My goal is to enter a top mechanical engineering graduate program or an Ivy League school. Bottom line, I’m referring to selective schools. My credentials are as follows:
Education:
Undergraduate: Top 5 liberal arts college
Degree: B.A. Physics (Honors), minor in Earth and Oceanographic Science.
GPA: 3.31
GRE: (unknown)
- Honors Project
- 5-6 senior level courses
- Many 2000 level courses, rarely any 1000 courses.
- Credential from Harvard Online Business School (3 courses)
Experience:
- Summer REU
- Unrelated internship at a notable institution
- President of 3 campus organizations
- Co-founded a small summer-operating partnership for two years.
These two things are (generally) opposites. The Ivy League does not generally put many resources into their engineering programs and only a few of them are notable.
This is really a terrible way to select a graduate program for several reasons.
[ol]
[]There aren’t reliable statistics on graduate school admissions rates.
[]In graduate school, the goal is to find a research group that is strong and is a good fit. The name brand of the school and department are (largely) irrelevant beyond the fact that those name brand schools will probably, on average, have a larger percentage of truly strong research groups.
[li]Many of the top engineering programs are at large state school that often have high overall acceptance rates (based on undergraduate admissions, the only reliable statistics that I know of on admissions).[/li][/ol]
First, I’m not equating top mechanical engineering graduate programs with Ivy League schools, thus the reason I use the word “or”. For instance, I could be referring to a school such as University of Michigan – Ann Arbor OR Brown University. Although UM – Ann Arbor has a stronger engineering program, I would like to include other schools that may be harder to get into. I recognize that there are plenty state schools (UC Berkeley, UIUC, Georgia Tech, etc.) have great engineering programs at both the graduate and undergraduate level.
Second, I have made no claims that I am applying to schools solely based off of selectivity. I am simply asking a question regarding graduate admissions regarding various types of schools, not about what program I should be aiming for.
If this makes things clearer, I’ll rephrase my question:
Given my current academic record and other miscellaneous info that may or may not be relevant, what would be my chance at top engineering graduate program OR another school that is highly selective but not necessarily strong at engineering.
@cobyt501st - Just my humble opinion, but first you need to decide what you want to do. Do you want to be an engineer or something else? Do you want a Master degree on a PhD? You are comparing apples to oranges. Then you need to better understand the graduate school admissions process. There are some great pinned threads on this board. Much of your posted credentials are irrelevant for graduate school admissions. For an engineering masters degree, your grades, GRE, and employer recommendations are key, as they would be for say an MBA. If you want a PhD, then you need research experience, strong recommendations from professors, and top grades, with less weighting of the GRE.
And overall you need to understand the difference between engineering college reputation. Along with Stanford and MIT, the top engineering graduate programs are almost all at public universities such as Georgia Tech, Michigan, Purdue, Cal and Illinois. There are only three Ivy-League schools in the top 20 (Princeton, Cornell, and Penn). So an engineering PhD from Yale (rated at 38) would be less prestigious to engineers than an engineering PhD from North Carolina State (27).
And as @boneh3ad explained this gets further complicated for PhD candidates because you want to apply to the college that is strongest in the type of research that interests you. For example, my son wants to focus on plasma space propulsion for his PhD in aerospace engineering . This is really applied physics rather than traditional AE. So my son will apply to the colleges that are strongest in plasma propulsion research. Michigan has historically been number-one. Georgia Tech hired a top Michigan researcher in 2004 to start their program and now they are very strong too. Princeton is also very good (number two in graduate physics). So these will be his top choices. It would be senseless to apply to top AE programs like Purdue, Texas, or Illinois for an AE PhD, because he couldn’t do the research that interested him.
An overall comment - your GPA looks low for admission to top programs in either engineering or otherwise.
I hope this helps.
Not sure this clarifies anything, but your motivation is your own problem.
Remember that getting into (and completing) grad school is about research first and foremost, your ability to complete the required coursework second, and everything else a distant third.
Your GPA is a little low for “top” programs, which may have typical admitted GPA’s above 3.5.
Your Honors Project and REU may be relevant if they lead to publications and/or strong letters of recommendation, but most good applicants to “highly selective” programs will have a research background that gives them this kind of advantage.
Your coursework matters only in the narrow subfield where your prospective research group works, so the numbers don’t matter, just how well you are prepared in that area - a few grad-level courses are more preferable than a larger number of senior-level courses.
Your other experience probably doesn’t matter unless it relates to your prospective research topic. Internships are usually about business and industry, not research. Campus organizations can give you research experience, but usually don’t. I can’t possibly talk about the impact of a “summer-operating partnership” without more information.