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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Location, location, location

The location of the university you attend will have a big impact on your overall choices in addition to other factors like ranking, reputation. Being close to an industry hub can mean the difference between getting a job or not getting a job. Especially during recessions employers are reluctant to spend money on hiring candidates who live far away from their locations. So if you have a choice between 2 similarly ranked universities it might help to choose the one close to the jobs. It might help to start out with a Google Map to track the various regions I refer to below.

Silicon Valley
For the technology industry there is no place like Silicon Valley. As you've probably heard this is the region between San Francisco and San Jose. The advantages are the number of companies, the great weather, the choice of outdoor activities (from beaches in Santa Cruz to skiing in Tahoe and Yosemite) within a 4 hour radius. The downside is that the cost of living is really high. Even individuals who have lived in the Bay Area for 5 years may not be able to afford those million dollar hovels. Every city has one prominent company... Santa Clara has Intel, Mountain View has Google, Palo Alto has HP, Sunnyvale has AMD, Cupertino has Apple.

Southern California
Los Angeles and San Diego areas also have a lot of job opportunities. The big employers in the area are Qualcomm and Broadcom on the semiconductor side. San Diego is said to be a hub for telecommunications businesses. The great California weather gets better here if you like warmth. UCSD, UCLA, USC are the large recognizable universities in the area. Caltech in Pasadena is another choice if you're doing really well in college.

Texas
Texas is also great region for jobs. Austin, Dallas and Houston are the big cities here. Austin is the place most people talk about these days. UT Austin is the top school in the area and there are also a large number of companies in Austin such as AMD, ARM, Intel, IBM and the outposts of most other tech companies. Dallas has Texas Instruments and Dallas Semiconductor to name a few. The Houston area also has several large employers like oil companies, and Continental Airlines. Some of the advantages of living in Texas are a low cost of living, cheap houses and no state taxes. The weather is probably a tad too hot in the summer months.

Raleigh Durham : North Carolina
This is another fast growing region, with decent weather and a large number of employers. Three good schools in this region are Duke, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University. This is probably a reason why most large companies have offices in NC now.

North East
The Boston to Washington DC corridor is another popular area for students. Boston has a large number of excellent universities and the Route-128 technology corridor with numerous companies and many others in the region from New Hampshire to Rhode Island. New York metro area has a large number of financial companies, publishing houses. Hartford about 2 hours north of New York is the insurance capital of the US, although Yale is the only highly rated university around.

A Recommendation for your recommendation letters

All graduate programs will require you to submit 2-3 recommendation letters as a part of your application. If you are still studying, you'll probably have to ask your professors for recommendations. Choose professors with better qualifications or teachers who taught courses related to the field you plan to specialize in. An external project guide might also be a good person to ask as well, to show some diversity in your references. If you have started working, you'll probably want to ask at least one person from work for a reference. Here are a few tips for your recommendations:

Access to recommendation letters
Most universities will allow you to choose to keep access to the recommendation letters. If you are not sure whether one of your references will write a good letter for you, it might be worthwhile to keep access to the letter. You could then delete the letter and substitute it with the letter from another recommender if needed.

Writing your own recommendations
A lot of your recommenders are probably busy people. They may ask you to give them a rough draft of the recommendation. So you do have some control over the content of the recommendation. If you need to write drafts for all 3 letters, it might make sense to ask your parents/friends to write some of the letters so that there is some variation in the language or tone of the writing.