You can find money for grad school!
If you think that you can't afford to go to graduate school, think again. Not only can you find money for grad school - you can even get paid to go to school. You probably know that you can apply for various grants and scholarships on a competitive basis, but you might not know that graduate schools often pay salaries (or stipends) to graduate students. If you want to study sciences, engineering or humanities and choose a graduate program wisely, you can get paid enough to survive without having to borrow a penny.
Instructions
1. Begin by finding graduate schools that have programs in the field of study you are interested in. To do that check the graduate school rankings: (grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/grad).
2. Visit the websites of the graduate programs you might be interested in and check whether they offer teaching or research assistantships. In most schools (especially big public schools) graduate students are hired to teach classes or to work with faculty assisting on research projects. In return, some schools pay only the tuition, while others even pay a salary, provide health insurance and cheap graduate housing.
This really is the best way to get money for grad school. In addition to getting paid to go to graduate school, you also get some work experience in your field.
3. Beware that it is a lot easier to get graduate assistanships in the fields of hard sciences, engineering, and to some extent, humanities. In some programs, every single graduate student gets tuition remission and a monthly salary with a ballpark figure of twelve hundred dollars or so. It is not exactly a lot of money, but it is possible to survive if renting a cheap room and cooking your own food.
While not completely impossible, it is definitely a lot more difficult, however, to get paid by school to do your MBA or get your law or medical degree. Those types of schools might give a partial assistanship, but it's unlikely that they will cover all of your expenses. You can find some scholarship or grant money though, so never give up.
4. If you are interested in a particular graduate program, contact them. They are usually very responsive. In addition to teaching or research assistantships, they can often tell you more about specific grants, scholarships or fellowships you may qualify for. Moreover, there are often grants and scholarships available to women and minorities in a given field of study (sciences and engineering, especially) specific to those particular schools. Be sure to ask!
5. Ask the graduate program to put you in touch with some current graduate students in that program. They might be able give you a better idea of what the graduate program is like, what the financial support is like, info on housing, health insurance, and so on.
6. Familiarize yourself with the faculty in the graduate program that you are interested in applying to. If there is a professor whose research interests you, contact them directly and tell them that you would like to work with them. Such personal contacts might facilitate your admission process and land you a research assistantship on top of that. For more details on this check the resource section below for the article about getting into grad school by making personal contacts.
7. Do a lot of research to determine how the graduate programs compare so that you can find the best deal. Make a decision based on both the quality of the graduate program and the financial benefits that come with it.
The more research you do, the less your graduate education is likely to cost you. Best of luck!
Tags: graduate program, grad school, graduate school, graduate students, grants scholarships, money grad
