Quality of Undergrad Program

cosmicfish
Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:08:05 +0000

My opinion is based on discussions with 4 of my coworkers and mentors who have served in recent years on admissions committees at 3 different universities (all ranked between 10-30 in electrical engineering), plus a few more current professors who have discussed with me their “second stage” preferences in selecting students.

This reminded me of one thing I forgot to mention - that first stage algorithm is often iterative, weeding down to a certain number of top students “by the numbers” to minimize the second stage search. That is, if a given school is looking for 30 serious candidates they will keep eliminating candidates until they get down to 30. Depending on the competition that year, a given person could fall on either side of the line.

Some examples I can give without naming names (yes I know some of the students they told me about) - a student admitted to a Big Ten school who had a gpa between 3.2 and 3.4, passed through in the first round over some higher gpas because of their undergrad institution (MIT). Another student who had a good gpa (3.7+) who they let through (elsewhere) even though the school was not so good (ranked well below 50th).

In the second stage you get all sorts of prejudices, so it is hard to say what helps. One prof told me he favored MIT because in his experience MIT grads were innovative, another at the same school disliked MIT grads because they were not very good in the lab. Another preferred to admit women and students from “lower tier universities” - one of his grad students had gotten his undergrad from a very very low ranked school. Another professor (by repute, I never knew him well) would not accept students who did not come from a “prestige” school like he had.

These were the exception: most were looking more for how well the student fit their expectations and needs - including academics. One prof doing plasma physics and engineering was looking expressly for high gpa, particularly in math and physics, and did not care that much about the particular school.

I hope this clarifies.