28.01.2007
Graduate School 101 tutorial for Burmese students and graduates
_ By AKS
Introduction
I hope this article will be useful for those who have some friends, families and relatives trying to earn admission to graduate schools and the content of the guide is constrained by author's limited knowledge. The inspiration for writing this article was originated during a conversation with one of the countrymen during the flight back in 2000. She was doing PhD in Biotechnology in one of the Korean universities and she told me how the students from other countries are pursuing post graduate studies in the engineering department of her university on Research scholarships by making proposals to professors directly by themselves submitting a research proposal.
The author observed how the students from our neighboring countries are thriving in post graduate research works in the graduate schools in the universities around the world.
I do believe that what Burmese (Myanmar) students are lacking exposure, knowledge and opportunities and given the information and opportunities, they can strive and this article is to fill the gap in the former part, i.e. to provide information.
In this article, I will try to discuss a brief discussion of degrees, admissions, graduate schools, and compile the resources to make the reader informative and make their graduate schools applications successful. Feel free to forward any Burmese students or professionals.
However the article is solely based on knowledge of author and limited by his research done.
Moreover there will be more biased towards some academic discipline and topics.
Graduate Schools and programs
A graduate education is defined as the education you obtained after 4 years college degree. In some parts of the world, graduate studies mean studying after college degree and below Master degree. A post graduate student is a student who is pursuing PhD after his Masters.
However, in this article both graduate and post graduate terms were used interchangeably. Graduate schools are becoming more and more important in all the universities around the world and graduate education becomes an entry level education in some professions of science and technology especially in engineering firms and R&D labs.
At the early phases in their careers, an employee or a professional with post graduate education and another person with merely undergraduate qualification may be offered same positions, responsibilities, roles and compensations.
Statistics show that after a period of time a post graduate qualification holder may have more chances of getting promoted and salary rises than a college degree holder. It is not only in science and engineering but also in other displines: accounting, finance, law and medicine.
If all things being equal, employers and recruiters (gate keepers for jobs and pay check for debts) prefer MSEE holder to a BSEE holder unless one's MSEE were from Yjoxabc graduate school, Timbuku University, Republic of Bayarnathi while BSEE is from MIT, Cambridge. In other words, where do you earn your graduate degree counts as much as what degree do you earn.
While it should be treated with skeptism, Shanghai Jiangton University, London Times Education supplementary are places to start looking up for global ranking of a university where graduate school belongs. There are local guides that will give you hints about how universities fare with their peers in particular country or region.
But it is more difficult and demanding to be one of the top students in a second tier university than a dog student in a first tier university. It is better to be a straight A+ student from a second tier university than a grade C- or D+ student from a university with better ranking, higher prestige.
Categories of Graduate Degrees and Admission Criteria
The graduate school normally offers degree leading to M.Sc, S.M, M.S.E.E, M.Eng, Engineer Degree, M.Phil, Ph.D, D.Sc or D.Eng degrees. Types of degrees offering at the graduate schools and their prestige differ from country to country.
For example in UK, a MSc degree is regarded higher than M.Eng degree. If you apply for M.Sc degree admission you need 2 years of professional working experience while M.Eng applicants can be a final year student. Also an M.Eng graduate can't apply for a Ph.D degree whereas a M.Sc degree is the path for admissions to Ph.D programs. While earning a M.Sc is not the only path towards admission to a Ph.D program, a good Bachelor degree or a second class honours (lower division) could be good enough to be slip into a Ph.D program although a Master degree could enhance the applicant's competitiveness.
Since our Burmese education system does not have this honours categories, we can considered a first class honours degree can be considered as top 5% (or up to 10% if school is competitive) of graduating class and second class honours (upper division) is top 10 to 20% of graduating class and second class honours (lower division) is to be a graduate who stood in top 40 to 50% of its graduation class. If a person is not good enough to be distinguished better than 50% of class than it is likely that he may not survive in graduate school and dropping out will be a waste of time, tuition, energy and ego and a loss for all parties concerned.
