<p>Pragmatic Dreamer - yes, there are many physics students in MSE, along with chem students, chemE students, EE students, and even some BME. MSE is a fairly rare undergraduate major, and so it’s not surprising that the departments would be made up of students of other majors! I had a good friend get into UCSB MSE with a physics background.</p>
<p>My friend who went to Caltech had a second author publication in Advanced Materials. I think he was writing a very exciting first author one, but it wasn’t published by the time he was applying. It’s similar to me - I had a first-author-from-contriubting-institution paper in JACS, and three lined up, but those I hadn’t even begun drafting yet. </p>
<p>Desiyankee - your stats should be very competitive. I just looked up journal of chemistry and biology, and it is a fairly high-impact journal, which should be very good. One major consideration is what author you are, first author is <em>HUGE</em>, second author is expected, and third and below are not very interesting :-. Also, I noticed you had recommendations from industry - that is very tricky. People in industry do not praise the same values as those from academia, so you have to be very directed in how you ask for recommendations (“please discuss my ability to research independently, not necessarily my strict adherence to schedules, etc”). Finally, although you may be competitive for the top schools (MIT, NU, Cornell, Stanford), competitive just means hard to predict, so it’s really no guarantees. There are some very good schools like Umich and UCSB that have huge departments, and so I think it’s not as hard to get in.</p>