider going here.</p>
<p>Nope. Engineering is a bit too far off the applied mathematics side for me. </p>
<p>As the OP is probably scratching at, unless a student is just THAT GOOD, any “research” they are doing as an undergrad, is likely just piggybacking off of something an advisor already has in the works, fluffed and massaged on an application to make it seem more than it was (if I have to see one more CV with a page of “In Progress” papers - ugh).</p>
<p>This whole idea that before going into a research preparatory program, a person should have research experience is foolish. </p>
<p>OP if you’re really concerned with it, just start your own independent study, and potentially get an instructor you’re familiar with to cosign off on it at some point.</p>
This describes a surprising number of PhD dissertations as well - it is difficult in engineering to do a thesis that does NOT in some way “piggyback off of something an advisor already has in the works” without somehow producing often absurd amounts of funding.</p>
<p>Undergraduate research is very common but occurs at a lower level of involvement than research at the graduate levels. A great many undergrads find positions in labs where they are perhaps executing research rather than really directing it (as they will do later). Still, it allows them to gain competence in the setting, demonstrate to a professor (and future writer of a letter of recommendation) that competence, and perhaps find a few areas where they can provide a genuine contribution.</p>
<p>Is it absolutely necessary? Not generally, but as in all things, falling short in one area (as research IS an expectation at decent engineering grad programs) means you must either be correspondingly better in other areas or else settle for a “lesser” program than you might otherwise attain. Also note that lack of research experience also leads to a lack of quality letters of recommendation, and these are the two biggest factors in the admissions process at most schools - you cannot make up for this by acing the GRE, generally the LEAST valuable part of your application. Note that most top-5 programs WILL be completely out of reach without research experience, simply because there are no meaningful ways to compensate at that level - MIT would rather have a 3.9 GPA undergrad with a couple of years of quality undergrad-appropriate research than a 4.0 GPA undergrad with none, and they get more applications from that first type than they can admit anyway!</p>
<p>OP, it is probably too late but one thing you should have investigated prior to this was REU programs, “Research Experience for Undergrad” programs that take people from universities that offer minimal research programs and place them in labs at major universities for the summer. If you are graduating this year it is too late to apply and probably too late to attend, but programs like this are what you needed.</p>
<p>The point, for the most part, working in an engineering lab as an undergrad is understanding how to make perform research, not necessarily how to design a research project. The ability to perform work accurately, reproducibly, and understand when there’s a problem with the experiment that needs to be examined. It’s a worthwhile experience to understand what the frustration is of doing a week/month’s worth of work only to find out you need to discard all of your data due to an unforeseen issue with experimental setup. It’s hard for me to even think about how much harder grad school would have been without some experience having done it before.</p>
<p>Another reason you would want research experience is that it can be seen as a form of a specialized internship. Do companies greatly prefer students that have had some sort of work experience? How do you think professors hiring people for their lab feel? </p>
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<p>The thing is, it’s not just a preparatory program. It’s a full time job where you’re expected to produce results and not flake out after two years because it turns out you don’t like the duties research involves.</p>