Admission to PhD EECS/EE at Berkeley/Stan/MIT for Fall 2011

GShine_1989
Wed, 17 Nov 2010 15:48:12 +0000

You have almost no chance. Plenty of people have the same thought process as you. If this was a reasonable path to those four schools, then their programs wouldn’t be prestigious. Let me make an analogy to undergraduate admissions: this is like transferring, NOT like first-time admissions. Know why transferring success rates are something like 2% at elite universities? The applicants almost all fail to understand that they need a compelling reason to justify a transfer. Most of them are just prestige-obsessed and think this is a second chance. It’s not. On your first shot you don’t need a reason. You’re looking for a good schools and the schools are looking for good students. Transferring is fundamentally different.

Some students do switch graduate programs but this is for unusual situations. E.g. their advisor leaves or they did a fast BS-MS at the same school so it’s like they’re applying for the first time. MIT/Stanford/Berkeley don’t care one bit that you think you need one of their degrees. That’s not an example of a valid reason, which is typically something directly related to research.

Do letters matter? They matter more than everything else put together. No, really. To be blunt, you don’t seem to know the bare basics of admissions to top schools. You really need to reconsider doing this.