Question for grad students from top engineering colleges

Graduate School
1

<p>I have a question for current or previous graduate students from top engineering colleges (MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, etc.) that have also attended "less than top" engineering colleges (either grad or undergrad).</p>

<p>How would you compare the students of top colleges to students from "normal" colleges?</p>

<p>I've heard various answers ranging from "all of the students are now smarter than me" to answers like "not really much difference / not impressed".</p>

<p>I would like to hear from people who have actually experienced both ends of the spectrum and to see what your opinion of the students is. I'm am interested in hearing about things like overall intellect, academic performance (grades), practical abilities, etc.</p>

<p>Any insight you have to offer would be greatly appreciated.</p>

2

<p>Stanford EE PhD for grad here, but I haven’t been at “both ends” because my undergrad was also highly ranked, albeit it was a public school but that’s not unusual in engineering. My views on this topic are not charitable:</p>

<p>I find the PhD students from top undergrad programs to be consistently better by a noticeable margin. It’s hard to shake the feeling that some of the domestic students from outside the top 10 got lucky. (Internationals are also all over the place, but better on average in my opinion.)</p>

<p>I base this on classroom grades (somewhat competitive here because of the large MS program) and how well they do in the PhD qualifying exams (which at Stanford EE is non-trivial, although recently they’ve been diminishing it).</p>

<p>I happen to have statistics from over half our entering class: of the domestics, roughly 40% were top 5 undergrad (MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Illinois, Caltech) with another 20% from the next seven or so (GaTech, Michigan, CMU, Cornell, Texas, Purdue, Princeton). The rest came from a plethora of other places, usually the sole representative from that place. (For reference: the department has ~100 PhDs/year, and a little over half are international.)</p>

<p>Based on this, you can see why some of the “less than top” students might struggle. Even the top 5 only send ~2-6 per year each. Those students have the demonstrated ability to out-compete other high-caliber students. For those outside the top undergrad programs, <em>even if they’re the single best student in years</em>, it’s hard to say how to say how they stack up. They may simply have never had to compete with anyone but lower-caliber students. Their recommendation writers might be overestimating them due to a lack of perspective. So they <em>might</em> be good, but we don’t <em>know</em> that they’re good.</p>

<p>Of course, you can argue that we never truly know if an applicant is good, but the top 5 students at high-ranked programs are a pretty safe bet: you know what quality you can expect from consistent past experience because there are at least a few representatives entering every single year. The top 1 in a decade at no-name school X is more of a wild-card and sometimes turns out to be a bad pick. These individuals will struggle at Stanford EE now that they’re finally facing real competition. I believe the department does notice these things and try to keep track of it. For example, one of my PhD qualifying exam givers (a former department head) asked everyone he tested what undergrad they came from.</p>

<p>Now does it matter? For the most part, a PhD only requires perseverance. Theoretical work often requires raw intellect but experimental work (which most EE PhDs fall under) usually only requires permuting experimental conditions. If your advisor is coming up with the ideas, then your job might be as simple as button-pushing. So I think even these struggling individuals will end up doing fine (in that they graduate), provided they can survive the quals.</p>

3

<p>Me: BS Penn State, MS Johns Hopkins, PhD (in progress) UIUC</p>

<p>

In my experience those students generally have a much better grounding in the theory and math. I would describe that difference as noticable but not huge. Strangely, many of them struggle with practical applications of said theory - I TA’d a course alongside an MIT grad who had trouble actually working with even basic circuits. I would say that practical skills have the same spread as any other school, where some are very hands-on and capable, others are almost pure theoreticians not to be trusted with anything sharp.</p>

<p>I had a Berkeley grad try to align a laser by starting down the beam. Good lord, I hope he chose a safer specialty.</p>

<p>

Overall intellect is not something I would say comes up very often, and I am not privy to the combination of grades and undergraduate institution for anyone but myself. I do not think that there is a large bias by institution, but that is a guess.</p>

4

<p>Kmerst, thanks for your reply. A lot of interesting information there. If you don’t mind, I just have a few more questions if you don’t mind.</p>

<p>When you say that the people from the less-than-top schools tend to not do as well because they haven’t yet faced real competition, would you say that it’s more of a case of</p>

<p>1) they just aren’t putting in work that’s required to compete with top students</p>

<p>or is it more a case of</p>

<p>2) they just don’t have a strong enough fundamental base and therefore are too far behind to really compete?</p>

<p>The next two questions apply to students overall:</p>

<p>When it comes to the quals, what percentage of students, would you estimate, are not able to pass them?</p>

<p>And what areas of the quals do people seem to have the most trouble with? Do people struggle with certain subjects for example (electronics, controls, DSP, optics, etc.)? Or is it some other aspect?</p>

5

<p>I study math, not engineering, but I’m currently a PhD candidate at Stanford and I did my undergraduate work at Bryn Mawr. I also spent some time at Haverford and Penn. </p>

<p>I’m not going to compare Bryn Mawr to Stanford because of course my graduate peers are more motivated than my classmates from college - since they represent only those who chose to go to graduate school in the first place. </p>

<p>Comparing graduate students at Penn (selective but not tippy top PhD program) to graduate students at Stanford (among the most selective in the country), it seems to me that the students at Stanford are overall more motivated than the students at Penn and function at a higher level academically. Whether they are more successful due to effort/motivation or some difference in “intrinsic ability” I cannot say. I’m pretty sure it’s not solely due to a stronger undergraduate background though.</p>

6

<p>I’m not yet a graduate student, nor am I in engineering. However, I was accepted to one of the schools you mentioned for a PhD in a STEM field.</p>

<p>I don’t believe Kmerst was saying either of the things you mentioned. It isn’t that students from non-top schools will have a weaker base or that they don’t work hard - it is that they are wild-cards. They can, and many are, extremely brilliant. A stellar GPA from an unknown school can mean anything, as can LORs from unknown professors. So you just don’t know what you are going to get. </p>

<p>I went to many visitation weekends for the top-tier schools. My impressions of the other applicants, though superficial, was that they were smart. They were not, however, blindingly brilliant. No different than the other “smart” kids I know from my own unknown university. The biggest difference is that EVERYONE was that way. I’ve heard that the top 5-10% of the class at any university are pretty comparable. So my guess is that that top-quality students are top-quality students, regardless of undergrad university. The top ones probably just have more of those.</p>

7

<p>I’ve found once you get to a top school, where someone went for undergrad doesn’t matter much. I have friends from various top STEM schools, ivies, honors colleges within large publics, and non-main campus public schools. Everyone is really smart.</p>