Applying to Graduate School

By Ayaan Qayyum, May 10th, 2025 (updated January 7th, 2026)

This is my advice on how to get into a graduate school and whether it is the right fit for you.

(1/7/26): Update

Just to introduce myself, at the time of writing I am a second semester Master of Science student at Columbia University. I applied in December 2024 and was notified by them on 3/31/25.

The only major change since I applied was that the federal government no longer will offer the Graduate PLUS Loan program for new borrowers. My cohort will be the last one for the immediate future. The PLUS program was a federal loan that covered over 100% of tuition with no need for interest or principal payments as a student. There is also a generous six month window after graduating before the first payment is due, which can even be extended under certain conditions. Additional conditions for students that work in the public sector could enable loan forgiveness.

Columbia is expensive. I am a full time student and am not working. I am privileged to focus 100% of my time on my studies. Without the PLUS program, I doubt I could have attended Columbia. I am extremely privileged and I am thankful for this opportunity. I worry for those who want to follow my exact path but will find it much more financially tenuous to do so.

Since this blog went online in May, I have added sections on GPA and "Transferring Instead of an MS".

Overview

A graduate school application is arguably a lot more straightforward than an undergrad application. The purpose of graduate school is to help you specialize into a particular field or area. Depending on the type of graduate school that you apply to, it may cost a significant amount of money for you to attend, or it may be free or you may receive even a stipend. This will focus on mainly applying for MS/PhD and engineering. I applied for electrical and computer engineering and will be attending Columbia for their Master’s of Electrical Engineering. I also got into Georgia Tech for their MS in Computer Engineering.

If I had to break down all the components of a graduate school application, I would list it like this: resume, essay, letters of recommendation, grades, research, and internships. The main things that you can plan for in the short term rather than the long-term or your essay and resume. Everything else requires significant care and attention for long-term planning.

When to Plan

If you are a freshman in college and your plan is just immediately go straight into a PhD program or MS program after you graduate at some other university, then you must start planning early. Try to get into a research lab and do research and eventually try to get a paper published. I applied to graduate schools without any papers published and still got in, but I did have some very interesting projects and industry experiences, such as private research. You can always do self-motivated / independent research into a particular fields, but sometimes you need the structural support of your school to succeed. For example, in my third year, which was my last year, I enrolled in the James J. Slade Undergraduate Research Program. This program gave me six credits of Computer Engineering credits to write a research paper, which was guaranteed to get published at the symposium. There were structural aspects of the program that really helped me through it. Such aspects include being required to check in with a PI (principal investigator) and having to come up with a research topic in advance.

Applying to PhD Vs. MS or Both

All of the advice that I received said that you should probably apply to a PhD program rather than a masters program. This is because a lot of schools will consider you for funding and if you don’t get funding, as a PHD student, you will most likely still be considered as a Master’s program. However, this tends to not be automatic. You typically need to opt-in to being considered for both a MS and a PhD. Meanwhile, some schools have you decide between a Master’s and a PhD program, so you have to be careful. For example, Georgia Tech’s Electrical Engineering forced me to choose between a masters and a PhD. I chose the masters. I got in, but they never considered me for funding. I don’t regret applying, but be sure to learn from my experiences. You must double-check and do all your research to make sure that you know exactly which program you’re applying to. Also, start all your applications early in the web application portal so you know what each program precisely requires, such as an official or signed transcript. I would recommend you start your application early, possibly in October or September. I started all of mine in October, which was a little late.

Letters of Recommendation

Most schools require three letters of recommendation, but some only required two. Try to ask letters of recommendation well in advance. It is better to get letters of recommendation from professors in your field that you have taken classes with rather than letters from a boss from an internship for example. You can still get a letter of recommendation from an internship manager you had, but this internship should be more focused on research and development. Most people go to graduate school to do research (PhD), to be a Professor (PhD), or specialize in a particular field (MS). If these appeal to you, you really need those professors in your field to really support you.

Resume

Making sure your resume is top-notch is not as difficult as it seems. Follow the online templates for graduate school published by Carnegie Mellon or Harvard or whatnot. Highlight the important things and highlight the projects that you’ve been working on that is directly relevant for a master or PhD program. Corporate experience does not matter as much as research and useful project experience.

Transcript

Possibly the most important yet underrated part of your application, which will absolutely play a significant portion of your application is your transcript. Make sure to take hard classes early and do well in them. Show that you have demonstrated academic success and that you’ll survive at the rigorous school that you’re applying to. Things are definitely not easy at graduate school, but with the right support, things could be great for you. You have to believe in your potential, as nobody else will believe in yourself more than you will.

GPA

So many engineering students I know are worried about their GPA. If you are coming from an engineering undergraduate program like I did, it is very rare to have earned anything close to a 3.9 on a 4.0 scale. For careers, I have heard the advice that GPA does not matter countless times. People on Reddit speculate that a 3.75 should be good enough to be competitive and anything above that has diminishing returns. My sample size of one student (me) cannot add particular insight to this debate.

