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Online Master's Degree from Stanford University anyone?

There are a lot of smart people at my workplace who got jobs in Silicon Valley straight out of college at age 22. While their friends were working on their graduate degrees full-time, they got their own degrees part-time. Their full-time peers took 2 years to complete their MS programs, while the part-timers took 3 years to complete their Master's degrees. I heard someone compare 2 such people saying, "In 5 years X got a PhD from Stanford, while his classmate Y got a part-time MS from Stanford and bought a house in the Valley with all the money he saved."

Advantages
- Work experience is a fairly big contributor to career growth and salary growth. Working for 2 more years than your peers gives you a pretty big edge. One of my friends who did a part-time MS in EE from Stanford is the youngest manager at our company.
- The biggest advantage of this avenue is the amount of money saved. Usually the degree was completely sponsored by the employer. If your company rewards performance with stock options, those extra 2 years could mean a huge payoff if your company's performing well.
- At Silicon Valley employers like Intel, Cisco, NVIDIA this happens to be a degree from Stanford, through the Stanford Center for Professional Development (SCPD). I know someone who worked for Motorola and got a part-time degree from IIT Chicago. Some Indian employers sponsor degrees from BITS Pilani to be completed remotely.
- SCPD is an excellent way to get a degree from a top-flight university like Stanford... The choices for majors range from Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Management Science and Engineering. If your odds of getting into a school in the top 50 aren't looking too good, IIT Chicago is not a bad place to get a degree from.
- The other advantage is completing a degree on your own schedule. You could watch all classes on Saturday or Sunday, instead of watching after work everyday.

Disadvantages
- The cost is high if you plan to pay out of pocket for some of these American programs.
- Online degrees may not allow you develop as many close relationships with either your classmates or professors.
- Doing a PhD after a part-time MS may not be very easy, because a lot of PhD programs would require a thesis from students with a Master's degree, usually not possible remotely.
- It is a lot of work. Doing a full-time job and taking a course from a good school every quarter is very time-consuming.

From a Carnegie Mellon University Professor's Blog

http://vonahn.blogspot.com/2009/12/advice-on-grad-school-applications.html

Quoting a few:
"1. DON'T start your research statement with a quote from Albert Einstein. You may think that's a good idea, but so do the other 50% of the applicants. Hell, don't start it with any quote, unless it's from something like Gossip Girl. XOXO. 

2. DON'T say you've wanted to be a professor since you were 4 years old. We won't believe you. When you were 4, you either wanted to be a policeman, an astronaut, or a firefighter. Admit it."

Canada Ahoy!?

It might seem odd, to have an article recommending Canada on a website about American grad schools, but it isn't too odd considering that Canada is a North American country after all. Canada is a fabulous country in many respects. If you watched the Winter Olympics last month, you may have realized how scenic the Vancouver is.





Universities
The University of Toronto is arguably the leading graduate school in Canada. If you look through the faculty lists of most top schools in Canada, UToronto grads feature in large proportions. The Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto is also featured prominently in many business school rankings for their stress on Design Thinking. Richard Florida is one of the prominent thinkers from Rotman, and is the author of a best-selling book from last year called "Who's your city? (Recommended reading) At my workplace in Silicon Valley there are a large number of Canadians who studied engineering at the University of Waterloo and a few from McGill University in Montreal. McGill is known as the MIT of Canada and has a very strong reputation in the United States as well.


Immigration
Immigration to Canada is much simpler than the United States. You could gain permanent residency almost as soon as you complete your graduate school program. There are also no per-country limits (like the United States) and getting a job offer is sufficient qualification for a Canadian Green Card.  3 years with permanent residency qualifies you to apply for Canadian citizenship and you are pretty much free to move around the world after that. Canadian citizens can work in the US on TN visas and can drive to the border and enter the US without a prior visa process.

Industry
Most of the big American firms have offices in Canada. The Greater Toronto Area is a semiconductor hub with offices of AMD, Qualcomm, Synopsys, Altera and others. The Vancouver area has offices of Microsoft, Intel, PMC-Sierra, Broadcom and IBM. Blackberry maker Research in Motion is based in Canada as well. If consulting is your thing, McKinsey& Co also has a practice in Toronto.

Other points to consider
Canada has universal health care, which might be good to have in the future in your senior years. But you do have to pay higher taxes for that benefit. Canada has been less affected by the Great Recession of 2009 as well. It's rumored that salaries are somewhat lower in Canada though. One of the other big downsides is the not so great weather.

Featured Program : University of Wisconsin-Madison : ECE

This is a new feature on this blog. I am planning to write an article about a graduate program or invite guest authors to write about a program they know closely. The objective is to give you a first-hand, from-the-horse's-mouth, impression of a graduate program which is vastly different from the kind of descriptions you get from a graduate school guidebook or a rankings website. So to begin with here's a piece about my own graduate program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Top areas of concentration
Computer Architecture, and Power are highly regarded areas of concentration. There are a large number of faculty members working in Computer Architecture between the CS and the ECE departments, and many prominent developments in microprocessor design were born in UW labs. You have a lot of choices in coursework, Design For Test, Circuit Design, Logic Design, Architecture, along with courses in the CS department in Compilers, OS, Distributed Systems.

Top Employers
For MS students who specialize in computer architecture or allied areas, the top employers are Qualcomm, Intel, Micron and NVIDIA. Another prominent employer although not specifically related to Computer Engineering was Epic Systems in Madison. There are 2 widely attended career fairs during a school year and I was extremely happy with the quality of the Engineering Career Services department. They helped me all through the process, and I had at least 4 onsite interviews all across the country.

Rankings
NRC rankings, or US News engineering rankings will list UW ECE at around 14-16 close to UCLA and UCSD. The CS department is ranked among top 10 CS departments in the country.

Other notes
- It is also one of the largest universities in the US by enrollment and campus area. Usually everyone finds funding either in the first semester or the second semester. There are many departments on campus that you can approach for funding (provided you ask nicely, ie don't spam). I found funding on my 11th day in Madison. It helps to know programming in Perl or Java.
- Madison is the capital of Wisconsin and is located about 3 hours north of Chicago. Winters are quite cold as the rest of Midwest and Northeast but there isn't as much snow as say Buffalo, NY, because it is situated on the western side of a Great Lake. It is an urban campus, so there is a lot to do, lots of restaurants and activities. There are 3 campus gyms.
- It is not as highly selective as say Caltech, Stanford or MIT, but you do need good grades (top 10% of class) and excellent GRE scores, in addition to a good record of extra-curricular activities. University of Mumbai, University of Madras & IIT Madras were highly represented in the years I was around.

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