Admittance to top Mechanical Engineering PhD programs without publications

RacinReaver
Wed, 07 Aug 2013 10:19:09 +0000

Keep in mind a lot of getting a publication is luck. Does your project work? Do you get interesting results? Do you actually have enough data to publish it? I’ve been included on papers where I did fairly small amounts of work, and I’ve been on papers where I’ve done all the work. I’ve also had a ton of work which has never been published because even though I’ve felt it was great, I had no real way to thoroughly defend it through the review process.

I got into Caltech in the PhD program (I believe only a small handful of departments take MS students, and they’re often either sponsored by a company or foreigners) with only one publication, and it was in a really low tier journal. The work wasn’t poor, it just didn’t turn out to have any exciting results that were of interest in a country that, for the most part, doesn’t care about non-specialty steel production anymore.