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Information for prospective graduate students Thank you for your interest in Purdue ECE. I have put the following information together to help answer the most common questions that I receive from prospective graduate students. Please read this before you contact me. Note that the information contained here is my personal opinion/observation and is not official in any way. 1. Can I do a summer internship with you? 2. I am applying to Purdue for graduate school. Can you give me funding? 3. How does the M.S./Ph.D. admissions process work at Purdue ECE? 4. Can you evaluate my chances of being admitted or of receiving financial support? 8. What software/programming skills should I have? 9. Does the TOEFL score really matter? 10. Should I apply to the M.S. program or to the Ph.D. program? 1. Can I do a summer internship with you? Unfortunately, I do not offer any summer internships, paid or unpaid. 2. I am applying to Purdue for graduate school. Can you give me funding? First, you will need to get admitted to Purdue ECE (see Question 3 below for more information about the graduate admissions process). Second, I will need to take you on as my Ph.D. student. For more information on that, read my answer to Question 6 below. If I agree to serve as your Ph.D. advisor, I will discuss funding possibilities with you at that time. Please note that I usually do not give out funding offers to students with whom I have not had technical interactions in person, except in exceptional cases. 3. How does the M.S./Ph.D. admissions process work at Purdue ECE? Step 1: After you submit your application, the ECE graduate admissions office assembles your application material together in a file. The ECE graduate admissions office is headed by the Director of Graduate Admissions (DGA), who is a senior faculty member in the School of ECE. Each file is tagged as being “complete” when all the required information has been received. All complete files are then sorted according to the specific technical area that the student has listed as his/her first choice. Purdue ECE has nine different technical areas - click here for the list. Step 2: Sometime between January 15 and January 30, the graduate admissions committee, consisting of approximately 25 ECE faculty members, reviews completed applications. Each complete file is reviewed by atleast two (often three) members of the admissions committee. If a student lists technical area X as their first choice in the application, only faculty members who work in technical area X will review the file. Each faculty member who reviews a file puts down his/her individual recommendation (i.e., admit or deny) and supporting comments. Once all the files in an area have been reviewed, they are sorted into two stacks, an “admit” stack” and a “deny” stack. Step 3: Based on the comments provided by the faculty members, a subset of the files in the “admit” stack of each area is selected to consider for financial support. Financial support for graduate students is usually in one of three forms: fellowship, teaching assistantship (TA), or research assistantship (RA).
The admissions committee creates a ranked list of applicants to consider for fellowships and a ranked list of applicants to consider for TAs. These funding lists, along with a list of admit or deny recommendations for all the other applicants (Step 2 above), are submitted to the Director of Graduate Admissions (DGA). The DGA makes the final admit/deny decisions on each file as well as the decision on whether to give an applicant a fellowship or a TA. This decision is usually based on (a) the recommendation of the admissions committee, (b) the total number of fellowship and TA positions that are available in that particular year, and (c) his/her own review of each file. Please note that the DGA’s decision on all applicants is final. Individual faculty members cannot influence or alter the decision. Step 4: All admit, deny, and funding decisions are sent out to applicants by the graduate admissions office. 4. Can you evaluate my chances of being admitted or of receiving financial support? Unfortunately, I cannot. As you can see from the process described above, it really depends on how strong your application is, relative to the other 2000 or so applications we receive every year. My only advice to you would be to go ahead and apply. If you have already done so, please wait to hear back from the graduate admissions office. Rest assured that every file is carefully evaluated before a decision is made. For specific queries regarding the process, please contact the ECE graduate admissions office. 5. I am interested in working in the area of embedded systems. Which technical area should I select in my application to make sure that it is seen by you (and other faculty working on this topic)? If you are interested in specializing in embedded systems, you can select either the Computer Engineering area or the VLSI and Circuit Design area depending on what your specific interests are. If you are mainly interested in the hardware (VLSI/IC/PCB) design aspects of embedded systems, please select the VLSI and Circuit Design area as your first choice. If you are mainly interested in the software/systems aspects of embedded computing, please select the Computer Engineering area as your first choice. The application also allows you to list the names of one or more faculty members whose research group you are interested in joining. I am affiliated with the VLSI and Circuit Design area as well as the Computer Engineering area. I look through the “admit” list of both of these areas if I am looking to hire new students. Therefore, if you have applied to either of these areas and have been admitted, I will certainly get to see your application file. 6. I have applied to Purdue ECE, am interested in embedded systems, and have listed your name in my application form. How do I become your student? Thank you for applying to the graduate program at Purdue ECE. If you are interested in joining my research group, after you have applied, please send me a short email with a 1-page resume in PDF format (I will not open attachments of any other type). A good time to send me this email would be in the first two weeks of January. If you send me email much earlier than that, I will likely forget by the time the admissions process gets under way. Unfortunately, due to the volumes involved, I may not be able to respond individually to your email. However, I do read every email that I receive from prospective students. As mentioned in Question 5 above, I personally look through the admitted list of students in the VLSI and Circuit Design area and the Computer Engineering area. If I am looking for new students and I am interested in your application, you will most certainly hear back from me sometime in late January or in early February. Sending me a flood of emails asking for an RA or whether I received your previous emails is not going to help. Finally, please do not call me over the phone to talk about your application unless we have explicitly set up a prior appointment through email. 7. What courses should I have taken during my undergraduate degree to have the required background to work in your group?
