Funding for Sciences - How to ID a well funded lab

[mbreck]

Hello all!

I'm currently looking at graduate schools, and in the spirit of the

best graduate school being the one that pays you to do it, I wanted to

ask you all about the relative levels of funding for various departments. Based on some quick research, I get the impression that this is usually dependent on how well individual professors are funded. Which leads me to my first question:

1) How do you best identify a well funded lab/professor?

Question 2 relates to fields with in the sciences I'm personally interested in.

2) How would you rank the following fields by relative funding level? If these departments are too specific, feel free to rank overall categories.

Cognitive Neuroscience (Psychology dept, usually)

Neuroscience

Biotech

Bioengineering

Biochemistry

Chemistry

Materiel Science

Thanks so much for your help!

[Eigen]

In my experience, Psychology will pay lower.

All of the other fields seem to have relatively similar pay, at least in the areas I'm looking at.

It seems that you're only basing your funding question off of funding students, rather than funding research- or am I missing something?

In all of the above areas (in the US, for a PhD), you should not go unless you're fully funded with a competitive salary. The usual reason a school would admit you but not fund you is if they aren't confident in your abilities, and it's usually a hint that you should go elsewhere.

If you're talking about a MS rather than a PhD, than all of the above is pretty much out the window. Funding is a lot harder to come by for masters students.

[mbreck]

Thanks Joe!

I am indeed looking for a funded MS. I have friend who is fully funded (RA position) doing a MS in Mech Engineering. Like I said, it seems harder to get a funded MS, but of the people I know who are doing it, most of them have found labs/professors which are very well off.

Anyone have any input for question 1?

[Physwimic]

In answer to #1, talk to them. The easiest way is to email them and tell them that you are applying as an MA candidate and are interested in doing research for them. Often times they will tell you whether they have funding to pay you, or to provide equipment and supplies for you, or they just don't have the resources to take you on. From my experience, you really don't have to ask outright, just let them know you are interested. If they think you will work well and have the funding, they will let you know. If not, they probably won't respond at all or will apologize and let you know they aren't taking students. One final note, they may side step the question at first but show interest. This is often because they like you and don't know if they will have sufficient funds yet (for instance, they are applying for a grant but don't know if they will get it yet), so be prepared to maintain in contact with some people until funding is sorted out.

[mbreck]

Sounds really good! Thanks so much Decaf!

I'm basically planning on going to the schools I want to apply to in person (specifically Berkley, UCSF, Stanford, etc) to try and do just that. Sorry to keep adding the questions, but

3) Any suggestions for getting/scheduling in person meetings with professors about working in their labs?

Also, I'm planning on applying for fall of 2013, so this next year in large part will be based around preparing for grad school (i.e., I'll get a job in whichever of my fields of interest seems to have the best shot of funding my studies and research, take whatever pre-reqs, etc...). These meetings I'm hoping will also be a good opportunity to get a personal description of what individual professors look for when choosing Grad Students for their labs. This leads me to the question of:

4) How important is it to be accepted to a given school before scheduling these meetings?

Thanks again! This forum is answering in minutes questions I have been churning the web for all day.

[vertices]

When you contact the professors, be specific about what aspects of their research you are interested and what skills and background you have that support your interests and theirs. This link is not your field, but offers generally good tips and things to think about:

http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~ejw/advice/

If you can schedule these meetings before you are accepted, it might help your application. However, professors might be more interested in scheduling meetings after they know you are accepted.

Also, on the funding issue, some of the big granting agencies make their awards available publicly online. Of course, this will only give you a partial picture and may not tell the story of who is good at finding funding sources from other departments for various projects or has industry funding, but it's a start.

If you find webpages of MS students with similar interests, experiences or background, you might want to connect with them. They may be able to tell you about funding. For instance, at some schools it is easy to get TAships as a masters students and at others not so much. The students may be more aware of this than the professors. (The department's director of graduate studies may know about this as well so you might want to write them too.) The students may also know what labs tend to support masters students. This may also be beneficial because MS students can answer other questions about the MS experience.

[TakeruK]

For funding, sometimes the department webpage will tell you some information (some will tell you outright how much money to expect, but many will just be vague and say something like "tuition is covered" or "tuition + stipend" or "funding depending on availability".

Asking the group is a good way to find out, but if you're not accepted yet, it's probably not a good idea to ask outright. Before I started applying, I emailed all the profs/groups I was interested in with a description of my experience and interests, and what I would like to do with that person. Then I ask if they are still interested in these topics (as webpages can be outdated) and will they consider taking students for Fall 2012 (or whatever your year will be). Most of them said something like, "yes, I will be taking students, but we don't match students with supervisors until after first year, but please do apply", one person was honest and said "yes, please apply but I don't have any grant money so you will have to TA a lot" and a fraction of them will just ignore your email. In your case, since funding Masters is rare, it is understandable for you to include that in your emails too -- something like, does your lab provide any support for masters level students or something should be direct but polite.

Finally, for funding, similar to above advice about looking at funding results from major competitions, you can also look at "press release" type news published by that school's PR department or your department. Most schools, when their faculty wins a major grant, will have some page announcing like "Prof. X group wins $99999999999999 grant to send a manned mission to Mars!" etc., so watch for those things. But just keep in mind that some grants are for buying equipment, etc. and the University will take a huge fraction of that money as overhead, so you shouldn't go as far as trying to figure out how many grad students that grant would support!

Maybe your field is different, but I think you should just stick to email contact unless they invite you to come and visit. Definitely don't drop in unannounced! When I sent my emails out, I was about to go to a conference in the field, so I also asked if they were planning to attend -- one of them was going to be there and we met up to chat about grad school, and another wasn't going to attend but told me to seek out his grad students to find more information.

If you want to visit, you can say that you plan on visiting the area before applying and ask if it would be possible for you to drop by. But don't ask with the expectation that they will say yes because most programs have scheduled Open House events in Feb/Mar/Apr in order to do just this -- it might be a lot of work for them to schedule in additional visits. The open house events are usually for accepted students. But if they are willing to schedule a visit for you, that would be a good experience to impress them as well as learn what they would want from you as an applicant!

Good luck!

[SymmetryOfImperfection]

Also think about this: California, especially UCs, are hard to get into for non-California residents as funded grad students and very hard as foreign students, as you saw in the "advice" page. Conversely, they're easier to get into as a foreign undergrad and paid MS level grad students! Think about that very hard.

[SlickMcFavorite]

For life-science related labs, you can search the NIH database:

http://projectreporter.nih.gov/reporter.cfm

Also, many labs will list some/all of their grants on their webpage. Finally, if you want to do some research, you can look up some papers from the lab and count how many different grants are mentioned.