Speaker 1: Welcome back to the channel guys. So when I applied for masters, I got seven admits and three funding options for myself. Ultimately, I went to University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I did my master's in computer science for free. And I believe you can do it as well. In this video, I'm going to talk about a detailed timeline of various things that you need to do throughout your application cycle, as well as in grad school. So as to maximize your chances of getting funding. Now our clients have used the same approach on and many of them have gone on to receive TA, RAship and other kind of offers. Some of them have also done their master's for free. So I'm pretty confident that if you follow these things and stick to the timeline and do all these things, you can definitely maximize your chances for getting funding and hopefully do MS for very, very low cost or even 100% funding. So keep watching. So in this video, we are covering the timeline to find funding in USA. Now what you guys should remember is that the funding in USA actually works very differently from some other countries like UK. In UK, you have to apply to the scholarships as well as universities in parallel. But when you're applying for US, it works slightly differently. You cannot rely too much on the scholarships. For me, the best way to find funding in USA is through finding assistantships, which is RAship, TAship or GAship. We are going to do a separate video to cover about assistantships in detail. But in this video, I'm going to cover the timeline as I said, and particularly we are focusing on the fall semester. So the timeline I'm covering is from May of current year to August or September of the next year when your actual fall semester starts. Now let's say you're applying to spring semester or something, then you should tailor the timeline accordingly. Okay, so let's get started. And I'm going to now cover the important steps you need to do in different different months to make sure that we are putting all our efforts for funding and some sort of funding will work out for us. So the two options for funding that we are covering in this timeline is one is external scholarships like Tata loan or Fulbright fellowship, etc. And main emphasis for me would remain on finding assistantships in US because I feel that is what I got. And I know that is the best and proven way for getting money or studying for free in US. Okay, so now let's start from as I said May, so between May to July, what I want you to do is keep an eye out for any sort of external fellowship applications. For example, Fulbright is a very prestigious scholarship, and its application closes in May itself, May or June, I think. So make sure you don't miss out the early deadlines for some of these scholarships. So between May and July, please apply to any of these external scholarships options. Now let's move ahead between June and October. Now this is a crucial time, especially if you have a research profile, because this is the period when you should be contacting professors in USA. So let's say you have a research profile, let's say I'm in wireless networking, and I have done some good projects, industrial or research projects, and especially good if I have publications. In this case, you want to reach out to networking professors in various target universities, and figure out how interested they would be in like having you in their labs, we are doing this for two reasons. One is they directly determine that research assistantship options. So if a professor replies to us favorably, it means that like, you know, we are more likely to get an admission and secondly, maybe even get an RAship option later on. So this is the period in which you want to contact professors, send them a very formal email, attach your resume, mention your research interests, and specifically go through the work they have done so that you can tell them how you can contribute or how you can work in their labs. So send out this email. Now if you are lucky, you might get a response from a professor and they might say that hey, I like your profile. You should apply to the university and we'll see that is an encouraging reply. In this case, you should definitely apply to the school. And even you should mention the name of this professor in your SOP, mentioning your interest in working with him and his lab. And that will be taken into consideration when they're reviewing your SOP. And let's say you don't get any replies. That's fine. So I've seen, especially in programs like computer science, electrical engineer, or any sort of engineering programs, it's really hard to get responses from these professors because I think they are just overwhelmed by the number of emails they get. But I've heard of success story of people in like economics or biomedical engineering or something where sometimes people have actually received a favorable response from the professor. So depending on your department, I do think it's worth taking a chance. So you want to do this sometime in summer because later on professors themselves get busy, they might have to review some applications as well. So they tend not to reply. So if you want to contact the professors, June, July, August is a good time. Now, of course, August to October, you're also looking at selecting universities like so shortlisting the schools, and you should do this again, keep your financial constraints in mind. So if you are really dependent on funding, you should apply to universities which are affordable, and which are likely to give you funding. So for