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[Advice needed] Confused, tired and destroyed.

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I am an Internation student with a master’s in physics from India belonging to a lesser-known university. I recently completed my master’s from India and applied for PhD position at various places including US, Europe and UK. I do not have great grades (3.3 GPA), nor do I have any publication till date. I do have relevant research experiences though given that I interned at places like European laboratories (one of the biggest and the most prestigious) twice, once as a summer student and the other time as a RA for an entire year and have significant contribution through other prestigious (two other, four internships in total) internships. All these internships made me quite confident that I might be able to get into the premium schools from the US, UK and EU. My main field of interest is in computing (ML and HPC) and is completely different from physics and in the future, I plan to move to the industry.

Now after this application cycle I got rejected by all these big universities except one place with a QS ranking of ~800 in US. I know the supervisor pretty well given that I worked with him in the past during one of my internships, but I never intended to go to US or specifically to that specific university. I like the research that his group does but I feel that I might get dragged down due to the prestige of the university in general.

My supervisors back at Europe (my primary letter writers) have strongly suggested me to not consider this offer but given that I do not have anything also due to the immense pressure from the supervisor at that university I did end up signing up to the intend to enroll form. Now I am regretting and do not know what to do. My primary concern is I might be pulled down by the reputation of that specific university.

Any help or suggesting in this regard is greatly appreciated, I am completely torn apart and slowly sliding towards depression. I do not know whom to listen to.

Note: I also posted this on r/gradadmissions, I do not intend to spam just was a bit confused on where to ask.

Comments

  1. GonzagaFragrance206 Avatar
    GonzagaFragrance206

    This is just my 2 cents to your post, take what I say with a grain of salt:

    1. Your GPA is sub-par and not good enough to be competitive when applying to top-tier, doctoral programs.
    2. Search committees are looking for well-rounded prospective students. You keep talking about your relevant internship experience, but that is one factor of many, including your grades, publications, and other factors. Just putting all your eggs in a internship experience basket sounds like you are a 1-trick pony.
    3. I will refer to myself for this example. I say this respectfully, but who cares about university rankings or prestige? This is my subjective opinion, but I have supreme confidence in numero uno (myself). If I think I am the man/woman and I have supreme confidence in myself as an academic when it comes to my teaching and researching, it doesn’t matter what university I attend. I can and will shine anywhere and this will not stop me from achieving career success, especially if I have the talent for researching, publishing, learning, and teaching. The way I look at it, I want to elevate the name recognition of my alma mater and the university and doctoral program I attended. I want to apply the great education I received from my professors, advisor, and doctoral program and go onto do great things in my field to the point that prospective doctoral students come across the name of your alma mater and say Sad-Cattle-4402 went to that school. What I don’t want to do is ride the coattails or “dick ride” off the name recognition of hundreds/thousands of other doctoral students/academics who have come before me at a given institution and achieved career success, elevating a university or program’s prestigious name to what it is today. Come talk to me about rankings and prestige of a given institution when you’ve actually contributed to it post-graduation.

    To follow up on this, do you look at this supervisor you know in this doctoral program as lesser academic or researcher than other researchers/academics at higher ranked universities or doctoral programs because they decided to take a job at a lower-ranked university or a institution with a “QS ranking of ~800 in US”?” It is a fair question to ask.