Hello everybody. I am an Italian student who is about to graduate from High school with a big dream: studying computer science in a USA college like Stanford or MIT. Unfortunately I didn’t have much time to study and get informed so my TOEFL and SAT are not so high (97 on the iBT; I’ll know the SAT score soon).
Now, somebody gave me a scholarship opportunity for the University of Evansville, Indiana, which would waive the $36000 fee to $20000, but this made me dubtious.
The American Bachelor’s degree is not well-accepted in Italy, so doing graduate school too would be very important, and I thought that could be my opportunity for Stanford. The question is: “Are there any scholarships available for international graduated students?”.
Because we have them in Italy but they are reserved to people who graduated here…
Please tell me what I have to do, my future is in your hands!!
2 Comments
It depends on what you want to go for, a masters or a PhD.
If you are going for a PhD, then you will receive funding through the program. You will be required to either teach or perform research. For this, your tuition should be covered and you will receive a small amount living money. This funding comes from one of three places. If you are teaching, the funding comes from the department. If you are doing research, then the funding comes from your faculty adviser and his/her research grants. If you are doing research and you adviser does not have funding for you, then you will need to either teach as well, or you will need to find outside funding. There are plenty of external grants and fellowships that you can apply for. Being an international student will affect these fellowships and grants, but will not make it impossible to find outside funding. If your adviser has plenty of funds, again, this will be irrelevant. This is the basic setup for PhD funding for most science programs in the US. For Stanford computer science, see section V of this website:https://cs.stanford.edu/degrees/phd/Requ…
If you are applying for a MS, the setup can be very similar to PhD funding. However, internal funding (department and adviser) goes primarily to PhD students, so if there is none left over, then the MS students will not get funding. They will then be required to find external funding, which will also be in limited supply. If you can’t get any of this, then you will need government assistance. You, being international, will NOT be able to get US assistance if you need it. So you would have to find some other source of assistance. Again, this is only if there is not enough internal funding to fund you. So it would be better, from this standpoint, to go for a PhD. At Stanford, it seems that there is some MS funding, but a limited amount.
Look here for Stanford Masters info:http://cs.stanford.edu/degrees/mscs/faq/
under both Funding/Assistanceships and under Foreign Students.
But remember, financial aid is what you get when you don’t work. Assistanceships is what you get when you do work. And for a PhD, and if you are lucky, also a masters, you will be looking for assistanceships, NOT financial aid.
I do think that US Universities offer graduate scholarships for international students. To find out which universities offer scholarships to international students not just in USA, here is a useful resource: