Re:I cannot afford to go back to engineering school
by RabbitAngstrom on Thursday August 08, 2013 @10:14AM
(#6179004)
Anecdotal evidence to be sure, but I went to an Ivy League School (Penn) on just straight-As and 700s (!) on the SATs. I was not a "legacy" student of any kind. I knew many such people there, and only about 10% of my colleagues admitted to being a legacy -- maybe it was just my social circle? Or that I didn't major at Wharton, which is stereotypically legacy?
Your point about graduate school is spot on, though. The game completely changes (though I think it's still mostly a game). I especially love the "don't buy this muffler..." quote!
Re:I cannot afford to go back to engineering school
by sidww2 on Thursday August 08, 2013 @09:07AM
(#6178627)
Maybe you were just a more distinguished candidate during graduate admissions? Also, if you're international, PhD admissions are a lot less biased against internationals compared to undergrad admissions (most top universities have 8-10% internationals for undergrads vs. ~50% for PhDs)
Re:I cannot afford to go back to engineering school
by hga on Thursday August 08, 2013 @09:36AM
(#6178779)
Getting into an Ivy as an undergraduate is very tough if you aren't a potential legacy admit, that is, a child of an alum. Once all those slots are filled, there aren't all that many left over.
I never got anywhere trying to get into Princeton as an undergraduate, with average SAT scores over 700, but did get accepted in the math (or statistics) department as a graduate student. I'd read lots of John Tukey's work -- uniformity in topology (in the back of Kelley's 'General Topology'), Tukey's lemma in axiomatic set theory, stepwise regression, power spectral estimation (Blackman and Tukey), the FFT (Cooley and Tukey), and 'Exploratory Data Analysis', had been working in applied math and computing, wrote G. Watson, and got accepted. I also got accepted in the Division of Applied Math at Brown and in Operations Research at Cornell. I went to Hopkins.