Confused Mechanical MS/PhD International Student

spidy1985
Thu, 12 Apr 2012 17:36:44 +0000

Hi,

you will be for sure able to get a good job with a degree from UCM after you graduated. Its not like it is an online degree from somewhere, it is still a University of California campus and that is a very high standard. My lab mate for example will graduate this summer and just got a job offer at a company in silicon valley with an entrance salary close to a 100k, another graduate from our department is doing a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon University. Some of my labmates including me got internship offers for this summer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, etc. So of course you have good chances to get a good job after graduation, especially in an engineering field. What do you think is more useful for industry, a BA in History from Stanford or a BS in Mechanical Engineering from UCM?? It think its easy to answer this question.

You can do crap work in your PhD at MIT and do excellent work at UCM, also the other way round. But at the end when you apply at a big company everyone has to go through the same interview process and there people will see if you are good or not. A degree alone doesn’t say if you are good or not.

I think they would probably give you a MS degree if you decide to drop out from the PhD program. I think that is not the problem, the problem will be to explain this in a later interview for a PhD position at Stanford or where ever: “You left the PhD program because the school was to small for you. Ok you are probably not passionate enough about your filed.” -> do you get what I want to say?
Another problem in this case could be that your adviser from UCM won’t be very happy and probably not willing to give you a letter of recommendation for another application, unless you have a really really good reason for it. And this is very bad and will lower your chances to get accepted somewhere else.

When I came here I also thought about reapplying to another school after a semester or a year, but it was clear to me very fast that I won’t do it because I really like the work I am doing here and that is what counts most.

I don’t really know what happens if you accept an offer but then reject it again. I am sure that’s considered kind of rude. But I don’t know if it will affect you somehow.

To summarize it, you will for sure be able to get a good job with a UCM degree, it is up to you what you make out of your opportunities. But that is the same everywhere.

Let me know if you have any more questions, and let me know what your decision will be ;)