example, Columbia University or CMU, now historically, they do not give scholarships or assistantships, etc. It's really hard to find funding at Columbia. So now that we know that it's hard to find funding at Columbia, why would you apply there? So when you're shortlisting your schools, you should keep these financial factors in mind and shortlist only those schools, which are either affordable, more affordable, or they have also like, you know, maybe a higher possibility of giving out funding. So this is what you should be doing between June to October. Now between November to January or February is the time when you will be actually submitting your applications depending on your deadlines, I'm not going to cover this in detail. But please keep submitting your applications, check the status, make sure all your documents all your LORs everything is submitted on time and that you are not missing anything right. And then of course, once you apply, you have to wait for the results. Now between December to May, so anytime between this period, you will see that there are more external scholarship applications start opening up. For example, we have seen Aga Khan Foundation, Tata Loan, Sekh Saria Scholarship, Inlax Shivdasani Scholarship, they open sometime in February or March, I believe, and they have deadlines pretty soon after that. So in this period, once you're done with submitting your applications, you should go on and apply to these other scholarship programs if you're interested. Of course, you will wait for your application results and you will start receiving your results sometime from March onward, let's say. Now a pointer here, by this time, also it may happen that you have not received any scholarship and even if you have received admits, you have not received any funding opportunities along with your admits, which is, by the way, the case with me also. Like UIUC did not give me any assistantship at the time of admit itself, but I did have a research assistantship offer from University of California, Riverside, but UIUC was so much higher ranked school that I found out my option that like, you know, if it looks affordable, then that is what I wanted to really attend. And so I started my homework, I started contacting people in UIUC and all. So please don't give up hope if you do not receive any sort of funding so far. And let's say if that is the case, anyways, go ahead, decide on the school you want to attend and start your study abroad loan as well as visa process in this time frame. Now let's look at the period that is after receiving an admit or visa up till August or the time when you are going to land in US. Now many people think that admission is done, visa is done, now all I have to go and start the school and like, you know, start my studies, but this is a crucial period in between and you can do a lot to find funding in US in this period also. So you should be contacting the grad advisor. So whenever you are admitted, you will be assigned and when you accept an offer, you will be assigned a grad advisor at this school. So contact them or the program coordinator and ask them that how can you find assistantships and I'm sure they will give you some pointers and refer you to some lists where you can look for the campus opportunities. So usually like for example, one of our client is headed to UC Berkeley this year and on their portal, there was a specific link where all the assistantships were listed. So any grad student, incoming grad student could go and apply to those links. So apply for any sort of TA, RA, GA positions that you see open on their portals and many people if they do this diligently, they are able to like find assistantship in this period between February to August when you are flying away. So do not skip out on this part and then of course you will fly away and you will start your school session in August and September. Now the silver lining is that even if you have not received anything till now, even then you can be fine because I found my funding after landing on the campus. So once you land on the campus, spend that initial one or two weeks meeting the Indian students, meeting other seniors, finding out what are the openings in different lab, taking your resume copies, going out to relevant professors and trying to find out if any of them are looking for RA or new people in their lab. This is how I got my research assistantship offer. So up till those two weeks when you land on the campus, you can still figure out a lot of things in those first two weeks. So please don't give up hope. In US, 90% of the funding actually comes after receiving an admit. So don't lose hope. Now if you are serious about finding funding in US, then you should look at the details of what kind of emails you can send to the professors, how to look for TA, GA and RA internship on campus, what is the right time to apply for those and what are the kind of things you can do after arriving on campus as well. So we have covered all that in much more detail when I conducted a two hour long funding masterclass. This funding masterclass is designed specifically for US and Canadian programs. So if you're applying to those and you really want to find funding for your programs, you can check out our masterclass as well, or we will leave the link in the description box below. So hopefully that helps you as well. So that was it for today. Funding is a big topic and if you have specific questions or feedback about what other video I should create on this topic, then feel free to leave a comment below and I will see you next week. Bye.