<p>I am a sophomore in college. I have a 3.823 GPA as of now. My goal is to get into a great graduate school. What should I start doing from now to increase my chances of getting in to say an Ivy League grad school. I currently am doing research. I have some extracurricular activities and community service. I plan on doing an internship next summer. Should I focus primarily on research? I keep hearing grad schools are looking for engineering students with background in research.</p>
<p>You’re on the right track right now, just take everything to the next level. Do as much as possible and diversify. Don’t limit yourself to just engineering. Research is the best type of experience for graduate school but obtaining internships, particularly research-oriented ones, will be beneficial too.</p>
<p>Research, research and more research. If you can get involved enough to be mentioned in, or better yet coauthor of a published work, that would he ideal. Its tough to do as an undergrad though.</p>
<p>Why Ivy League? There is nothing special about Ivy League engineering.</p>
<p>If I apply for non-thesis, will research still be a major concern when compare to the admission of thesis-based?</p>
<p>Good question. I wouldn’t think so but I am not nearly familiar enough with the non thesis degrees to say that with any certainty.</p>
<p>I can only speak from my experience so I don’t know in general, but I was accepted to non-thesis MS programs at Carnegie Mellon, UIUC, and Columbia with absolutely no research experience.</p>
<p>LOL Nice. All right! Thanks</p>
<p>The only Ivy League engineering programs in the Top-10 are Princeton and Cornell…and those are in debatable/fringe engineering areas as computer science and engineering physics.</p>
<p>I take that back…Cornell is Top-10 in a few other engineering areas. I didn’t see any other Ives except for Princeton CS.</p>
<p>Princeton is also good in aerospace, though from my experience, this comes from their expertise in applied math, and thus mathematical modeling, which just happens to be a bid deal in aerospace.</p>
<p>Non-thesis masters programs seem to have a lot of working engineers taking one or two courses at a time. Undergraduate research is not usually a requirement. Although my son did UG research and internships, I think what got him into his masters programs were his GPA, test scores and recommendations.</p>