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

gthopeful
Wed, 17 Nov 2010 18:26:18 +0000

gthopeful, thanks for your comments. I assume you go to Georgiatech from your location, how many of your school’s graduates have become faculty in say top 30 even after postdocing (even counting georgiatech itself)?



I don’t keep track of that sort of stuff. To be sure, it’s probably not very good considering Georgia Tech’s good reputation outside the South is quite new. I will say this though: professors I know of here that even were postdocs ever are in the minority. Most spent several years in industry and have come since come back to academia. Why is that? Well, industry jobs pay a heck of a lot more than academic ones. Why go through a formal postdoc making about the same as an elementary school teacher when you could “postdoc” while making 6 figures as a research scientist in industry? Postdocs are what you need to land jobs in the sciences – not engineering.

Even if you don’t believe the above, here are the schools all of ECE’s current assistant professors attended for graduate school ( [ECE Faculty Profiles](http://www.ece.gatech.edu/faculty-staff/fac_profiles/ece_faculty.php) ). I single out assistant professors because they are the least likely to have had significant industry experience before applying for a faculty job:

Berkeley
Caltech
Georgia Tech x2
Illinois
Maryland
Michigan
Penn State
Purdue
Rice x2
USC x3

Doesn’t seem like your position that school prestige is even more important today in landing a tenure-track position is well-supported, at least at Tech. Maybe all the prestigious university graduates don’t like ending up in backwater Atlanta though :)