I have also seen countless students in a very common situation: their overall GPA is around a 3.2 but their major GPA is around a 3.8. Obviously when applying you report your overall GPA by default, but from what I remember, you could write your major GPA in a separate spot. Any early undergraduate can understand how a major discrepancy between overall and major GPA can emerge: you struggled as an underclassmen but hit your stride as an upperclassmen. Grad programs are sympathetic to this common plight. A common assumption is that the more important classes are upper level and the lower level are filters that keep only the most determined of the prospective class. In your transcript, the story of your college years could be that "I struggled as a freshman in the introductory classes, but I started to excel in the major courses and did really well by the time I will apply to your university for further studies." If this applies to you, then so long as your GPA is above the minimum requirement permitted by your prospective university, I would still say you are in a good spot to apply.

If you are a Type A like me and strive for perfection, the idea that your GPA is less than perfect when applying is enough of a motivator to give up on the application process altogether. Please do not think that way. If you are in engineering, you fought for your life and you should recognize your own achievement.

Essay Structure Overview

Regarding your essay, you have to make it very clear your intentions and what you plan on doing there. Make your research interest very clear both on your resume and in your essay. You are trying to sell yourself so they will invest in you. So you have to mark the best things about yourself. This is not easy, but arguably it is a lot easier than applying to undergrad because undergrad is a complete mess (at least in my experiences). A lot of schools will have supplemental essays that you’ll have to write. Try to answer them to the best of your ability and be clear and direct.

When writing, consider the type of skills a graduate school is seeing that you have demonstrated. Such skills include critical thinking, research, communication, and interpersonal skills. The earlier you can identify your strengths and weaknesses, the better off you will be. Explicitly list three situations where you have demonstrated these skills. Then these form your paragraphs. Don’t start your intro paragraph, in fact this should be the last thing you write. Don’t lock yourself into a particular theme. I started with a spreadsheet of how I demonstrated these skills and went forward with that. Recall that the purpose of your graduate school essay is to simply demonstrate what activities you have engaged in, what you learned from them, and how it relates / reflects to graduate school.

I would say that applying to graduate school generally is a lot more straightforward than applying to jobs (which is a numbers game), and more straightforward than applying undergrad (which is idiosyncratic). You have to ask yourself, why am I applying to graduate school? What is my goal? What do I hope to get out of it?

Undergrad Double Major vs Master’s Degree

I advise a lot of the freshman that come to me to plan their four-year plans to either choose between a Master’s degree or a double major, since they’re the same amount of credits typically (30). I originally planned to do a double major / double degree, but since the scholarships I got from Rutgers had to be renewed every year (with the amounts I received varying wildly over time), I was convinced to speedrun my undergraduate degree by finishing it in three years and just do my Master’s in that extra year. I was supposed to spend four years in higher education anyway, so I’d rather be more efficient. In ECE, I only knew three people in my major who could do the same thing. You have to plan EXTREMELY early, like as early as first semester freshman year to plan to finish. As time goes on, you lose a lot of flexibility. Same thing with a double degree.

Since it worked so well for me, I’d recommend everyone rush their undergraduate degree in three years or less if they are able and skip doing a double major. It’s usually the same amount of credits anyway, and the level of the courses typically change as compared to a double major. For example, you typically have to take more 100-200 level courses to complete a double major. To do a Master’s degree, you have to take all 30 credits at the 500 level or above. The rigor is definitely different, and as an undergrad at Rutgers you have the ability to take Master’s courses as an undergrad or have Master’s students in your classes (such courses are called cross-listed). It also helps that a Master’s degree lets you specialize in your field, but a double major gives you two introductory looks at two separate fields.

But fundamentally, whatever you may choose, do NOT make the mistake of choosing your classes before you pick the job you want. The job that you want should guide the courses you choose to study to give you clarity. If you have an internship that’s all about building analog circuits and you want to do that as a career, maybe you want to take more classes on that topic. Find jobs you find are ideal and pick the classes and major that will help you be the ideal candidate for that job.

Transferring Instead of an MS

This section is for freshman undergraduates and high school seniors. For the prospective engineering high school seniors who worked hard to get into elite schools but were disappointed by their results, I understand how you feel. Some may receive guaranteed transfer options to attend their dream school. I know Georgia Tech has this program. For the students that choose to pursue this path, you spend your first year at one university then transfer to the other. Why would a university offer such a program? Well, transfer students don't count towards acceptance rates for elite schools trying to maintain a very small percentage. You can read more about the details in the 2022 exposé by Columbia Professor Michael Thaddeus, who discussed transfer students and Columbia's policies at the time in detail.

This is just my anecodal experience, but I have found that an Ivy League undergraduate degree in engineering typically does not need a master's degree to achieve a highly respectable, interesting, and competitive job. I have seen students who earned their MS at a T-50 like Rutgers achieve the same job and title as an undergraduate who went to a T-20 engineering school. There are, of course, nuances, predicated by the fact that this is just my opinion. YMMV.

