How to find funded positions?

[virtua]

Hello forum,

1) how do you find universities with funded graduate positions?

2) how do yo make sure that the university program you are applying to, has professors with funding? I mean, what if the university department you apply does not have funded positions?

3) Do you contact with professors before applying? But it takes a lot of time to email to each professor in the department.

I mean, when I applied first time, I applied to 8 universities and had to pay probably about 500-600$ just for applications! And although I got admitted to 7 out of 8, but I got only 1 funded position offer. So I feel like I wasted a lot of money for nothing.

So, in one word, how to optimize this applications submission process?  

[TakeruK]

6 hours ago, virtua said:

Hello forum,

1) how do you find universities with funded graduate positions?

2) how do yo make sure that the university program you are applying to, has professors with funding? I mean, what if the university department you apply does not have funded positions?

3) Do you contact with professors before applying? But it takes a lot of time to email to each professor in the department.

I mean, when I applied first time, I applied to 8 universities and had to pay probably about 500-600$ just for applications! And although I got admitted to 7 out of 8, but I got only 1 funded position offer. So I feel like I wasted a lot of money for nothing.

So, in one word, how to optimize this applications submission process?  

Hi Virtua!

1. I found universities with funded graduate positions by looking at the university webpages. Usually, the department webpage will have some information about funding. If it's not on the department webpage, you might be able to find it from the Graduate Office webpage. If there is no information available at all, then I would contact the appropriate person from the department contact list. You should always check but generally Masters programs are not funded in the US and PhD programs are funded. But this is just a generalization.

2. This is a good question---sometimes the department commits to funding students but you can only work with professors that have funding because the professor needs to provide a part of this funding. The best way to find out is to email the professor and ask them if they have funding for a student in Fall 2017 (or whatever year you will be applying). In this email, you should be very brief, but basically indicate that you are interested in applying to their school and working with them on topic X, and you would like to know if they have spots for students.

3. Yes, it takes a lot of time to research schools and email professors. But you should not be emailing every professor. The goal is to identify a few professors with matching research interests and apply to those professors specifically. 

When I applied, I also applied to 8 universities and I probably spent over $1000 in total for applications---my transcripts (from 3 schools) cost money, the GREs (both subject and general) cost money, the GRE score reports cost money and the application fee itself was about $100 per school! This is a lot of money so I put a lot of hours in researching and emailing professors ahead of time to ensure that this is money well spent. In the end, I would estimate that I spent a total of 150-200 hours in the months** leading up to applications thinking about which schools to apply to, including things like carefully researching schools to make a shortlist of 15-20 schools, then consulting with various professors I knew to narrow that down to 8, then reading up on each professor to make sure our research interests overlapped and then finally emailing them to make sure that if I am spending $100+ to apply there, if I get accepted, there would be something interesting for me to work on.

(** I was in a MSc program while applying to PhD schools, so I basically put aside the equivalent of one work day (8-10 hours) per week starting in July to think about where to apply. In the fall, there was a short period where I basically got very little work done on my MSc projects because I was basically full-time working on applications. My MSc advisor was okay with this and even encouraged me because my advisor is a good person and great mentor who wanted me to get the best opportunity possible after my MSc with them.)

In addition to not wasting money to get an offer you're not interested in, spending the time to do the research to make sure you have a great fit will make your application a lot stronger and greatly improve your chances of getting a good offer!