If you are interested in embedded hardware, you should have also done as many as possible of the next three:
If you are interested in embedded software, you should have also done as many as possible of the next three:
8. What software/programming skills should I have? First, you must be an "expert" in C programming, regardless of whether you are interested in hardware or software. Second, during your Ph.D., you will almost certainly have to work with (by "work with", I mean either run, modify, and/or write) large, complex infrastructure software, such as design tools, simulators, compilers, etc. These are usually written in an object-oriented programming language (most often C++). Therefore, it is important for you to be comfortable working with an object-oriented programming language as well. 9. Does the TOEFL score really matter? Many international students do not take TOEFL very seriously, due to the (mistaken) perception that TOEFL scores are not really important during the admissions process. At Purdue ECE, TOEFL scores play a very crucial role in determining your eligibility for a TA position. TAs play a key role in educating our undergraduate students by conducting office hours, help sessions, etc. The university is serious in making sure that all TAs have good English speaking skills and has a set of criteria to determine if a student’s English speaking skills are good enough to be a TA. The best way you can prove to the university that your English speaking skills are good enough to be a TA is to receive a score of 27 or higher on the TOEFL iBT Speaking section. If you receive a score of 27 or higher, your file will be marked as being certified for a TA and, if the admissions committee recommends you for a TA position, you will usually receive an offer from ECE. On the other hand, if you receive a score of 26 or lower on the TOEFL iBT Speaking section, you will have to take a spoken English exam administered by the Oral English Proficiency Program (OEPP) before you can be a TA. Since you cannot take the exam before you get to Purdue, the School of ECE will have to get into the business of speculating whether you will pass this exam or not, which it will not do. Therefore, the policy in Purdue ECE is that if you receive a TOEFL iBT Speaking score of 26 or lower, you will not even be considered for a TA position during the admissions process, irrespective of how stellar the other aspects of your application are. Unfortunately, every year, we have several cases of very bright students (top ranked students from top universities around the world) lose out on TA positions due to a low TOEFL iBT Speaking score. I would strongly recommend you to take the TOEFL seriously and make sure that you score a 27 or higher on the TOEFL iBT Speaking section. 10. Should I apply to the M.S. program or to the Ph.D. program? If the highest degree you have is an undergraduate degree then you can either apply to the direct Ph.D. program or to the M.S. program. If you are sure that you want to leave Purdue with an M.S. degree, then you should apply to the M.S. program. Similarly, if you are sure (or almost sure) that you want to do a Ph.D., I strongly recommend you to apply to the direct Ph.D. program. If you are not sure of your plans to do a Ph.D., then you have a choice to make. If you apply to the M.S. program, clearly, you will have the benefit of keeping your options open. However, this flexibility does not come for free. In return, you will likely decrease your chances of receiving financial assistance (atleast some forms of funding). My observation has been that students applying to the direct Ph.D. program are usually given a preference over students applying to the M.S. program when it comes to RA positions or fellowships, and possibly even TA positions. It is completely your choice as to which side of the increased flexibility vs. increased chance of funding tradeoff you want to go with. This information is provided to only help you make a more informed decision. If you do decide to apply to the M.S. program, there is a question on the application form that asks you “Do you plan to continue for a Ph.D.?” Personally, I don’t attach much significance to this question or the answer. The reason is simple – even if you answer “yes”, you are not bound in any way to do so. I have found that students often put down “yes” to this question because they feel it improves their chances of getting funding. Therefore, unless I have other concrete information to indicate otherwise, I usually consider all applicants to the M.S. program to be terminal M.S. students, irrespective of what they put down as the answer to this question. |
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