Guide to newbie international applicant please

Graduate School
1

I am an international student from a developing country. I am applying for Masters in Computer Science in the US for fall 2016. My gpa is 3.3/4 and I am yet to give my GRE. My questions are

  1. How do scholarships here work actually? In order to apply for a certain scholarship, do I need to first apply for that college in the regular way as well or can I simply go with the scholarship form?
  2. Please suggest me some good universities with affordable fees.
  3. What are the US universities that overall provide the most or highest financial aid/ grants to international students to computer science grad students?
  4. Please help me with the links to informative posts about scholarships to international graduate students.

Thank you in advance! :slight_smile:

2

I think you are going to have to do a lot of the legwork yourself.

For MS degrees, the vast majority of student are self pay and don’t get grants, and that includes domestic students. They and their families pay or they work for an employer who has tuition reimbursement or just finances MS. They can get some financing through federal student loans which international students can’t get. PhD is different, as most PhD programs have a tuition waiver as well as a stipend for being a teaching or research assistant.

So for MS you would need to find the universities that may give some assistance
a) because you are a very attractive candidate compared to the pool they have
b) because they always need teaching assistants and they can give you some consideration, you have good TOEFL scores, maybe TA or tutoring experience
c) you have research experience and may get asked to work with a prof

Good luck. There is a grad forum here but I doubt they will know, also an international student forum. you can try thegradcafe but I bet there are forums for international students somewhere.

3

in order to have the best chance of getting financial aid as a Masters student you will want to apply to a program that offers Bachelors and Masters degrees but not Ph.D. These are the ones which will have the most TA positions available for Masters students. There are plenty of such schools, starting with all of the California State Universities. You will have to find others in different states yourself.

4

Also look at:

https://educationusa.state.gov/