vishwa

Juhi - If you like the course then you should do it. I would expect that with an MS in MIS you should target the IT departments in companies (information services departments). I am sure you are aware of most companies (non-software and software) having well invested IT departments. That would be a natural choice with an MIS degree. You may be able to secure positions in companies that make applications for the IT departments of companies too. So, there should be as many opportunities out there as there are for a graduate with an MS in CS or CE. The only thing to keep in mind is that getting positions that require strong Computer Science backgrounds will be hard, not because you are not sharp enough to learn given an opportunity, but because there are a lot of people with the exact qualifications sought by companies these days. Hope this helps. Good luck on your plans.

daedalus - what's with the leading 's' - 8^)? In any case, congratulations on your GRE score. As far as I know RECs fall under the category of "known" schools from India. Clearly, everyone knows the IITs here, but RECs do enjoy fair reputation. Considering you are on track to gain some considerable research experience, I don't see anything coming in your way in gaining admission at any of the schools you list. Your aggregate will mean little unless your rank in class makes it into one of your reco letters. You could take the AGRE and get a good score to offset your relatively lower grades. I really don't believe in converting your scores to a GPA, but that's me. Apply for a Ph.D. program and you should land schol somewhere. A friend of mine with a 2180 GRE from REC, Suratkal did his Masters with schol at UMass Amherst and then obtained a Ph.D. from Ann Arbor all in Mech. Engg. So, there is that possibility of even switching schools after a Masters for your Ph.D. Few points to keep in mind, . Consider AGRE. A good AGRE takes your 67.5% out of the equation. . Iterate over your SOP as many times as possible with at least one additional pair of eyes to give you constructive criticism. . Try and get a publication, else get a researcher to give you a reco highlighting your research experience. . See if you can work with your buddies in class so that they don't trample you by applying to the same school if all else is the same and they have higher grades (again AGRE should help here). That's my two cents. Good luck on your grad studies.

Vipul - Firstly, congratulations on your Columbia admit. On your questions - the economy seems to be showing signs of recovery. It is a cycle and by definition repeats itself. This is one instance where we want history to repeat itself and it seldom disappoints. I am an optimist. In any case, the location of a university matters little. Your work as a grad student matters the most with the reputation of the university coming somewhere in between. There was a time when there were so many of my batchmates from Virginia Tech who got into Intel Santa Clara (just to illustrate location being inconsequential). Columbia is very well known. So, you are covered from a university reputation standpoint (which will give you that benefit of doubt if your performance is less than stellar). A Ph.D. is the way to go if academia and research entice you. A faculty position is not the only option after a Ph.D. and is in fact a hard thing to get into, where your academic performance, your university reputation and your ability to attract funds all play an equally important role. A Ph.D. also opens up opportunities to work as a researcher in various companies or research labs. If you are happy with a technical role in a company without aspirations to be a researcher in any of the premier research labs (IBM, JPL, NASA, SRI) or a faculty member at any of the universities here or abroad, then a Masters degree is good enough. I hope this helps. Good luck on your grad studies.

Real GRE: V 700 Q 800 AWA 6 Power Prep 1: V 700 Q 800 Power Prep 2: V 660 Q 790 ETS [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip] 10th ed: (seven tests) V : 670 630 680 660 660 650 650 Q : 750 800 780 800 800 780 780 Kaplan CBT : V : 640 610 610 Q : 760 790 780 Princeton Review CBT : V : 760 730 590 760 Q : 680 760 780 770 Two ScoreItNow! essay submissions : 6 and 5

Sushmita - I checked your earlier posts and found a mention of Motor Control being your area of interest. I assume this is part of computational neuroscience. When I googled it the first university I hit was USC and their motor control lab. Anyway, considering you got the best response from Iowa and have already established some sort of rapport with the faculty there, I would suggest you go there. A Ph.D. is a long program. A friendly faculty makes a big difference in maintaining sustained interest from you as a student. Minimal response from USC with no funds makes it hard to choose USC, considering it is quite an expensive school to top unresponsiveness! If you want to use the rankings of these programs to decide, then Iowa is the only other top 50 program with USC being the highest ranked program amongst your admits. I am using the Biomedical rankings as that seems to be the closest to what you are interested in. I hope this helps. Good luck on your plans.

Ali - I would go with UIUC. There is nothing like having financial support. Remember that Stanford is located in perhaps the most expensive part of the bay area. I live in Palo Alto within two miles of Stanford and know a thing or two about living expenses there. So, unless you can comfortably afford living and tuition, which will not reduce with time at Stanford unlike public universities, it is a hard sell for me, considering UIUC has already offered support for Ph.D. Also, UIUC is very reputed, which makes it by no means a compromise to choose UIUC over Stanford. You can always transfer or even attempt MIT after joining UIUC and working there for a couple of years and completing their requirements for a Masters. Don't even think about accepting two places. Universities do have a database and such practices of accepting multiple offers could jeopardize your plans to study. If you are that particular about Stanford, then ask them for a deferal without accepting their offer for fall admission. I wouldn't jeopardize an offer of admission for a Ph.D. with support for a Masters without support at Stanford. There is really no comparison. I hope this helps. If you are still undecided and money is not an issue, then take a look at faculty in your area of interest and decide. But remember that faculty prefer to work with their Ph.D. candidates. So, unless you attract their attention by stellar performance in their courses (A+ in grad level courses through extra earned credit), Stanford faculty will not be willing to give you face time.

