I can't pay for grad school on my own. Please rate me on my chances of getting a scholarship! It'll be really helpful in shortlisting which universities to choose.

[saiyam1999]

Keeping it short to not waste too much of your time!

Profile:

CGPA: Engineering 8.3/10 from a Tier 1.5/2 university from India

Have 1 internationally published research paper and 1 year-long undergraduate thesis (Both relevant to my field). No work experience.

Was hoping to apply for MS in Sustainable Energy Systems in US/Europe T20 and Australia T10 universities (I can get 3 strong recommendation letters)

Do I have any chance?

Thanks a lot for your kind time!!!

PS: Please let me know of any other ways I can fund grad school (Does being a minority from India have some weightage?)

[lkaitlyn]

I just noticed this. I apologize that no one replied. Full disclosure: I am not in your field, so what I say might not apply as much.

At least in my field, MA programs are rarely funded in the U.S. unless they are part of a PhD program/en route to a PhD. There are exceptions to this, but you have to seek them out, and they're often at lower-ranked universities. (The higher-ranked ones in my field just care about PhD students, hence their ranking, so they don't have or don't care about funding MA students.) Australia/Europe, I'm not as familiar with, so you'll have to do more research on that. You sound on paper like you might be a strong candidate based on your research experience leading to publications, but the only way to truly know is to apply.

If financial aid is necessary for you, make sure you only apply to MA programs that do fund some of their graduate students, as many programs do not offer any type of funding. That information should be visible on a program or graduate school's website, or you can email and ask if you cannot find that information.

You can also look for fellowships for your field to apply to along with graduate programs. Some schools may have fellowships you can apply to, e.g. something like Stanford's Knight-Hennessy program, while some fellowships exist separate from schools entirely (e.g. NSF-GRFP, Fulbright, etc.).