Preparing Psychologically for Grad School

Lately, I have been writing a lot about things related to the start of grad school. I believe that it is important to prepare for grad school as early as possible. While you can easily Google how to prepare for grad school academically, I haven't come across any article on how to prepare for grad school psychologically. So, in this post, I am going to share 2 advices with you.

QS Grad School Guide Review - Part 2

This post is a follow up post to the post Grad School Guide Review Part 1. Last time, I have reviewed 3 out of the 7 articles that I found interesting. In this post, I will finish up the review for the remaining 4 articles. The overall impression up to now is that the QS grad school guide is quite normal. It has a mix of good and bad articles.

QS Grad School Guide Review - Part 1

Previously, I found a guide that talks quite a bit grad school and suggested a few article that seems interesting. I read through them a bit and I am going share some of my views on 3 of those articles in this post.

The QS Top Grad School Guide 2013

I just found a very interesting publication by QS called "Top Grad School Guide 2013". They have several articles in the guide to introduce prospective grad students to some of the question to be considered. You can view the guide here. Currently, the following articles seems interesting to me:

1. Graduate Careers. (on page 20)
2. Choosing a Masters degree. (on page 41)
3. Is a PhD really for me? (on page 46)
4. The best of the best. (on page 58)
5. Top ten cities. (on page 64)
6. Admission tests. (on page 75)
7. Subject Guides (from page 117 to 146)

I will do another post reviewing the usefulness of the above article in another post. So far, this publication seems pretty promising.

5 Useful Advices on Grad School

Sometime during the weekend, I came across a funny article - 6 Important Things Nobody Tells You About Grad School. Although Luke, the author, mentioned 6 things, it is really more like 5 points. Some of the points were not described in a well manner.

5 Reasons to do Graduate Studies in Canada

North America is well known for science and technology, which is mainly driven by research. Therefore, it is not unusual that North America is also famous for its graduate studies, especially the United States. However, getting in school in the US is tough and getting permanent resident status after you graduate is not easy. If you are an international student that is considering where to go for graduate studies, I would recommend coming to Canada.

Considering UofT for your Engineering Grad Study

University College @ UofT

Some time back in April, I read the following post by Dr. Greg Mankiw, a professor at Harvard University. In his post, he listed 9 criterion to consider when choosing a graduate program. I find it very useful and decided to answer some of the questions he posted by specifically looking at the  Engineering Program @ University of Toronto (UofT).

Top 3 Grad School in Different Field

Previously, I wrote two posts (selecting grad schools for faculty position and industry job) that suggested that you should try to aim to apply for the more famous grad school in your field of study. Well, I guess one nature question to ask is what are the better grad school for a particular. In this post, I am including an infographics that list the top 3 grad schools in the states for different area of study.

Selecting Your Program, Supervisor and Grad School (Faculty Route)

Last time, I wrote a post on how to select your program, supervisor and grad school if your aim is to get into the industry. This post I will try to give my opinion on how to select the three things if you are aiming to be a faculty member. Please do not take my words as a sure-success formula. I would appreciate all other advices from you guys.

Ace the Inquiry Email for your Potential Supervisor

If you are planning to go into grad school, chances are you will need to find a potential supervisor. One might think a simple email to a professor would do the trick. But, if you didn't happen to know this, let me tell you this - professors are spammed with inquiries email. So much that they start to ignore many of such emails. In this post, I will give some hint on how to write an inquiry email that makes you stand out.

Selecting Your Program, Supervisor and Grad School (Industrial Route)

Congratulations, you have finally decided to come to grad school after considering most of the factors that I have mentioned previously. The next step would be to choose a program, followed by selecting a supervisor and a grad school.

8 Factors to Consider Before Coming to Grad School

Previously, I wrote a post on why you want to consider to pursue a post-graduate degree (click here if you have not read it). In this post, I want to highlight the important factors to consider before you apply for grad schools.

Why study control?

Walking Robot - An example of nonlinear control

As a sequel to the post "Into to Control - A Researcher Prespective", this post tries to answer why would one want to study control? To answer this question, I want to refer to the picture on the right. The first study (from IEEE Xplore) that attempt to understand and control a walking robot, as shown above, was published in 1977. This study is roughly 40 years old. However, nowadays, we still don't see many robots that have great walking performances.

Even the state of the art technology, walking robot probably performs worse than a six years old child. Don't believe me? Watch this video. Notice how slow the DARPA (yes, DARPA) robot is moving. This shows how immature control technology is. Therefore, there are still a lot of opportunities for great research in this field.

Why do graduate studies? (General)

Why would one want to do graduate studies? Hopefully, your reasons are not the same as the ones in the ads – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4M98x-FLp7E. Now, there are a lot of discussions on the web on this topic. I am going share my personal experiences with you to help you make a sound judgement.