Then there are confusing 3 years and 4 years undergraduate college degrees and in general a person with 3 years college education is not eligible for M.Sc programs or Ph.D programs and it needs minimum of 4 years college education and degree for pursuing a Master degree. Speaking in terms of Burmese education system, for a MBBS, BDS and Bachelor of Engineering (B.E)degree holders are considered to be 4 years education while B.Sc, B.CSc, B.Tech holders are considered to be in 3 years track. Therefore, it is advisable for those with 3 years degrees to earn M.Sc, M.I.Sc or M.C.Sc before applying reputable Master or PhD degree programs.
The reason is that Basic Education High School (BEHS) system in Burma has 11 grades (11 years secondary education and Burmese BEHS matriculation certificate can be considered between GCE (O) and (A) level and therefore although a B.Sc degree requires a student to spend 4 years in college, it is considered equal to 3 years of college education to compensate 1 year less secondary education he has compared to peers.
To continue discussion about different titles of graduate degrees and weightage they brings, we will start from our ASEAN neighbour Singapore, where M.Eng and M.Sc by research degrees are more prestigious than M.Sc by Coursework degree. In Europe if you pursued an engineering program at a university (not a university college), then the final degree certificate you earn will be equivalent to a M.Sc degree in UK and USA systems.
A student pursuing a master program will generally need to accomplish 120 credits after Bolonga accord which was to standardise and normalise European education systems across continent.
In UK, there is M.Phil degree, which is regarded as more prestigious than M.Sc but and sometimes it is called M.Sc (Research). In universities in UK, M.Sc by research where you do an independent research, write a thesis is considered to be academically more rigourous than taught M.Sc or M.Sc (coursework) where one has to take courses, sit for exams, do projects without writing a thesis.
Everywhere Ph.D degrees need longer years to earn compared to studies leading to M.Sc or M.Eng degrees.
A PhD candidate/student may or may not need to do a qualifying exam; rigor and demand of Q.E exam differs across displines and departments even at the same university and for example Q.E at department of Electrical engineering may be less demanding than a Q.E at Chemical Engineering at the same university and therefore the quality of PhD graduates may differ. A doctor wanna be must also fulfill a several coursework modules towards credits and dissertation and several papers in prestigious journals. A Ph.D program will demand minimum of 3 years and it took average of 4 years in most graduate schools around the world. Some Ph.D students drop out half way of PhD program and they could earn M.Sc degree if they had fulfilled coursework requirements and that is how some students earned free M.Sc degree in US research universities although very few scholarships for Master programs, i.e. some students with Ph.D scholarships, drop half way out of Ph.D candidacy, afterfulfilling coursework requirement for M.Sc, apply for M.Sc degree and there is a freshly minted M.Sc ready to enter industry educated with tax payer's money from the host country.
Being not only unethical and it is a clear demonstration of lack of integrity and intellectual capacity in that person "the scholarship broker", that pattern is being observed to be implicitely practised by a lot of overseas graduate students with PhD scholarships.
The author believes that keeping one integrity is more important than other aspects of life and therefore would like to urge to apply for terminal Master programs if one would like to go to industry instead of academia.
Then there are D.Eng or Doctor of Engineering degrees, a category of Ph.D degree. It is offered in Tokyo University and UMIST, Manchester in UK and holders of D.Sc claim their degrees are superior to Ph.D.
In Engineering education, MIT, Cambrige offers S.B, S.M, Engineer and Sc.D degrees.
S.B is considered to be equivalent to BSEE or B.E, S.M is to MSEE or M.Sc while ScD is to Ph.D.
But the a degree with a confusing term is the Engineer degree, it can be considered somewhere above S.M and below Ph.D at MIT, Cambridge.
To make it more confusing, a engineering graduate with a S.B from MIT, Cambridge is not a practising professional engineer yet although MIT is undisputed best engineering schools on earth. He will have to go through Professional Engineer License (PE) exam, professional track different from academic qualification track. Alternatively he could pursue Engineer degree at MIT which is to train graduate practising engineers, its degree is considered to be higher than S.M degree from same university.
At some European countries, a student who already had a Master degree can pursue a professional Ph.D program by fulfilling some academic requirements (40 credits for example) and an industrial project accomplishment at a sponsoring company with a dissertation and project report. It should be noted that earning a Ph.D degree in Civil Engineering or Law may not entitled for a person to be a professional in some industries in some countries although it may make him easier to pass professional/licensing exams.
To discuss about all about degrees, professional licenses, certificates, qualifications will be beyond the scope of this article and so we will move on to discuss about admission procedures.
