Pay for your Education: Funding Tips

For most of us going unfunded to grad school is not an option. The costs of every semester are prohibitively high at many universities. So here are some tips to improve your chances of getting funding.

1) Take the TSE - Test of Spoken English
At UW to be eligible for a TA position you need a TSE score or the score from a SPEAK test taken on campus. The SPEAK test is free after you get there, but the TA application deadline for ECE is the day you file your application. So if you do take the TSE early on, it could help in getting a TA position. There are many more complications to it... if the department doesn't have a lot of funding for PhD students, they will only give TAs to the PhD students. The few remaining positions may go to seniors who have been teaching for a year or so. Some people I knew though got TA positions with the Math department and the Physics department, after getting to the US. But these are options after you have been admitted, and in the case of other departments after you arrive on campus. The TSE does help though.

2) Job Center Website
This is also probably an option only after you reach the US, but you can apply for many of the on-campus jobs. Some of them are Research Assistantships and Project Assistantships in various departments and institutes of the University. For instance for my first year I was funded by the Department of Biomedical Engineering. For a summer I was a Project Assistant at a Synchrotron Center about 5 miles from campus. In my last year at UW, I got an RA in the department itself. So luckily for me I was funded all through my MS. But the Job Center was one of the resources that helped. People also get RA positions in the library sometimes. Programming is the top skill needed all over the campus, whether for making webpages or to run experiments.

3) Professor Phone Calls
Around this time in 2002, I suddenly got a call from a Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. He was a professor in the ECE Department and he asked me whether I was interested in doing a PhD. I was completely not prepared to answer the question. I really didn't expect any professor to call me. I was also a little too ambitious at the time, and I honestly just wanted to get an MS from Boulder and then move to a higher ranked university for a PhD. But all the same, be prepared for such phone calls. Another thing is to enter your phone numbers from India in the same way that you dial from the US. So for Pune it is something like 91-20-34545660 and not 91-020-34545660. One of my friends N just wrote a post about this on her blog, and how she might have gone to Georgia Tech had that phone call worked out for her.

4) Scholarships from India
A lot of people also apply for scholarships in India, some of them are very sizable. For instance the Lila Poonawalla foundation in Pune funds the complete graduate school education of some girls. The Tata Endowment for Higher Education of Indians also provides some interest free loans to selected students. There is a similar scheme from Mahindra and Mahindra I think. This can help cover some small expenses.

5) Internships
Another way to help pay for your education is to get an internship in the summer, or a co-op for another semester. The campus career fair is the best place to look for one, because employers are actively searching for interns too. The salaries are pretty good for most of these. I remember saving up a bunch of money after a co-op and then getting a laptop( I still use the same one),and a second-hand car.

6) Grader Positions
The last option in many cases is to grade homework for the university. If you get enough grading hours then the university waives your fees. For instance if you grade papers worth 13 hours a week, then you could get a tuition waiver. This is a riskier form of funding. I knew some seniors who would go hunting for grader positions in Physics, Maths, Chemistry and other departments in the hope of making their 13 hours a week. The payoff was an automatic saving of 12k dollars in tuition.