- #1
X89codered89X
- 154
- 2
BACKGROUND:
I'm an electrical engineering student, and it's my senior year, and I'd like to continue with my education and obtain a Master's degree, particularly in controls and maybe DSP. I have a 3.53/4.0 . It should be around a 3.6X but I attempted to take 23 credits one semester and got a ~2.9. I suppose this atleast shows I'm ambitious.
PROBLEM:
I've recently discovered that only PhD students really get the funding and tuition waivers to advance in their education. Now, this sucks for me. I don't think I could hold out and get a PhD only because I don't want to be 30 years old by the time I finish my education. I'm also not sure I'm cut out to do research for years on end. I was in an REU, which was all right, but I felt like I was sort of doing a sort of busywork project that had all ready been accomplished. Of course, this could have been because I was still and undergraduate and the REU was really more about the 'research experience' than to contributing to the already-existing body of knowledge, but again I don't know.
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS (and what makes me hesitant to jump at these solutions):
1) Apply as a PhD Student... I don't think I have the GPA or that I would be able to find the recommendations letters. Most PhD students had 3.7 or higher GPA's in undergrad and just seem a bit smarter than me. I also don't think I could find could people for rec letters.
2) Pay for a Master's... I don't want to add on to my all ready 40-50K of debt, although perhaps it would be worth it. Not sure... I also don't think my dad would support more school that costs money... since he's been helping me financially to keep it to ONLY 40K-50K...
3) Get a job... I feel like I won't get my questions answered. I want to keep learning! I'm sick of two things in undergraduate electrical engineering classes...No noise (i.e. perfect information) and linearity (e.g. "we can approximate this system as a 3rd order linear, laplace transformable system...") i want to take all kinds of control and DSP with noise classes.
4) Apply to a university in a different country with free/dirt cheap tuition... I'd be up for this but I'm not really bilingual. I know some spanish but I don't know if I could depend on it, nor do I necessarily want to go to school in Spain.
Thanks in advance!
I'm an electrical engineering student, and it's my senior year, and I'd like to continue with my education and obtain a Master's degree, particularly in controls and maybe DSP. I have a 3.53/4.0 . It should be around a 3.6X but I attempted to take 23 credits one semester and got a ~2.9. I suppose this atleast shows I'm ambitious.
PROBLEM:
I've recently discovered that only PhD students really get the funding and tuition waivers to advance in their education. Now, this sucks for me. I don't think I could hold out and get a PhD only because I don't want to be 30 years old by the time I finish my education. I'm also not sure I'm cut out to do research for years on end. I was in an REU, which was all right, but I felt like I was sort of doing a sort of busywork project that had all ready been accomplished. Of course, this could have been because I was still and undergraduate and the REU was really more about the 'research experience' than to contributing to the already-existing body of knowledge, but again I don't know.
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS (and what makes me hesitant to jump at these solutions):
1) Apply as a PhD Student... I don't think I have the GPA or that I would be able to find the recommendations letters. Most PhD students had 3.7 or higher GPA's in undergrad and just seem a bit smarter than me. I also don't think I could find could people for rec letters.
2) Pay for a Master's... I don't want to add on to my all ready 40-50K of debt, although perhaps it would be worth it. Not sure... I also don't think my dad would support more school that costs money... since he's been helping me financially to keep it to ONLY 40K-50K...
3) Get a job... I feel like I won't get my questions answered. I want to keep learning! I'm sick of two things in undergraduate electrical engineering classes...No noise (i.e. perfect information) and linearity (e.g. "we can approximate this system as a 3rd order linear, laplace transformable system...") i want to take all kinds of control and DSP with noise classes.
4) Apply to a university in a different country with free/dirt cheap tuition... I'd be up for this but I'm not really bilingual. I know some spanish but I don't know if I could depend on it, nor do I necessarily want to go to school in Spain.
Thanks in advance!