International (Australian) student scholarship problems...

[biggles]

Hi all, long time reader / first time poster...

With great excitement, I was admitted to one of my top choices for grad school (UC Berkeley in Mech Engineering) and will be commencing this Fall - however without any financial aid. I'm planning to get through by tutoring / GSR work / savings / loans, however I also plan to apply for any external funding I can get.

This seems to be proving difficult for a few reasons:

• -- Firstly, Australian government scholarships seem to be generally only awarded for study WITHIN Australia (eg Australian Postgraduate Award) or a specific country (eg Menzies - England), or to indigenous Australians (not me). The industry funded scholarships seem to be for very specialised areas, none of which I'll be studying.
  -- Furthermore the few which are for general overseas grad study (ie

Fulbright, Sir John Monash) seem to require you to apply in the year BEFORE commencing grad school. This seems totally stupid because due to the differences in academic calender the USA grad applications weren't even open at that time. Maybe they can bend the rules?

I figure if I can get into UC Berkeley surely I stand a reasonable chance of getting some sort of external funding. Are there any other aussies out there (or anybody else for that matter) who can offer any advice?

Lastly a couple more questions:

• -- For a lot of these scholarships they like to know about your proposed thesis/research topic. Given that I haven't actually started and that my proposed topic is different to my focus areas in undergrad, I'm finding it hard to give a tightly defined scope / abstract / proposal. I can easily talk about the social utility of my research topic... but exactly what I'll be researching is another story... any advice?
  -- What are some of these online databases with scholarships I hear people speak of?

Any info / advice / tips would be greatly appreciated!

[Minnesotan]

In regard to defining the scope and method of your research, I would repeat what advice has been given to me in the past: do your best. What my advisors were telling me is that these applications are done so far ahead of time that most reasonable scholarship committees will understand that research projects often change trajectory mid-flight, for very good reasons (i.e. "this cell did not react the way I had figured it would, so the new project is to find out why"). Now, I'm not saying you should be vague, but do some research and ask your advisors to look over your proposals. Come up with something thorough and well thought out, but know that academics have the right to alter their own research, provided you are not breaking the rules the funding source sets down.