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

gthopeful
Wed, 17 Nov 2010 11:00:28 +0000

It’s going to be really hard to make a case for your admission. Your argument is basically “my current school is not prestigious enough to make the elitist sho*es of academia to hire me for a faculty job”. Your stats are of course fine, but making a real case for admission is perhaps not possible.

You’re also overstating the benefit of these schools. My undergrad thesis advisor, who graduated from one of those 4 schools, told me that most of his classmates were unsuccessful and ended up switching fields entirely after graduating (e.g., med school, finance, etc). He was fortunate in that his advisor gave him a pretty good thesis topic. He said he saw his advisor once every 6 months though and didn’t get much help when he did. By contrast, I’m my advisor’s only graduate student and get tons of advice when I need it. We publish in well-known journals and get cited a lot. My first paper has already been cited about 30 times.

Really though, I don’t know where you get the idea that you need to graduate from those schools to get a faculty job. In my department (EE), I had classes taught by exactly 1 Berkeley graduate and 1 Caltech graduate - and that’s it out of the ~15 classes I’ve taken.