<p>There are a few schools I’m looking at for PhD in engineering (mechanical or aerospace, leaning aerospace). While the top schools on my list are obvious giants in the field, like Stanford, MIT, Purdue, Texas, etc., I’m also looking at a few that most would consider a tier (or two) below the rest, like the University of Washington, Arizona State, UCSD, OSU, etc., as they look to be a better ‘fit’ for me in terms of research interests, location, size of the program, and faculty. At what point do I start sacrificing better job prospects (as far as faculty appointments, possibly corporate R&D) for personal fit?</p>
<p>The idea of prestige even depends on your subfield, and the name of your advisor might well be more important than the name of your institution, especially if you plan to continue in academia.
Another part of the problem: you’re going to have a much harder time getting accepted to any place where there is not a good research fit. And if you did go there, wouldn’t you not be getting the experience and knowledge you’re looking for?</p>
<p>First of all, you may have a slightly skewed view of what “a tier lower” means. A “tier lower,” for PhD programs, to me means ranked less than around 30 to 50 depending on what academic positions look like in your field. But all the programs you mentioned are within the top 25ish mechanical engineering programs. In that case, you aren’t really sacrificing better job prospects for fit. Especially in engineering - where the academic market is more wide open because of competing industry interests - I’d imagine a person at the #15 or #20 ranked program won’t have a lot of difficult securing a good position somewhere. And UCSD is ranked in the top 10! (I’m going by NRC rankings.)</p>
<p>Second exactly what nano said - sometimes the name of your advisor is more important, and you need to go somewhere with a good research fit anyway if you not only plan to get admitted but also plan to be happy and productive in graduate school doing the research you really want to do.</p>
<p>If we’re strictly considering name, MIT, Caltech, Stanford, and Princeton are typically considered the places to go if you’re interested in staying in academia and securing a faculty position, especially at a top tier university. There’s a clear distinction between these four schools and other ones in the top 10. </p>
<p>For industry, they’ll likely be more ignorant, that is, they may only consider the name of the school rather than your adviser. You could work under a highly coveted NAE professor at Purdue (actually, I don’t think they currently have any) and be placed below someone who worked under some dud at the universities I listed above, although I’m not aware of any duds at those those 4 schools I mentioned.</p>
<p>What about Michigan, Berkeley, UIUC, Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, etc…? Genuinely curious, this is just good to know.</p>
<p>I think that you can probably still get a faculty position from Purdue, though, just given its ranking/reputation in the field.</p>
<p>Wow, I wrote a long reply to this, but apparently I had forgotten to click post…</p>
<p>@juillet: what’s the difference between R-Rankings and S-Rankings?</p>
<p>If we were to compare the quality of research at the four schools I mentioned at the public schools (excluding UCB and Carnegie as I don’t know too much about there programs), then there would be a clear gap, despite the rankings. The truth is that public schools are just not as selective and in turn, there research output is not on par with those schools. However, there are areas where these schools are better (e.g., UMich has arguably the best electric propulsion program in the world). Much of the work at Princeton, Stanford, MIT, and Caltech are very fundamental. Typically, for faculty positions, it is desirably to focus on very fundamental research. Many of the other schools are not as focused on the fundamentals.</p>
<p>You can certainly get a faculty position if you go to Purdue.</p>
<p>@shrouded For both rankings there are 20 characteristics that have weight assigned to them. In the S-rankings, these characteristics are directly ranked by the respondent. For the R-rankings, the respondent ranks the quality of specific programs and those rankings are analyzed to determine what weight should be given to each characteristic. For example, someone may rank “Average Years to Completion” very highly in the S-ranking survey, but in the R-ranking survey may put a number of schools with low completion rates near the top.</p>
<p>“In the S-rankings, these characteristics are directly ranked by the respondent.”
So each characteristic is ranked separately, for a few specific programs?</p>
<p>“For the R-rankings, the respondent ranks the quality of specific programs”
So the respondent just gives an overall rank for a few specific programs?</p>
<p>also, there’s an average GRE scores ranking for each program. Is that for the Q section or the V section?</p>
<p>And, how often does NRC publish these rankings? I mean, those averages are averages of how many years?</p>
<p>You like hijacking every thread and asking a crap load of questions that you’re too lazy to find the answers to yourself, don’t you? How about actually looking for these answers yourself instead of asking people to spoonfeed you everything.</p>
<p>@Blue4123 Isn’t answering questions about graduate school what this forum is for? Sure, s/he could Google the answers, but s/he can also ask here.</p>
<p>@shrouded, I think that the average GRE score rankings are for both sections of the GRE. And the NRC publishes the rankings on an irregular schedule but about every 10 years. The last time the rankings were published were in 2000. The current rankings are already outdated because even though they were published in 2010, I think they are based upon data from about 2005.</p>
<p>@radicalnegative1, if you feel I ‘hijacked’ your thread, sorry; didn’t mean to do so.</p>
<p>Some of the data in NRC rankings are quite important, such as the avg annual 1st year enrollment, percent of international students or percent of 1st year students with support,… Unfortunately, there’s a good chance some of them have changed.</p>
<p>btw, have you seen this revision?
[What’s</a> New](<a href=“http://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/Resdoc/PGA_044475]What’s”>http://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/Resdoc/PGA_044475)</p>