Starting on the right foot.

Congratulations! The very fact that you are here right now, and not at a counsellors office, watching the admits at Nebraska he's managed to get his past students, proves that you have started on the right foot indeed.

The GRE & the TOEFL are simply minor hurdles in the application process. As long as you study well, practice enough and sleep well before the test, you can be assured of a good score. A good score is a very relative term, like we shall discover in the consequent posts about GRE. So like I was telling you, what you should concentrate whole heartedly on after your entrance exams is your school shortlisiting procedure.

Shortlisting schools is a very personal thing, almost like buying underwear. You have to go there, choose it yourself, or you might land up with a bad fit and an ill-fitting-underwear walk. I am sure you must have seen plenty of people doing the ill-fitting-underwear walk and laughed at them, and must have at some point of time suffered from the same too. Many might see this analogy in bad taste, but thats exactly what shortlisiting schools is like.

Now would you ask your counsellor to buy underwear shortlist schools for you? There are several things you may need to consider but your counsellor might ignore. You maybe intolerant to cold, as I am. You may have siblings in the US, and might want to be at a car-drive of 4 hours away from them, or you may want to look at schools on the west coast to escape a nagging aunt on the east coast, you may have dreamt about living in a beautiful snow covered locale, you may have a boyfriend in a state and want to be close to him. These were the non academic factors. Strictly non academic.

There are a lot of academic factors which need consideration too. Mostly your specialisation. A lot of us have specific specialisations in mind before our MS. You might want to look at schools which offer a lot of courses in Digital VLSI. Or something specific like parallel and distributed computing. Chances are your counsellor maybe as blank and ignorant as you are about the life cycle of a Pawsonia Saxicola. Would you trust him to shortlist schools for you? I am quite sure I wouldn't.

Another factor you would want to consider is the post-ms-scenario. If you did your Masters from Haryana University in Parallel and Distributed Computing, chances are that you maybe unemployed after your masters too. But if you were in Bangalore, it would be a different story altogther. I am not saying that Haryana University is not good, nor am I saying that companies in Bangalore would recruit students from Bangalore only. Just that they stand a better chance, a much betetr chance of working with Wipro or TI simply because they have the advantage of being locals.

If you have enrolled at a counsellor already for over 10 grand, I am sorry. You could have built yourself a great wardrobe, or you could have bought that display card and kicked ass in Quake 2. But do not make this second error of trusting your counsellor entirely. Think intelligently, do your homework and then start your applications.

Edulix is a great place to start your research work. Go through people's posts, read them patiently and carefully. Search before you ask. Chances are that somebody has had the same doubts as you before.

To cut my long post short, applying for MS is not as difficult or as intimidating as it seems. Its a long journey, but at the end of it, it pays off I suppose.

Will keep you updated, as always :-)