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Overseas Grad Studies for US Students?
foidulus asks: "I am currently a senior undergrad at Penn State looking into studying overseas. I spent 6 months working in Japan at an R&D lab and have published 1 paper with another pending publication(though I was researching security, however I would like to study bio-informatics). I am confident in my Japanese language skills, however it seems very tough to get any scholarships or funding there, but in the US a lot of schools seem to have tuition waivers and stipends(some even have health insurance!). Have any US Slashdot readers done any Masters/PhD work abroad? Do people from outside the US have any information on grad school in their country? What were your experiences? How did you get funding? Were your language skills adequate?" What differences can one expect when dealing with Graduate School in a foreign University compared to those in the United States?
The Japanese Government has a great set of scholarship programas for overseas students. You should try contacting the Japanese Embassy, and ask for information on the Mombusho (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology).
Unless you're planning on staying in the country you get your final degree from, it's usually not a good idea. It will be much harder to get an academic job in the US with a foreign degree. If you're planning on just getting a masters and coming back to the states for the Ph.D., that can work, as can going to a foreign university and then getting a job in industry.
All in all, it's probably not a great idea unless you're planning on moving out of the US permanently. Few people will have heard of where you studied, so they'll just assume the worst. If you can study here in the US, do so.
It seems that my school happens to have a pretty renowned Bioninf laboratory. Altough it's not my area, it seems that they have achieved some interesting developments in the genome project. If you want to check:
www.lbi.ic.unicamp.br
Even if you don't have interest in coming to Brazil, the lab's professors could point you towards other good schools "abroad", and how to dig up scholarships for those. Try and mail them.
Personally, I find that moving from where you are, wherever that may be, is a nice experience that broadens your horizons. So far I have been too to Japan and the US, and I'm aiming for a PhD somewhere in Europe. More due to the personal experience of knowing many different cultures and languages than for being in some bigname university.
Cheers,
Claus
The first one or two years in a North American (US/Canadian) graduate program are often not very different from the last two years in an undergraduate program: lots of required courses, not much research. I'm not saying that's bad: it can be good if you don't know what you want to do exactly, if you're entering a new field and need to catch up quickly on the basics, etc. North American graduate programs are therefore often longer than elsewhere. If you know exactly what you want to do and don't want to spend much time taking classes, look into the top schools in the UK: Edinburgh, Cambridge, Sheffield, etc. Most UK graduate programs (they're called post-graduate programs there) are focused much more exclusively on a research topic, right from the beginning (as I said, that can be good or bad). If you're seriously considering going there, look for studentships on jobs.ac.uk or other pertinent message boards. A studentship will typically provide you with three years of funding, which is considered sufficient for finishing a PhD in the UK (don't know if it actually is sufficient), compared with the nominal five years in North America.
Marklar: marklar
Yes, for internships abroad is usually easier as companies tend to like a multicultural environment, a very good first step is to join AIESEC, they have hundreds of internships abroad not only for undergrads but also for masters. Of course it is just a traineship no longer than year and a half, but it is pretty useful learning from other cultures and changing a bit the environment where you are living (and probably see that ouside there is much more than the US :). A good think is that doing a internship abroad with AIESEC you will get a salary for living there, so it could be really cheap and you don't have to carry directly the costs of leaving abroad.
I was born in Sweden but has studied at some other universities around the world (Switzerland, Japan) but I must say that I get more and more impressed with Swedish universities (especially the engineering faculties).
Most beginner universities offer Master's programs given in English, for bioinformatics there is for instance this
one.
By law higher education is free of charge in Sweden (!), ie no tuition fees (this applies to foreigners as well). For foreign student's I think there are various scholarship to cover living expenses as well.
Finland might be another good option, there are definately some world class universities overthere.
Perhaps the biggest reason though, was that I really didn't plan to spend the rest of my life in Europe, so it made more sense to complete my degree in North America. The longer you spend abroad, the harder it becomes both logistically (more stuff) and socially (all your friends here vs. all your friends and family at home) to return.
Currently, in Germany there is a movement (pushed by some EU agreements I think) to convert the structure of the education system to match the British model. Traditionally, you earn a Diplom in Computer Science, which is equivalent to an MS. More and more schools are changing to a BS/MS track though, which will make things easier for foreign students to study in Germany and vice-versa. Unfortunately, most schools are still doing Diplom programs, but if you look around you can find MS programs around.
Simultaneously, a lot of departments have started offering courses in English (especially CS departments) in order to draw foreign students. Since hardly anybody learns German in school, it's very hard for German profs to get great foreign grad students like their counterparts based in English speaking countries. You could certainly complete the MS where I did (in Saarbruecken) without knowing any German and you'd still have a good number of courses to choose from. At some other places though, I've heard cases where students would need to take say 4 courses and there are only 4 offered in English, so you have to take those specific ones.
One big downside to doing an MS at a German university though, is that it's hard to get any financial aid. Because the MS has replaced the Diplom (which is/was the first degree earned), MS students are still viewed and treated as undergrads in almost every way. However, for foreign students, there are scholarships available, but obviously not everybody can actually get one. The biggest source is from DAAD, which I believe is funded by the German government. A couple of universities also have some scholarships as well, but I think these are few and far between. I was lucky to get one from the Max Planck Institute (via the IMPRS) located in Saarbruecken where I studied. It paid 715EUR/month, which is plenty to live on, since the cost of living is relatively low and you only need to pay around 100EUR in fees per semester.
Here, there are a lot of jobs on campus usually doing various programming tasks for a research group. Foreign students are allowed to work these jobs, but obviously there's no guarantee that you'll find a job for which you have the necessary skills.
For PhD students, there is obviously more funding available, but it really depends on your advisor's funding situation. Unlike in the US, where many, many profs have external funding from DOD, NSF, DOE, etc. in Europe there's much more of a reliance on money coming directly through the university. Hence, it seems to me that there are a lot of profs who cannot fund their students particularly well. However, those that do have lots of funding, pay their students quite well. After taking into account cost of living, the compensation is better here, but not by a huge margin.
As actual instruction goes,
Here's a somewhat similiar question that someone asked on slashdot before. Could be helpful.
"There is no spoon." - The Matrix
I would like to reiterate hak1du's post. There are a lot of very bright people with very interesting thesis topics that didn't come from a well named school, yet are highly successful. Too many times people judge the reputation of the school by its name and not that of the program or the research. Probably one of the best programs for Bioinformatics is at Boston University-- not Yale, Columbia, or MIT (although all three have recently started Bioinformatics programs). Take an in depth look at the schools you want to apply to. What kind of research do they do? Does it interest you? It doesn't hurt nowadays to fire off a couple of emails to some of the current grad students or researchers at the school. Inquire about their research, what they do, also try downloading and reading some of their papers. There are many branches of Bioinformatics (Systems biology, proteomics, genomics). Also look at schools that have Computational Biology as well. The terms tend to get mixed up a lot, but a lot of schools use them interchangingly. You might be more interested in Computational Biology than bioinformatics if you have a more mathematical kind of mind. The field is advancing so fast that a lot of the names haven't caught up. Lastly, make sure about the advisor. Really make sure their personality isn't horrible. You can find an advisor with really interesting research topics and a good reputation but sucks as an advisor because they have horrible research skills. The current students would be able to judge him best for you. It's very important to have an advisor with a personality that doesn't clash with yours. Too many times people come out of Ph.D programs frustrated or burnt out because they chose the wrong advisor (and some never go on to complete).
Here in the Netherlands PhD students are paid a net salary between 1500 and 2000 EUR net per month. Also, everybody speaks (some form of) english; it is the lingua franca of research here. For a list of universities see this list