Another Financial Aid Post

Harsh recently asked in the comments about financial aid. I think this requires a fresh post outlining my experiences and observations from a few years ago.

In the years I was at UW-Madison (2002-2004), most Indian grad students in ECE at UW-Madison didn't get funding from the department along with admission. This was something I faced back then too, and honestly it was discouraging enough for me that I was even considering not enrolling at all. My parents were professors at a medical college in India and $12,000 in tuition every semester was a very large amount in rupees for us. They could support me for a year without funding, but somehow I felt terrible about spending so much out of my parents nest-egg on my education.

2002 was a tough year for jobs with the 2001 recession still looming large. Many employers in India, such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro had deferred their offers for the 2001 batch. Many smart seniors were killing time at home without a job for a whole year at times. That did affect grad school admissions too and I think admissions in 2002 were a lot tougher than 2000/2001 (based on the GRE score + academic profiles). For Electrical Engineering nobody I knew got accepted at any top 10 schools apart from some at University of Michigan.

Anyways so when I arrived in Madison, I was a practically peniless and even a $5 sub seemed expensive in rupees. I was planning to save every penny in order to avoid asking my parents for a lot of money. Most of my seniors in Madison were funded and they were very helpful. My hosts, Rajas, Amar and Manoj gave me a lot of ideas on how to go about looking for positions. About 11 days after I arrived I obtained funding for a programming job in the Physics department. I had heard about a couple of seniors who were teaching assistants in the Physics or the Math departments. There were some seniors who were working at the library on their IT systems. Some seniors were also TAs in ECE itself. The short answer is that there was a lot of demand for programming skills all over the campus. In my second year I luckily got an Research Assistantship in ECE itself. I interned at GE for a semester and beyond that point I was fairly rich for a student. I bought a car, a laptop, a camera... so most of my needs were satisfied.

TAs were usually 33% (or 13 hours a week) appointments and earned about $800 a month. Some 50% appointments (or 20 hours a week) as RAs earned about $1500 a month. This includes a complete tuition waiver and health insurance.

So my thoughts on funding:
- As much as I could tell it used to work out. People in those days paid tuition for a semester and were able to find funding within one semester. My ex-roommate didn't get funding in Fall 2002 itself but was later able to find a job somewhere recording video and burning CDs for some department related to African history.
- Programming is a really good skill to have for such jobs. Another friend I knew used to write Perl code to maintain a website for some department. And that paid for his tuition. So managing websites and having some samples may be a good idea.
- There is no point worrying about this before you even have admission. Most of these jobs require in-person interviews. So there is nothing you can do about them until you arrive on campus.
- What impact will the drop in federal funding have on such jobs? I have no way to tell. People currently at the university are your best bet for these questions. Again if there is a dearth of jobs in the real world, students tend to stay longer in school and that could affect your chances of getting funding. So take the above statements with a pinch of salt. There is some likelihood that things have changed.