<p>I'm planning on applying to grad school (Electrical Engineering) next year. I am a bit worried about one thing, I'm not quite sure what field I want to go in. Is this a huge problem?</p>
<p>Grad school is very specialized - even a large department with 100 EE faculty can only cover ~100 specialties at most (less in practice) and will be genuinely excellent in even fewer. Depending on your preferred specialty, your best choice could be MIT, Penn State, or South Central Lousiana State. If you got admitted and decided on a specialty not offered at that school you would be in deep trouble. In short, you cannot decently select a program without having at least a cursory idea of your area of research.</p>
<p>More immediately, admissions is all about matching applicants to probable (or definite) research advisors - they want to know your specialty so that they get a good match. Without relatively stellar numbers, you are dead in the water if they cannot match your goals with a professor’s needs.</p>
<p>Oh sorry, I guess I should’ve worded myself better. I do have a fairly good idea on which fields I’m interested, namely either nanotechnology or signal processing. Once again, I apologize, I reread my initila post and I definitely messed up the wording completely. I meant to ask, what if I don’t know exactly what I want to do, so what thesis topic I want to have.</p>
<p>I definitely am quite interesting in nanotechnology and signal processing, but I have no idea exactly what I want to do with it. So will that be a major issue? I heard somewhere people who already know what thesis topic they want to work on have a greater chance of getting in. But does that mean that those of us who aren’t exactly sure will get hurt on our applications?</p>
<p>Oh, no. A lot of times you really don’t have a choice anyway in <em>the</em> specific thing you want to do once you get in a lab. I think that’s the purpose of rotations to some extent too. I have tons of things I am interested in. I don’t think this will hurt you, at all, so long as you have a subfield or so and have maybe a couple of things you see yourself doing.</p>