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
…

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 …

Many students have expressed anxious feelings about deciding to go for an MS to the US given the current situation of financial institutions in the country. The financial situation inside the country has not been the best as compared to the last few years. In fact in many ways, its similar to the situation which was present in the 1987 economic slow down. However, many the dent caused will be felt slowly across many sectors. The first and primary harm is caused to the banks. Hence, a job in he financial sector is hard to come by - not too hard though as banks still need to operate and still need talented people - however, investment banking as …

Well, one thing is for sure - if you are applying to a US univ from Asia - chances are that you are cash strapped - meaning - in many cases you can barely afford a US college education! Heck, people in the western world find it hard to pay their way through college and with the dollar growing strong against the world currencies, its even harder for people in the developing world to think about education in the US. Many universities hence make it mandatory for students to send in proof of finances at the time of admission - while others require proof of finances after admit is issued for I-20 release.
The proof of finances - is to …

CMU has many varied sub departments within its CS and EE departments. One such department in LTI - which is the Language Technologies Institute. What goes on here? What sort of students make it here? And what are the funding opportunities for students who come for a Masters or PhD? We spoke with a current student - who wished to remain anonymous for this post. We had a couple of questions for which he had very interesting reponses which might prove helpful to a lot of prospective students. Here is the interview:
1. What course are pursuing at CMU?
Masters in Language Technologies. That means learning computer
languages and techniques to make a computer understand your languages.
I am working on automatic translation …

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.
1. …