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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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 …

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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