Department of Mechanical Engineering

Once all application materials have been received by the admission office, they are forwarded to the M E department if you have specified that you are applying to the M E department. Your application is reviewed and placed into one of the following categories

1. Accepted
2. Qualified
3. Denied

Accepted: If accepted, you are notified by the department that you have been accepted and, if there is funding available, you are sent a Letter of Intent (LOI)

Qualified: The qualified category is for prospective students that meet the requirements for acceptance. Your name is placed on a list distributed to faculty and wait for a faculty member to indicate interest in being your major professor and provide funding for an assistantship.

If a faculty member accepts you, then you are moved to the accepted category. Your file and name are kept on the qualified list until the deadline for rejecting applications is reached or you request that your application is rejected or sent to a different department.

Denied: If denied, you are notified by the department that your application to graduate school in the M E department has been denied.

Faculty are made aware of your name and qualifications. Based on their interest in you and the needs in their research program, they may select you as a student. It is recommended that you directly contact faculty to make yourself stand out.  

We will keep you on this list until the period is reached where we need to deny admission for students who are not being admitted. At that time, all students in the qualified category who have not been selected by a faculty member will have their application denied. You always can request that you be removed from the qualified list earlier, that your application be forwarded to another department,  or be denied.

The relationship that you develop with your major professor will be an important part of your success in graduate school. Further, individual faculty offer research assistantships from their own research funds, so these are funds that they alone would choose to offer you.

Therefore, it is important to start this relationship early and effectively. Faculty are looking for reliable, intelligent, hard working students who will take initiative and be responsible professionals.  It is important that you convey these aspects in your communication with faculty.

The general guidelines below apply if you are looking for funding or just a major professor.

Some prospective students send what appears to be a generic email. It is clear from these emails that the prospective student has little to no knowledge of the research that the faculty member is performing.

These email contacts are typically deleted before reading far into them. It is recommended that you carefully review the research interests of faculty and only contact the faculty who are doing work in an area that fits your educational and career goals.

In this contact, be sure to clearly indicate early in the contact the type of work that the faculty member does in which you are most intrigued.

Sources of information about faculty includes the M E department website, the websites for individual faculty, and the open literature.  The more that you show that you have done your background work to identify the faculty member’s research program, the more likely that you will catch their attention and get them to start a dialog with you.

Be persistent in cases where you have a good match with a faculty member. They may not have an opening on their research team immediately, but by them knowing who you are, they are more likely to think of offering you a position when one comes available.

Once you are a student at ISU, accepted, or identified as qualified, your name will be made available to the sources of these funding opportunities. 

In the case of research assistantships, you are advised to identify faculty performing research in your area of interest and take the initiative to contact them about funding opportunities.

Funding at ISU is available in the form of fellowships, research assistantships, and teaching assistantships.

Fellowships: Many of the fellowships are given as added money to the research or teaching assistantship.

Research Assistantship: Typically this funding comes from a research grant that a faculty member has received. You would be expected to perform research in collaboration with the faculty member and/or other researchers to accomplish the goals of the research grant.

Teaching Assistantship: A teaching assistantship is given by a department paying the student to assist in teaching course material. For example, this can include grading or running the lab portion of a course. Some advanced students are given the responsibility of teaching a course.