How important is being ranked #1 in your bachelor’s cohort for ETH MSc EEIT admission?
Hey everyone,
I wanted to ask how much the individual ranking within your bachelor’s cohort matters for admission to ETH Zurich, specifically for the MSc in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology (EEIT).
I am currently a Computer and Software Engineering student at a technical university in Eastern Europe, and I am interested in applying to ETH EEIT, most likely with a focus on Signal Processing and Machine Learning. My long-term goal is to work in ML research for engineering applications such as robotics, autonomous systems, electronics, and intelligent sensing systems.
At the moment, I am aiming to finish ranked 1st out of 228 students in my cohort. However, there is a realistic chance that I may end up ranked 2nd or 3rd, which would still place me in roughly the top 1.3% of the cohort.
Would not being ranked #1 be a significant disadvantage for ETH EEIT, especially coming from a university that is not internationally known like Cambridge, ETH, EPFL, TUM, etc.? Or would being in the top 3 / top 1–2% still be considered a very strong academic position?
For context, besides my grades/rank, I have also been trying to build a research-oriented profile:
- Research assistant / research intern experience in AI, robotics, and machine learning
- Two published research papers, both related to machine learning / engineering applications
- One additional paper currently in preparation for submission to Remote Sensing (MDPI journal)
- Research experience in computer vision, robotics, and scientific/engineering ML applications
- Active involvement in a university robotics club
- National engineering scholarship recipient
- Strong performance in university-level mathematics competitions (olympiads)
- Accepted at a high-level Machine Learning Summer School organised by researchers from Google DeepMind
- Interest in taking mostly ML, deep learning, signal processing, and engineering-oriented AI courses during the master’s
I know ETH admissions are holistic and that nobody can predict the outcome, but I would be interested in hearing from people who applied to ETH, studied there, or know how much weight is typically given to being exactly rank #1 versus being in the top few students of a large cohort.
Thanks in advance!