Kirti - I thought Dionysus covered your questions quite well. I second his opinion. Do you have any research experience? If you don't you should seriously consider getting some. If you could get a publication or two and or get a researcher in your area of interest comment on your research potential, it would give you the best edge to apply to the top CS programs you enumerate. Also, the WWW is the best store-house for information. If you spend time browsing pages of the departments that interest you at schools that interest you, you will get a wealth of information. Beyond a response painted in broad strokes you cannot expect more specific information without some browsing. I hope this helps. Good luck on your future endeavours.

Ritendra - I thought you were interested in CS and not CE. In any case, if you really think all things are equal between the two places and the US News ranking is what will break the tie, then here you go - for Computer Engineering (2005 US News ranking), SUNY is ranked 54 and Penn State is ranked 16. For CS, the picture is different though, with SUNY being 32 and Penn State 36. I still think you should base your decision on particular faculty interests in your general area, seeking to maximize a match in terms of interests, rather than a rank from a publication, but then you are the best judge of your future.

Nedian - There has been a lot of debate on the usefulness of converting the marks you secure in countries such as India and Pakistan to a GPA on a scale of 4. Since a GPA is relative to the performance of the rest of the students in your class, the absolute marks doled out in a number of universities in some countries including India and Pakistan really cannot be converted into a relative GPA without more information than what is available on your transcripts. So, don't worry about your "GPA". You should mention your class rank and get some Prof to highlight that in his or her recommendation. Universities in the US are aware of the fact that a 3.5 GPA from a fourth tier university counts for much less than a 3.5 from a top school. If your university is known here then nothing like it, if not you could write the GRE subject test to prove you are good in your subject, in case you are applying to any of the top schools. Hope this helps. Good luck.

Ritendra - Your advisor is the most important person you will know for the next n years as you work towards your Ph.D. As a consequence depending on the amount of time you have (which I guess is April 15), you could try writing to some of the faculty and students in your area to get a pulse for how good the research environment is. That may help cement your decision. As you rightly point out, SUNY has a better CS reputation than Penn State with Penn State being the overall engineering leader of the two. But then, since you are in CS it does not matter what the overall engineering standing is. Get to know what the faculty that interest you are working on, write to them and then decide. Remember - considering you have a fellowship at SUNY, faculty will be more than willing to talk to you as they don't have to spend their grants to get you funded!

Noor - Answers to your questions are easily obtainable from the websites of various universities. So, with the expectation that you will do your due diligence and voraciously read online content to get your answers I am giving you the list of the top 25 schools in Civil engineering from the latest US News rankings. This way you get a start on where to begin looking for the info you seek. Good luck to you on your plans. Engineering Specialties: Civil (New! Ranked in 2003*) 1. University of California–Berkeley 2. University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign 3. Massachusetts Institute of Technology University of Texas–Austin 5. Georgia Institute of Technology 6. Stanford University (CA) 7. Purdue University–West Lafayette (IN) 8. University of Michigan–Ann Arbor 9. Cornell University (NY) 10. Texas A&M University–College Station 11. Northwestern University (IL) 12. Virginia Tech 13. California Institute of Technology University of Washington 15. Carnegie Mellon University (PA) Penn State University–University Park 17. University of Colorado–Boulder University of Minnesota–Twin Cities 19. North Carolina State University 20. University of California–Davis University of California–San Diego University of Wisconsin–Madison 23. Columbia University (Fu Foundation) (NY) Princeton University (NJ)

Sweta - From your posting I am not sure if you are interested in a Masters or a Ph.D. program. I don't know what your area is. I am using this as an avenue to post a link which I think is a must read for anyone interested in a Ph.D. program in CS. This article written by a Prof. at CMU is very informative and should help answer such questions. The document is titled "Applying to Ph.D. programs in Computer Science" and is available in both postscript and pdf formats. I am attaching the webpage of the Prof. here. Please do a keyword search to get the document I am refering to. This way you get to choose the format that works best for you. The link - http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~harchol

sh123sh - There are some Canadian univs that easily compete with the best in the United States in CS. Waterloo, University of Toronto and McGill are stellar univs. I suggest you visit their websites and read the profiles of Profs and there research to get a better understanding of the quality of work done there. There are not many univs in Canada as compared to the United States, which is why you don't see so many aspirants for Canadian univs on forums such as this. Competition is still very stiff. If you have good credentials (GRE/Acads/Research) you should apply to some of the univs I mention in this response. Funding was always an issue at Canadian univs in the past. There was a time when Waterloo had no support for international students. I don't know how this has changed now.

