- Grad School in US - part 1
- Why English is very important?
- When to Study Engineering?
- IISER vs. Engineering
- Already doing Engineering and got into JEE?
- IISER - my views
- IIST questions - part 1, part 2
- Introduction
If you want any more questions answered - leave comments or email me.
Hope my efforts are helping people.
Friday, June 22, 2007
Grad school in US - part 1
If you plan on doing graduate school in the US, planning early can go a long way in improving your application. The fact is although admissions to programs are getting easier, getting scholarships seems to be the problem for most of the people. What is harder is getting scholarship for Masters students in good engineering schools like MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, CMU, GTech, UIUC, and UT-Austin. The most important thing to understand about universities in the US is the different between public and private schools.
Public Schools: Public schools are funded by the state government and are about half time cheaper than private schools. Each state has at least one decent state school because tuition for US students going to a school within their home state is 1/3 cheaper than going to an out-of-state public school. Thus, most of the students prefer to remain in-state and get almost a free education. The really good ones, probably end up getting scholarships from top private universities and go there. But mostly, at least one state school in each state is considered decent. Examples are UT-Austin and Texas-A&M in Texas, Georgia Tech in Georgia, Univ. of Michigan - Ann Arbor in Michigan, Purdue in Indiana, University of California - Berkeley, University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign, and many more. Most of these schools admit students into the Masters program and those wishing to stay on continue onto a PhD. Most of the funding for prospective PhD students is given via research assistantships (RA) and teaching assistantships (TA). In public schools, TAs are more popular because they have to manage a lot of students as compared to private schools. RA ships are sometimes hard to get by because mostly professors would want students to have taken a class with them before giving out an RA. In any case, the chances of actually getting funding in state schools is higher than that of private schools because TA or grader positions are a surplus.
Private Schools: Private schools are generally smaller in size. Most of the top schools in the US are private e.g. MIT, Harvard, Cornell, NYU, Princeton, Stanford, and CalTech. Admission to these schools can be touch and what is even tougher is securing scholarships for PhD and MS programs. Scholarships for MS programs are scarce, in fact some programs at schools are designed in such a way so that there is virtually no possibility of financial aid. The funda behind such thinking is that students entering these programs usually wind up getting jobs with a starting salary of at least $80K with which they can easily pay off a loan within a year. Some people take the plunge and risk it all to come and some, even though they have admission, choose other cheaper alternatives or don't come at all. PhD students at private universities almost always get scholarships because well they are working for the university. The quality of a university is actually reflected by the quality of PhD students passing, hence the universities try their best to recruit the best out of the lot of thousands of applications they get. Also, most of the programs in private universities are direct PhD programs where you start working on your PhD the day you arrive at campus and get a masters on the way to your final degree.
That is the main thing to understand about universities in the US. In the next segment, I will present my views on how to improve chances of admission into US Universities.
Public Schools: Public schools are funded by the state government and are about half time cheaper than private schools. Each state has at least one decent state school because tuition for US students going to a school within their home state is 1/3 cheaper than going to an out-of-state public school. Thus, most of the students prefer to remain in-state and get almost a free education. The really good ones, probably end up getting scholarships from top private universities and go there. But mostly, at least one state school in each state is considered decent. Examples are UT-Austin and Texas-A&M in Texas, Georgia Tech in Georgia, Univ. of Michigan - Ann Arbor in Michigan, Purdue in Indiana, University of California - Berkeley, University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign, and many more. Most of these schools admit students into the Masters program and those wishing to stay on continue onto a PhD. Most of the funding for prospective PhD students is given via research assistantships (RA) and teaching assistantships (TA). In public schools, TAs are more popular because they have to manage a lot of students as compared to private schools. RA ships are sometimes hard to get by because mostly professors would want students to have taken a class with them before giving out an RA. In any case, the chances of actually getting funding in state schools is higher than that of private schools because TA or grader positions are a surplus.
Private Schools: Private schools are generally smaller in size. Most of the top schools in the US are private e.g. MIT, Harvard, Cornell, NYU, Princeton, Stanford, and CalTech. Admission to these schools can be touch and what is even tougher is securing scholarships for PhD and MS programs. Scholarships for MS programs are scarce, in fact some programs at schools are designed in such a way so that there is virtually no possibility of financial aid. The funda behind such thinking is that students entering these programs usually wind up getting jobs with a starting salary of at least $80K with which they can easily pay off a loan within a year. Some people take the plunge and risk it all to come and some, even though they have admission, choose other cheaper alternatives or don't come at all. PhD students at private universities almost always get scholarships because well they are working for the university. The quality of a university is actually reflected by the quality of PhD students passing, hence the universities try their best to recruit the best out of the lot of thousands of applications they get. Also, most of the programs in private universities are direct PhD programs where you start working on your PhD the day you arrive at campus and get a masters on the way to your final degree.
That is the main thing to understand about universities in the US. In the next segment, I will present my views on how to improve chances of admission into US Universities.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)