Typical Fellowship $ at Universities.

[albertalla]

About the GPA and transfer question: when you fill out an application, there are fields for three schools usually. I went to four so it was a bit of a problem but I could add the fourth in the extra section.
For each school, there is a field for your GPA. When an application asks for your overall GPA (or something like that), I gave them my degree granting university GPA, but since I saw no rule out there, if it makes your GPA better, you could always combine GPAs. It sounds dodgy, but they can always work things out from your transcripts and the individual GPA you listed.

Moo types faster than me :-)

[OneMoreEcon]

Regarding GPA, they should make it clear on the application. (I think Berkeley made me list 3 or 4 different GPAs on there - overall, last two years, only math and econ).

As for aid, I think there's some confusion about fellowship vs other forms of aid. Fellowship is money you get with no responsibilities attached. Other forms in TAships and research assistantships. I'll re-iterate that I would expect research assistantships to be a very common form of aid in engineering fields (it seemed to be the case for the one or two engineers I knew). Keep in mind that a research assistantship in an engineering master's program is giving you experience that's valued on the job market.

Not that I know for sure, but I would expect an engineering MA/MS with no research experience to do horribly on the the job market (compared to others with a master's and research experience.

[neo_dude]

wow! i was unaware of all those details. Thanks for your responses asquare, albertalla, OneMoreEcon, europeean, and moo!
What is the best way to know the exact details about these fellowships and what a particular department has to offer? Also, How do you guys find out which professor is working on which project and invovled in what research? Do you hear about it from your friends or email all the professors asking for the details or any other way? How do you tell the professors that your interested in their research and are willing to work with them if they admit you into the Univ? Can you even work with them on their research or correspond about it through emails etc before even applying? Please let me know.
A friend of mine got into the criminal justice program in Harvard last year. He said he started communicating with the professors an year in advance and that the professors gave him a few topics and asked him to write a paper on it and email it to them so they could evaluate him and recommed him to the admissions committee. One prof. gave him 3 topics one after the other and he researched and typed 'em all up-each one about 14 pages (thats what he said). He got only 18k $ aid though.

hey how come there are so many Econ guys in this graduate thread? I mean they like comprise 99 % of all and most of them going for PhD's.
Is there any other forum which specializes in Engineering related threads?