Blanch - For an MBA, the school matters. This is especially true considering you are not doing any research or publishing in peer reviewed journals, like in a Ph.D. program. Moreover, the contacts you establish while doing an MBA are often invaluable. So, I would strongly suggest doing your MBA from a top 25 school at least. I don't know of schools around Houston. I know the Cox school at SMU is a top 25 school for a part-time MBA, but that is in Dallas. My two bits. Hope this helps. I know of no sites that would give you ranked schools by region. You have to sift through the WWW on your own. Here is some info for encouragement - I was reading the profile of this student from China who flies every week to San Francisco to attend the west coast campus of Wharton!! That's a 12 hour flight each way, during which she claims she does all her reading in peace. (she has accumulated more than 2 million miles so far). Good luck on your studies.

Monica, I would put your chances at UCR to be the best, unless you have good research experience in your chosen field with either publications to prove or recommendations from researchers stating the research work you have done. The reason I say this is because, if you do have research experience then the GRE does not matter so much. In other words, a really bad GRE score will pull you down while a decent score will be neutral. If you don't have research experience, then it would be best to have your GRE percentiles 90 or higher on all three sections. I don't know what a 730 (most important for CS programs and engineering in general) gives you by way of percentile. I know an 800 in Q is 92 percentile (this year). Also, AWA falls off sharply in terms of percentiles as you loose each 0.5 points. 6.0 is 96.

Monica - Erin is right about the effect the budget cuts are having on admission. The fees for grad school has increased by 40% in the UC system of universities. That is staggering. Though prop. 55 did see voter approval (if you are following California budgetary shortfalls and solutions), it will not dent the increase in grad tuition. I am sure this will affect admissions. Remember international and out-of-state students have the extra burden of out-of-state tuition as well. Considering UC schools are very expensive, many international students (IITians from India for sure) will not accept admissions without support. So, the schools may not make even make admissions in such cases as they don't have the money they used to. I wish you the best in your quest nonetheless. On MBA admissions - that is a whole different ball game. Firstly, you rarely see international students applying to B schools without experience (they will not get in if they do). Even the ones with experience who do apply are a minority compared to applicants in non-B schools (Masters/Ph.D. in engineering/economics/.. etc.). Also, Berkeley and Stanford see more than their fair share of IT professionals applying (Silicon Valley applicants). As they desire diversity, you will notice that IT professionals are competing in larger numbers for the same percentage of seats than other professionals. With international applicants being so tech centric, you may not find as many of them at these schools as a consequence. Erin's observation appears to be sound.

johnny3000 - You are right. I was refering to the bioengineering link, which includes computational biology and bioinformatics. The medical/biology aspects are in UCSF, which I guess is ably suited for research in that area, considering its reputation as a medical school. Good luck at Brown. Neuroinformatics sounds like fun!

Congratulations on your admit. Did you land schol or is it just admission? Good luck on your grad studies.

If a university states that AGRE is recommended and if have any reason to believe that you will not perform as well as you would like, it would be best not to take it at all, more importantly when you have good research experience. AGRE is typically seen by admissions committees when they don't recognise the school you got your Bachelors degree from. I hope your AGRE does not become the impediment in getting an admission. Best of luck. You could try to re-activate your UMinn admission. Once you get in you should be able to land some support.. considering you are a local applicant with no visa issues.

anak - As long as you have at least one recommendation letter from a researcher working in your chosen field (in this case bioinfo), who elaborates on the specific research work you did you should be fine. If you worked for a machine learning based company, I hope you got one such letter. I applied to one university (UCSC part-time Ph.D. CS) and got in. I have research experience too and got a researcher in my field (formal methods) to write about what I did by way of research. I think that is critical when it comes to Ph.D. admissions.

Most univs make their decisions such that letters are sent out by March 15. This is to give applicants a month (through April 15) to respond accepting or rejecting the offer of admission. If you haven't heard yet, you could be wait-listed.. after April 15 I would give up on an acceptance. Good luck to those waiting to hear from univs.

johnny3000 - I thought the bioinfo program no longer exists at UCSF. In fact if you try to access their webpage you are redirected to the one at Berkeley. anak - Good luck on your admissions. I hope you land at least one. Do you have any research experience in bioinfo? Most Ph.D. programs is very particular about prior research experience. In fact the top schools do not consider GRE as much as research experience.

ozgulker - I got my admission from UCSC last week by email for a Ph.D. in Computer Science. I have heard that all their decisions are complete by the end of Feb and they mail out their acceptances before the middle of March. I guess you still have time to hear from them. Good luck.

Also an early email notification from Berkeley and Feb 10 is early! has always implied financial support in the form of a fellowship.. so I guess congratulations are in order. Impressive stats. Also, nice to see another dude with relatively long industry experience getting back to school. We have more Ph.D. grads from Berkeley in the company I work for than from anywhere else and hence the comment about the fellowship. Anyways, good luck.

Congratulations Hendrik. Of course Stanford is a very good place. I have had the pleasure of taking courses there and can assert that even if the Profs are a mixed bag, the experience is quintessential academia! Good luck.