CalTech Graduate Admission Questions.

fyad
Wed, 16 Mar 2005 02:46:15 +0000

I have some question about CalTech’s Graduate Admissions, basically what does it take to get into CalTech’s Masters or PhD program in EE?

From what I have read for undergraduates CalTech seems to be looking for almost straight A’s and frowns upon even A-'s. Is this true for people applying for graduate work at CalTech? What is a competitive GPA from a state school for someone applying for graduate studies?

How much emphasis is their on research done as a undergraduate? For example I go to a state school and research opportunities are limited, but I have been able to get jobs (Engineering related) during breaks, does CalTech care about that? Or does is it more like, “well great you can work in the industry, but any monkey can do that, show us you are capable of doing research”?

How are recommendations weighed? From what I have heard if admissions can’t recognize the name of the recommender (as in famous in that field) the admissions people look at where the person works (low tier school or high tier) to weight how much importance to give the recommendation. So are people that go to state schools at a disadvantage here because of their status of their schools on the academic ladder?

Also, CalTech’s Undergraduate program is widely seen as very rigorous so much so that getting a degree is somewhat of a gamble (sorry if I am mischaracterizing it, this is just what I have heard/read). Is the same true of graduate level work?

As far as schools that graduate students come from, are most from CalTech or MIT or other top universities? Or does CalTech also take students from lower tier schools? Does anyone have any statistics showing the breakdown of type of school graduate students come from?