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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).
...is that, for a change, *you* are the "annoying foreign grad student" who has a funny accent, eats funny food, and doesn't quite fit into the culture. Unless that's just a feature of schools in the US.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
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.
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.
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
My professors (native nihonjin) all said I should not do grad school in Japan. They said you just end up slaving away for the senior professors, who get all the credit for your work. They universally described it as inferior to US grad schools. Of course these same professors had no problems exploiting grad students for their own benefit while teaching at a US school.
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
I'm getting a Korean government scholarship, which is about 2 or 3 times the amount what my labmates get from their various sources of funding (private companies, government, others). The cost of living here is lower than the U.S. or Japan and while health insurance is not included in the scholarship, it is also relatively cheap in Korea.
My Korean language skills aren't good yet, so I'm taking classes that are taught in English. Textbooks are all in English and of course all research papers are written in English. So while you can get by with just English, I feel like I miss out a lot by not being able to fully understand Colloquiums or discussion in the lab. But one of the reasons why I came to Korea was to improve my Korean, wanting to be more involved in the lab is good motivation.
Culturally, there are many labs whose Professors are rather dictatorial. Indeed, students are expected to pay more respect to Professors than in the US and even do errands and such (like clean the Professor's office), but there are many Professors who like to teach/advise in a more collaborative manner. My Professor is one of them and his teaching style is one of the reasons I came to KAIST.
So far my experience has been a positive one.
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.
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 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
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.
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