Admission procedure
Domain Knowledge Acquisition
It all depends on the institution one is going to apply. Here I will discuss about how to get admission to some graduate schools as a research based post graduate scholarship holding student. It is very important to go for the field what you are keen to learn. Although one has learnt several subjects in college, he could improve in that field by digging deeper, learning further. Grab a good text and research papers in that particular field and learn it. Learning new skills will never harm a person and it equip graduate with skills to compete with peers.
Try to dig deeper in the field you want to do research. For example if one wants to do post graduate research in Hardware Software Co-design, Multiprocessor design, parallel computing etc.. The best resources will be the academic journals for researchers such as Elsevier Science, ACM(Association of Computing Machinery), IEEE proceedings (Proceedings of all subjects are the topics in to explore more in that field while IEEE spectrum will be for brief overview of all emerging or popular topics for Electrical and Electronics engineers, etc..
Generally speaking, the core materials in some of the texts published are already established and those may no longer be worthy of research anymore. One could use trade journals (journals for a practising professional with full of industry advertisement) in a wise manner. To learn more about a topic, you can grasp overview from a freely available trade journal, manuals, standards and texts. Later reading up latest academic journals to find out what are the hottest topics in rearch and what areas are left to be researched further.
There are Prentice Hall and McGraw Hill text. It is time to unlearn and relearn, another way is to use search engines look for course web sites posted by professors for their teaching courses at universities they work.
Download, print out course materials and grasp the whole one semester course and learned together with reference texts they refer for their courses. MIT's Open Courseware (http://www.ocw.mit.edu) is recommended.
Try taking exercises. The text is not supposed to be a bed time story but a book to learn seriously. Try to work out end of chapter lessons then you will be able to gain more from self study. Forming study groups will be a great idea and group with good students to digest those materials. That will make your life in graduate school easier.
Graduate school admission should not be taken as gurantee path to graduation ceremony. The author has observed a lot of graduate school drop outs mainly due to lack of seriousness and bad attitudes. Not every Ph.D candidate or M.Sc student came out with degree certificates but failed endeavors, loss of time and money and suffering egos.
Do learn to code some programming languages like C, C++ and MATLAB (get installation CDs from vendors and there are help files and tutorials for self learning).
Use PC based modeling and simulation tools. Simulators can help a learner in academic or professional field.
Some tool vendors offers student or trial version, students interested in Digital Signal Processing realizations can use time limited trial offering of simulator software from Texas Instruments. Those who want to learn VLSI design or mixed signal ASIC design can download some simulator software like AIMSpice from UC Berkley for circuit simulations.
For those want to learn about Hardware Software Co-design or Co-specification can use SHESim engine from TU/eindhoven website. Those who are interested in parallel computing can use free simulators like PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) from MIT, Cambridge. Google to locate urls to download those software suites.
If you are confident that you have grasped the working knowledge from those easy texts then next step is to move into texts for graduate studies like some texts from John Wiley & Sons. Check the preface and check whether the text is for graduate (Master level) senior undergraduate (final year level) students. If the text was published within 3 years from the day you pick up that then it is not a bad starting point. My 2 cents advice is to look for books that have been published at least 2 or 3 times, it may contain more readable contents than others.
Patents (especially utility patents) are also a very good resource to learn how a device based on certain technology works and patents served as knowledge deposit to mine after period of protection period is over.
You can learn how their device work in certain environment. Although you shouldn't infringe on it as you will be sued. But for academic purposes, you should know how to use patents as a kind of resource.
Check out at http://www.uspto.gov/patft/. If you need to buy a full text patents you may need a credit card to buy online or let someone buy or get on behalf of you and send you the pdf file.
Standards like ISO (International Organization for Standardization), IEC (International Engineering Consortium http://www.iso.ch), ANSI (American National Standard Institute). Students and professionals in ICT field can use RFC (Requests for Comments http://www.ietf.org/rfc.html), RFP (Requests for proposals) are good resources.
All MNCs have access to patents, standards and if you have friends or seniors working there then get use of them.
English proficiency
Prepare your English; listening, conversation, composition and comprehension skills. Good English can move you extra miles and lousy communications tarnish your reputation and damage your career opportunities.
(To continue next week)
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