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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?
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.
For graduate school, it's the research lab where you do your work that matters, not the university. And there are lots of excellent research labs outside the US. Any US university that doesn't want to give you a job because they don't know a good foreign research lab where you did your Ph.D. is a university to be avoided.
If you're planning on just getting a masters and coming back to the states for the Ph.D., that can work,
You got it backwards. Getting a Masters outside the US is hard because requirements are often so different and because of language barriers. Getting a Ph.D. overseas is generally much easier because you will be in a research environment, people will tend to speak English in the research labs, and because the main requirement for a Ph.D. after you have finished your M.A. is doing a good thesis.
The personality, reputation, connections, and quality of a Ph.D. advisor are far more important than whether they happen to be located in the US, France, or Japan.
A friend of mine who attended University of Washington has went and studied in Japan for 1 year and his entire tuition was paid for by the Japanese government. He even managed to get a monthly allowance of about $1000 dollars. Japan is by far one of the better places to go study oversees.
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
I am a McGill alumnus, so I am biased...
There is a strong American presence at the undergraduate level (nearly 20% of the international student population) so by virtue of that, McGill is *somewhat* well-known in the northeastern U.S., at least among college-bound kids and their parents.
See this article on McGill University for an idea. Many of the alumni are household names in the U.S.
Consider this also: public reputation is not the same as academic reputation.
The McGill name may not be well-known to the U.S. public, but in academic circles it sparks recognition.
Also, I am not sure if it really is much harder to get a job with a foreign degree than a U.S. one, because when I browse faculty pages at most U.S. schools, a good number of professors seem to have foreign graduate degrees (granted, these profs were not American to begin with, but....). Anecdotally, I know of many Canadian profs who teach at U.S. schools.
Having said that, graduate funding at McGill is not as good as it ought to be, despite being a first tier research institution. McGill professors are the richest in the country yet only a limited portion of their funds are used to fund grad students (I wonder why).
So let me point the submitter to some Canadian schools that will *guarantee* graduate funding to anyone who can get into some of their programs (doesn't matter if you're Canadian or not). As far as I can tell, the University of Toronto funds every student accepted.... Info here. University of Alberta, University of Western Ontario, McMaster University funds all students accepted to selected programs.
In my experience, U.S. schools often don't like to fund Masters students because M.S. programs are too short for them to extract any useful research out of the students (projects funded by research grants usually take years). They prefer to fund Ph.D. students.
But in Canada, M.S. students have an almost equal chance of getting funding.
Anyway, as some other poster said, there will be insular schools and outward-looking schools. The United States is a big and diverse country - one cannot really generalize.
(P.S. but sometimes it is tempting... for instance, I was watching Letterman last night, and David Letterman was talking to a lady from Texas (this was on Stupid Pet Tricks). He asked her, "So if you drive west from Texas, you hit New Mexico, right?". She said yes. "What state is west of New Mexico?"... and she said "I don't know". And she's from Texas! I'm not American and even I know Arizona is west of New Mexico. But as I said, the U.S. is a big country... and there are all kinds out there.)
Not sure from your question if you'd like to do all of your grad studies abroad. If you are interested in a short (6-12 month) stint, doing an internship or your MS thesis internationally at a company or research lab is another option. Companies are usually better set up to handle international applicants. At least in our case, we semi-actively look for such students, and typically pay them enough to live off while they are visiting us.
I was on the Monbusho Scholarship undergrad program (note that it's no longer called Monbusho, but Monbu Kagakusho [Ministry of Education and Science]).
The program gives you five years study in Japan, with the first year being spent at a language school and the remaining four years in an undergraduate program at a Japanese national university. The ministry pays all tuition fees and gives you a monthly allowance (when I was in the program, it was around 138,000 yen a month - equivalent to $US1250 or so).
The graduate program they offer had an allowance of over 180,000 yen a month (more than $US1600) at the time; it's probably a bit more than that now.
Well, if you came over here, you'd probably not have to pay anything except the registration fee for each year (~$150), just like the rest of us. Everybody in scandinavia in general speaks english (not "everybody", *everybody*), so there wouldn't be a communtication problem, and you'd probably learn the language in a couple of months. Americans that are staying here are saying it hasn't been a problem. You sound more like you wanna go to Japan though, that's up to you.
I TA'd a CS class in Germany (in German) one semester. I'm a native American English speaker, who learned German in undergrad. Let me tell you, those foreign language classes you take at home only prepare you for dealing with literary and cultural studies, conversation, and daily life. Nobody teaches you how to say 'pointer' or 'worst-case running time' or even how to read a mathematical formula ('three times e to third plus the log of x').
If nothing else, it gave me a whole new appreciation of those poor foreign grad student TA's I had back home.
Fortunately, US food is more or less a superset of German food, but I still found it amusing to hear Germans (and other foreigners) talk about how disgusting a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or root beer was.
Unless you're already rich, you have to consider the costs of graduate education. And the cost of living while attending school is usually a bigger factor than tuition and fees, unless you're going to MIT or Harvard. Some countries have an extremely high cost of living. I certainly wouldn't want to add the cost of a few years' living in London or Tokyo to my personal debt pile. Going to Canada may be cheaper than the US, and some otherwise expensive countries like Germany or France may actually have cheap living for students. But most countries you'd want to study in are going to be more expensive to live in than the US. Think about it.