₦airaland Forum

I never said one needs absolute proof. after all, even statistical inferences are never 100%- there is always specified some level of confidence. what i mean is that people quote one or two cases, then generalize to either prove or disprove and that is what is questionable. i strongly feel that one should check and recheck info used as it might mislead people less informed. I fell victim to my own devices on the LOR issue and maybe i take it back-i had relied on ARWU rankings only having 2 or 3 african universities in the top 500 in saying faculty are unknown.
@lai-lai i am not questioning motives- what am pointing out are fallacies that anyone without a motive to mislead should be wary of.
@cezeozue was considering penn state, vatech, purdue, illinois urbana and am from the eastern side of africa - problem is my grades are much lower than my standardized test scores suggest.
i was checking out the fulbright foreign student program but details are sketchy. any others?

i also make mistakes, just not intentionally and i humbly accept constructive criticism.

Hi all! great site-i haven't seen another site where African US study hopefuls can communicate and learn from others' experiences. what is concerning(to me) is the prevalence here of the use of anecdotal evidence as support for claims made. with that i mean the use of evidence starting with ' a friend of mine, ', ' i knew someone, ' my former classmate' which is incorrect statistical reasoning as its impossible to prove such an assertion either wrong or right and not representative.

in the case of average GREs, GPAs or demographic makeup of a student body, such information is available (on university websites or maybe usnews.com). instead of using such stories its better to use class averages/medians or minimums when available. if such data does not exist, then one could turn to statistics of other programs of roughly the same rank(whether the rankings are usnews, arwu or nrc) to get a rough idea. considering that the majority of members here are scientists/engineers(me too!), I feel it important to discourage the use of incorrect logical reasoning(and greater use of representative samples rather than one or two cited cases) and i hope members are open-minded enough to see my point.

there is also this common misconception that students in top ranked grad schools have very high combined GREs-ie 1450+. truth is, most engineers get 780-800 in the quantitative but scores above 600 in the verbal are very rare(except in computer science, clinical psychology,linguistics,political science and the humanities)- which is why top engineering departments have GRE averages of 1350-1400. what keeps most of us out is lack of undergrad research experience and LORs from mostly unknown(to the admissions committees) faculty.
I too would like to take a masters in the USA-but in industrial engineering/operations research. problem is financing and i hope someone here could advise me on that.