/sci/ - Science & Math

what's your GPA

How did you do on GRE?

go back in tiem and major in science stuff

>>1172526

Didn't take it yet. I'm not graduating yet, I'm trying to plan ahead so I can get in, not just deciding I want to go at the last minute.

>>1172530
So far just a 3.5. But my CS and math classes have like a 3.6.

>>1172542
Five year masters, eh?

>>1172549
Yep, although I could do it in 4.5 if I wasn't getting the math minor.

Also, is there any chance of not having to pay for school through teaching or doing work for a professor or something?

Yes, they have positions for Research Assistant and Teaching Assistant that pay tuition (or take it off your bill) and pay a stipend. The RA is considered more valuable, because you're getting paid to do your thesis, but the TA can be easier to get if you speak English clearly (also easier to get because it's considered less valuable).

What is used to determine who does and doesn't get TA or RA positions? Also, how many are there, PhD candidate to position ratio approximation?

bump

>>1172655
Nobody ever has to pay to get a Ph.D in hard science or engineering.

>>1172795
Some schools rarely pay international students though. Sometimes only 50% of admitted students get paid too.

>>1172795
I think to say EVER is an overstatement. More like, people usually chose to go to schools that offer them free education. But I wouldn't expect everyone who gets accepted to be offered a full ride.

1) The individual professors have their needs for RAs and TAs that vary from year-to-year, and that bubbles up from the professors up to the department level. That makes it like going for a job; if people know you ahead of time, that's an advantage.

By the way, you might have an advantage for an RA position as a US citizen if there is some research at Draper Lab (walking distance from MIT) or Lincoln Lab (driving distance from MIT). MIT makes all thesis work unclassified, but I think Draper and Lincoln can put US citizenship as a requirement for an RA position funded by them.

2) Sorry, good question. I don't know the ratio, but you could contact the department and ask.

>>1172800
Then get your employer to pay for it.

I'm not international, so that kinda works to my advantage.

if u have to ask us, u will never get in

>>1172810
I'm still in school. And what employer would pay for me to become overqualified?

>>1172815
I wasn't talking to you.

>>1172807
No, as a general rule if you have to pay for your Ph.D education you're doing it very, very wrong.

>>1172815
If you don't ask, you will never get in.

>>1172829
Well, if my options are somewhere not nearly as good of a school and MIT, I think there might be the possibility of it being worth it. If money was my main goal in life I wouldn't be getting my PhD in computer science, a master's is practically overkill.

Do we look like guidance counselors to you?

Fuck off.

By the way, having a MS can ironically be a disadvantage, or a complication, in the following way. They could accept you with the intention of a PhD program, but you would not officially be in a PhD program until after passing the doctoral qualifying exam. So your scenario is you would start school -- and you could have an RA or TA position -- then you would take your qualifiers. This would mean you would be in a limbo between starting school and passing the qualifiers. A particular department let me do this because they knew me from before. This was not favoritism, it was that I was a known quantity to them, and they could picture me succeeding.

So to visualize your scenario, you want to know when the qualifiers are (probably at the end of the fall term and the end of the spring term), how many chances they give you to pass (probably two, maybe three if the faculty discusses an unusual case), and how long they would let you take classes before you would need to take the qualifiers.

Having some time to take classes helps you get used to their intellectual style. Qualifiers are essentially a test of whether you know undergraduate material forwards and backwards, and if you know which professors would give your qualifiers, you can sit in on their undergrad classes to see how they think. This point is not to kiss butt, but to understand when they ask a question, you know exactly what they mean by the question.

But my attitude writing this particular post is to tell you these are the rules to your game (not to be discouraging). If you can see these are the dynamics, then you may be able to master the dynamics and get what you want.

At this point, you could look at the research the different professors are doing. A part of getting a PhD is alignment of interests. Politics might be a cynical word for the same thing, but I say this so you can master the dynamics and get what you want.

apply on time and make sure the guy you want to work for is still there. They have an early deadline and the guy I was interested in had just been moved to stanford because MIT rarely gives tenure, even to good professors.