Question Research or course?

[AlfalfaQc]

Hey guys,

I noticed that there is quite a few people here that did graduate studies and I have a question for you. I will finish in a couple of year my B.S. in mechanical engineering and I plan to do a master's degree. The thing is though, I don't really precisely know what type of master's I want to do. I don't know if it works the same in other country, but in Canada you can do either a research master's where you have a teacher supervising you and you have to find a subject yourself, or a course master's where you take graduate course like for the B.s. but harder. You also take courses during a research master's but much less since you have a project.

My goal is to work in aerospace later but I don't know what is the optimal path. Should I take a Master's in Aerospace Engineering, or do some research in a related field? I already have a couple of idea for a research subject (that are not directly related to aerospace though) like a carbon monocoque for a Formula SAE car. I also like fluid dynamics and CFD and I find it to be a really interesting field.

Do you guys have any comments on your own experience in grad school? I'm also open to any suggestion concerning a research subject .

Also, moving to the US to do my master's is an option (since most of the market in aerospace is there in NA).

 

[boogabooga]

First of all, I think you learn more from research than taking class. By a wide margin. So given a choice...

However, I don't think that it is quite structured like that here. For example, the school that I know of has a thesis track and a non-thesis track, but the latter seems to be reserved more for professional engineers whose employers are sponsoring their schoolwork. If you are on a thesis track, you do BOTH all of the courses AND a research project. Plus, you will have to support yourself somehow, so if you can get a paid research position, that is really optimal, although it will be up to your adviser if you can use the same research that you were paid for as your thesis. A teaching position is the number 2 solution, but since you were mechanical and not aerospace for B.S., that will be hard to get. The good news is that there is scholarship money available for advanced engineering degrees, so it isn't all that expensive so long as you make good progress.

I would highly recommend that you work on getting U.S. citizenship/green card though. You will need it to work on certain projects:
[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITAR"]International Traffic in Arms Regulations - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]
Otherwise, you will NOT have the full opportunities in aerospace engineering (in school or after) that are available to U.S. citizens. They are really strict about that, even to citizens of "allied" countries such as South Korea.

 

[Dantassii]

Grad school

Although I found grad school to be much more interesting than undergrad ever was, it did not really benefit me when it came time to find a job. This is probably because in my field of study (Aerospace Engineering) at that time (late 80's to mid 90's) all the entry level positions were being filled by people who were laid off in the early to mid 80's and were willing to take up to an 80% pay cut and start all over again even though they still had 8-15 years experience.

I ended up going to grad school to delay my entry into the employment market with hopes that there might be some entry level positions available for entry level engineers. Sadly, the industry magazines are now saying that it will be at least 2015 before the folks who were laid off in the early 80's finally stop filling entry level Aerospace Engineering positions. I ended up changing fields to Software Engineering and although my MS degree and 3 years towards my Ph.D. did give me a slight boost in my initial salary (about $5k/year more), I ended up working for large corporations that only gave 1-2% pay raises when inflation was well over 3%. So now my salary level is about $20k/year less than it would be had I started at an entry level salary with pay raises equal to the cost of living inflation of the area I live.

I should also note that both schools that I went to fully funded my MS and Ph.D. studies. I was a GTA during my MS degree and a GRA during my Ph.D. studies. This not only paid my tuition, but gave me a small stipend to live on. If you do decide to go to grad school, this sort of arrangement should be mandatory on your list of things to look for in a school.

Good luck!

Dantassii
HUMONGOUS IMS shipbuilder

 

[AlfalfaQc]

Good advices. I will probably take the research side. Apart from the fact that you learn more, I think it's a lot more motivating when you work on a project instead of just having classes. I will have to find more info on how it works though.

I have 3 friends who are doing their master's at my university. I think 2 of them are getting paid by their teacher. It's not a lot, but since education here is quite cheap, they are doing ok. One of them has a job as a lab supervisor and the paychek is decent.

As for the US side of things, I just don't know how hard it is for a canadian student to get into a decent school in US. Even more when you come from a french university (although I am officially not french speaking since I study 2 years in english and passed the official english test instead of the french one :dry. And there are so many universities inthe US, it's kinda hard to know which one to chose. There is also that citizenship thing that gets in the way... Also, do you have to find your own research subject, or does it depend on the university and a the teachers?

Edit: I forgot, the reason for doing a master's degree is because most of the jobs offer I see require a B.S. but they always say that they prefer someone with a M.S. Some of them even require a M.S.

 

[Dantassii]

RE: grad school

The University of Tennessee Space Institute is the graduate only school for Engineers and Physics that's part of the University of Tennessee System. When I was there working on my Ph.D. attempt, they had 100 full time students of which only 24 were from the USA. 39 were from China and 19 were from West Germany. There were at least 2 Canadian students there when I was there.

In all the Grad programs I was in, the professor assigned to you as your mentor determined what your project would be. I was on 3 different projects while attempting my Ph.D. because the first 2 were canceled suddenly when someone in the government released classified information to 1 of the universities participating in the project and they had no choice but to cancel the entire, multi-university project.

Funding for your classwork and stipend came from the source of the funding for the project you were assigned.

Dantassii
HUMONGOUS IMS shipbuilder

 

[boogabooga]

In all honesty, there are MANY Indian and even Chinese, as well as some South Korean, Taiwanese, French, Egyptian, Jordanian, and Israeli students. They just don't do ITAR research. If you speak English and do your paperwork, nation of origin shouldn't be too much of an issue. Your grades and standardized test scores will be the more important factors, as well as application essay, interviews, etc.

I'm going to disagree with Dantassii. Job placement for new aerospace graduate degree engineers seems to be to be quite high. I haven't known anyone (whose studies went well, of course) to have had any major employment problems, and I've known quite a few. I haven't noticed experienced baby boomers clogging entry level positions being a problem for anyone.

And worker salaries not keeping pace with inflation is a general economic trend in the United States. This is something you should expect in ANY field.
If you go in right after graduation and can complete the masters in a few years, it should still pay off.

Also, while full scholarships were the norm a few years ago, budget cuts, sequestration, etc. have taken a toll. You should now expect to pay out of pocket for some tuition for an advanced engineering degree. But it is still a really good deal compared to most other fields; you probably won't be 10s of thousands of dollars in debt.

 

[AlfalfaQc]

That's encouraging. I did a quick search on internet and I found a top 100 list of masters programs in Aerospace with the cost of each. Obviously the top 3 are Caltech, MIT, and Stanford and they all cost between 45k and 50k (and I probably don't have the qualifications anyway), but the rest of the list is more around 12k. It is cheaper than I expected. That doesn't include the living expenses, but still, I thought it was more expensive.

Now the thing is, how to chose one? There are so many of them that I don't which one suits me the best. What should I look for to help me chose?

Also, I saw that there is 2 trypes of degree, a degree in science, and a degree in engineering. What are the big differences?

Last thing. Do you need really high grades to get into a grad school? I currently have 3.28 GPA after 2 years and I think I can get it up to around 3.4-3.5. Is it enough to get into most of them?