With the on-going economic meltdown of the US, many a grad student who will come to this country will obviously need to start living on a shoe-string budget. Many students in general live pretty much on paltry sums of money initially. At this point, any student who is going to travel to foreign shores to study, needs to start preparing before leaving, as to how to cut un-necessary costs and start living lean! Here are certain items which have a going to be your chief sources of strain on your wallet.

* Health insurance
* Tuition and other academic fees
* Books and Academic supplies
* Housing Rent
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A lot has been happening in the field of graduate education abroad. This post is about specifically presenting concise pieces of information about what is happening. Lets start with news on scholarships. NVIDIA Corp of USA has a fellowship program for graduate students called NVIDIA Fellowship Program 2009. Quoting from their site, “The NVIDIA Fellowship Program provides funding to Ph.D. students who are researching topics that will lead to major advances in the graphics and digital media industry, and are investigating innovative ways of leveraging the power of the GPU. We select students each year who have the talent, aptitude and initiative to work closely with us early in their careers. Recipients not only receive crucial funding for their research, …

In our last post, we covered a lot on the scholarships available for students wishing to pursue education abroad. But that route is not always open to all. In fact, scholarships for students who wish to study abroad are often hard to come by, and competition is stiff for the few scholarships that are out there. Sometimes, even after the announcements of scholarships, the decision on who would actually get the scholarship is not taken till very late. In those cases, students are often left in the lurch. And hence, the idea of taking student education loans is also in vogue. A lot of students from India take up loans from various banks. These loans are then paid off within …

Higher education has become very expensive. Added to that, the cost of study abroad means a big hole in your pocket. More than 80% of the students studying abroad have to club personal savings along with some sort of aid/loan etc. in order to meet the expenses of education in foreign land. Therefore, one needs to plan carefully.
Scholarships are one of the more popular options for funding their education. But they are highly competitive and most universities/colleges do not have large budgets. Hence universities offer scholarships to a very small percentage of successful applicants upfront. However after reaching campus and by the end of the first semester students are able to obtain aid in the form of teaching/research/graduate assistantships. The …

As the world economy slows down, more so the American economy, more and more people are going back to school for graduate education. This has been a trend which has been observed in the past. And now universities are already seeing an increase in enrollment. One of the major reasons why students go in for a slightly longer stint at grad school in a slower economy is that since the employment opportunities are on the lower side, having higher level degrees under your belt is a definite plus as the economy tries to come out better and stronger on the other side of the economic slow down. One thing is for sure, economic slow downs are cyclical and are not …

Mrunal continues his series about the differences between MS and PhD - this time concentrating on the differences in funding scenarios between the two.
PHD is a long term commitment. Mostly in 99% cases students get admits from university if he shows a potential to be a PHD candidate and some professors finds him worthy to be working in his group. Professors control the funding. Professors have control on everything. They design the syllabus, teach, design labs, design exams, homeworks. They receive grants from different sources like industry, Government, national laboratories. The grants in US universities mainly arrive from Governments. National Science Foundation (NSF), Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), National laboratories are some of main sources which fund the …

Many prospective students are wary of even trying to opt for MS in US as a future career option. This is mainly because funding one’s education in the US can become a major hurdle if one does not have some sort of university job which covers at least a part of the tuition and/or living expenses. Though education loans are easy to come by in India now, and also many scholarships are available - it is still pretty hard for many students to manage finances to get to the US.
I spoke with Somik Raha, a PhD student at Stanford about his efforts to help students with funding their graduate education in the US with his project named SWAYAM.
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