Question that is really bothering me is what are the important factors for admission to top five engineering graduate school? I searched in different forums and saw people got accepted to PhD program at prestigious school with GPA 3.40 GRE Quantitative of 165 and no publication. However I also saw people could not get in to even master program with 4.0 GPA ,good GRE score. I am starting to think that GPA ,GRE and even research experience are not determining factor. Can anyone please clarify this for me?
They are all important. GRE is probably the least important, but really it is a mix of GPA, GRE, research experience, and references.
Also, there really is no such thing as a top five engineering graduate school for a generic individual. Depending on what subfield you want to study, even the “top 5” programs may not be very strong and the best program may well be at a relatively middling school.
I’m not in engineering, so I’m only speaking based on general knowledge of PhD programs.
But the critical missing factor is fit. Publications generally aren’t expected for graduate school, so zero publications isn’t really a ding either way. But what can get a 3.4/165 in and potentially keep out a 4.0/169 is research fit with the department, and the quality of research experience. The 3.4 might be doing high-level research with a well-known or excellent scholar in the field; she might have written a phenomenal statement of purpose that intrigued the professors in the department; and she may have enjoyed a great interview with his PI that demonstrated that she was intellectually capable of doing great research. After all, grades and classwork only matter so much in a PhD program; what really matters is research promise.
On the other hand, the 4.0 might have had less research experience, or the research experience may have been of lower quality. Or perhaps she simply wasn’t as able to articulate her research ideas and passions, whether in the personal statement or at the interview stage. Or she could’ve simply applied to the wrong departments - she wanted to study rocket propulsion in a department that doesn’t have anyone interested in that, or she proposed to do research in what her PI was doing 5 years ago but he never updated his university website and has since moved on.