The real question is what's in it for the transfer student? Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants that many early undergraduate students that are academically qualified at elite universities often feel pressure by their cohort to stay in their competitive engineering program. You can be a "big fish in a small pond" or a "small fish in a big pond", and many of those at elite universities feel they are too small of a fish to stay in their engineering program and transfer out. I theorize that transfer students help insert students past this freshman filter point to keep the quantity of engineering graduates stable despite fluctuations in students fleeing their originally intended program.

I have met people at Columbia who have taken path A: 1. Enroll at a local university. 2. Apply for transfer freshman year to Columbia. 3. Matriculate and graduate on time or a semester late.

I have met a lot of graduate engineers who took path B: 1. Enroll at a local university. 2. Graduate in four years and be at the top of your class. 3. Get into your reach graduate program. 4. Graduate in about two years, so in total six years of higher education.

I have also met those who took path C: 1. Enroll at a local university. 2. Graduate on time and land a job. 3. Work for about to two to three years. 4. Apply and get into grad school.

For path A, cost will be the biggest factor. There is no guarantee your new school will offer any financial assistance aside from loans. Path C is the most financially prudent option.

Think of the following triangle with tradeoffs: time, cost, elite status. If you want to save time and have an elite status, you'll need something similar to Path A (you'll likely pay the most). If you want to save money and earn an elite status, you may want to take Path C. If you want to save time and cost, then forget about the elite status and get a job after graduating from a school like Rutgers. I have met a lot of people who wanted to do path C but ended up getting a job they really liked and accordingly changed their plans.

Since you are in engineering, the truth is that an elite status can only do so much for you. At the end of the day, you will need to demonstrate your real engineering problem solving skills. For those in the computer science orbit, that means Leetcode. There is no escaping it. Unfortunately, Leetcode seems to be the last reliable way for an employer to test an engineer's hard skills. I have met PhD students who needed to do Leetcode to land big tech jobs!

Credit Load Per Semester as an Undergrad

The standard ECE curriculum at Rutgers recommends no more than 16-17 credits a semester. Just because you can handle more does not mean you will have a fun time. Aside from my first year at college, I never completed more than 14 credits a semester. The one semester where I took 18 credits and had three jobs I was so stressed I had to withdraw from a class. Making the tough decision to withdraw early gave me more time to focus to my other classes. That’s a big deal! When you have less classes to worry about, you can spend more time towards each one. And when you can do that, you have a lot more flexibility on what you can work on on the side. Since high school, my philosophy has always been that classes are secondary in your academic pursuits. Your first priority should be to distinguish yourself from the hundreds of other people taking the exact same classes as you. In my experience, I tried taking advanced classes early, and took less classes. Since many Rutgers students overestimated the time they could commit to each class, the averages of the classes I took were very low, lowering the bar needed to earn an A or a B+. The moral of my story is to distinguish yourself from those around you. I did so by taking less classes and taking advanced classes early.

Networking and Seeking Advice

Definitely take the time and actually talk to professors and have them review your resume, essays, and topics of interest. I must have reached out to over 15 people for advice, including those who are doing graduate school right now and professors and Deans at my current university and those at other universities. The people who admit you for graduate school is the ECE department (or whatever department you’re applying for). This is important because for undergraduate they are looking for well-rounded holistic candidates to enrich their undergrad community. But for graduate school, they are looking for a focus fit and research fit. Are you going to be an asset to the university?

Cold Emailing and Demonstrating Interest

Cold emailing professors is important. This demonstrates interest and makes you stand out from the other candidates. This especially makes you stand out and especially works if you’re applying for a PhD program. It may even work better in as a Master’s student, since the only real administrative difference between a MS and a PhD student is that a PhD student works directly under a PI through their funding and are strongly attached, versus a master student is unattached and essentially can work for a professor for free. However, MS students tend to be lower quality than PhD students (from what I’ve heard). So if you demonstrate interest and catch the eye of a professor, they can bring up your name on your behalf to the admissions committee and make things easy for you to help you get admitted. I met with a faculty from the University of Michigan and they recommended you include your transcript and resume in a cold email, so if they’re interested in you, they already have more information on you to investigate further.

Fee Waivers

A lot of graduate schools are really happy to give you fee waivers. Pay close attention to any programs or ways you might be able to receive a fee waiver. For example, at Columbia, I received a few waiver by visiting an information session, and the fee waiver was automatically applied after I applied. A lot of people get fee waivers for being women through the Society of Women Engineers (SWE). I have a friend who spent $0 on graduate school applications through SWE. I spent more like $300…

Conclusion

That’s pretty much all the advice I have to get regarding graduate school. Fundamentally, try to keep in mind a few things:

Strategically plan early.
Work to always distinguish yourself from other students.
Try to take hard classes early if you can handle it.
Try to do research or internships on the side.
Always, constantly seek advice.

Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or email. Do let me know if this advice helped. As always, results may vary. Good luck!