In response to a A2A on a question titled “I am a first-year ECE student. What should I do to get into MIT?”,
I ended up writing a rather long answer, based on my experience and
learning so far. I thought it may be useful in general to any Indian ECE
student at the start of their engineering, and so putting it down for
all here. Previously, I had written a generic guide when I was myself in
final year, Abhinav Dhere's answer to What should a 4th semester ECE student be doing right now? . Anyway, so here we go:
- Till about your 5th sem, focus on learning and getting good at your subjects.
- Work well on core subjects, read from standard books and courses of OCW/edX when available.
- Try things practically and think about why it works like this. If you can do it in your college labs, good enough, otherwise use simulations in MATLAB/Python.
- Also, solve problems from standard books. It will be good if you can solve the problems in one standard book for each subject by end of your 6th sem.
- Try to get a research internship at a reputed research institution after 6th sem. If you can get a peer reviewed publication (not paid journal), it is good, but don’t waste too much time for that.
The steps so far
would help you in any case, and make you a better engineer with much
more scope ahead. Now here onwards, my suggestion is to attempt applying
abroad, but also not let go for M.Tech/MS opportunities in India. I
understand it is difficult to manage both, and practically speaking, at
that point you may decide on your intuition then, where to give more
weightage. Ideally one could go this way -
→ Take GRE in August, and send applications in September. Thereafter forget about it.
→
Assuming you would have followed the steps 1 to 5, you would have
crystal clear concepts and have solved problems in standard books. Now
from September onwards, solve GATE previous year questions and join a
test series. Continue preparation this way till Feb and appear for GATE.
→
By April/May, you would have an idea of which universities are giving
acceptance. You would also have your GATE score. Now, don’t go for any
random university just because it is in US. Choose the best option you
have then.
This requires patience, persistence and a bit of luck, but if
you enjoy the science and logic in your subjects, it would be fun in a
way, and also take you far ahead.
Also note
that this assumes you would be willing to go for higher studies at a top
school and wouldn’t get diverted due to peer pressure or societal
pressure. Also remember, if you are doing your best, the result in the
end would be good for you. As Steve Jobs says, you can only connect the
dots when looking backwards. So focus on your efforts and don’t care
about the results.
All the best..!
