Studycentrals

Half the people I speak to on whether they want to move to grad school after their undergraduate degree. Their major dilemma is whether they should leave the soft cushion of a steady income job that they just earned after working hard during their undergraduate degrees or leave all of it and pay hefty college fees again to pursue higher education and venture into unknown. If I ask them the same question but tell them that they can earn a master’s degree without paying a penny, rather they can save some money if they are frugal with their spending habits, the answer tends to be more aligned towards higher education. Now we all know that Ph.D. admit in engineering often comes with a tuition waiver and a generous stipend but finding a fully funded master’s degree is tricky.  Here is a list of few fully funded master’s programs that students can look into.

Erasmus Mundus Programs

Erasmus Mundus is a program funded by the European Commission. Its aims are to encourage mobility (long-term and short-term) of students and staff; to attract the best talents to Europe and; to promote European higher education worldwide.

They offer fully-funded master’s program across various disciplines. Not only they cover your tuition, they also offer a generous stipend to cover your living expenses as well as in some cases, flight fare to reach the program’s center from your home country.

Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree Program is an integrated study program and each program often is carried out across various participating universities across Europe.

Let’s take a look at some specific examples.

ERASMUS MUNDUS MASTER NANOSCIENCE AND NANOTECHNOLOGY

This program is carried in collaboration between 5 partner universities. The course is organized by the KU Leuven (Belgium), Chalmers Tekniska Högskola, Göteborg (Sweden), Technische Universität Dresden (Germany), Université Grenoble Alpes (France) and
Universitat de Barcelona (Spain) with option to pursue different research tracks as shown in the figure below.

 

This program comes fully funded scholarship details of which can be found here

Another awesome program that is offered by Erasmus Mundus is

ERASMUS MUNDUS MASTER IN MEMBRANE ENGINEERING FOR A SUSTAINABLE WORLD

The Master in Membrane Engineering for a Sustainable World, EM3E-4SW, offers an advanced educational program related to membrane science and engineering at the interface between materials science and chemical engineering and focused on specific applicative fields. It involves 6 Higher Education Institutions of 5 European countries:

• Université de Montpellier (France), coordinating organization,
• Université Toulouse 3 Paul Sabatier (Toulouse, France),
• University of Chemistry and Technology Prague (Czech Republic),
• Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal),
• Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain),
• University of Twente (Netherlands).

Associated partners are:

• Università della Calabria (Italy),
• Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium)

They offer very generous scholarships too which can be seen here

Chemical Nano-Engineering

“Chemical Nano-Engineering” is offered by the Consortium of three Universities: Aix-Marseille University in France, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology in Poland and University of Roma Tor Vergata in Italy. These universities have a long experience of common research projects and teaching collaborations in the framework of Erasmus program. They are providing an excellent environment for Nano-Engineering studies and opportunities for students to participate in research projects conducted by world-class researchers. Upon the completion of the two-year cycle, successful students will be awarded a Joint Master degree.

Details about their scholarships can be found here 

MATERIALS FOR ENERGY STORAGE AND CONVERSION

The MESC+ Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree is a 2-year programme in Materials Science and Electrochemistry, fully taught in English, involving 5 Universities in 4 European countries (France, Poland, Slovenia and Spain), 2 Universities in USA and Australia, a European Research Institute (ALISTORE), the French Network on Energy Storage (RS2E), the Slovenian National Institute of Chemistry (NIC) and a leading Research Center in Spain (CIC Energigune).

It is run by a number of world-renowned members of Research Laboratories in the field of energy-related materials who work closely together through several European and trans-European projects.

The program again comes with a generous scholarship, the details of which could be found here.

Canadian Universities 

Unlike universities in USA, Canadian universities often fund their master’s student either as Research Assistants/Teaching Assistants although they have to pay for their tuition. for example, Chemical and Applied Engineering department of the University of Toronto offers a generous stipend to their students. Details of which can be found in the image below,

Other universities in Canada offer a similar stipend.

 

As the application session is coming to its end, I see and hear from many people asking about profile evaluation. I can understand the confusion as I faced them myself probably two years ago. There was much confusion as to where should I apply? How many colleges to apply? Should I email the Professor? etc.

Here I am going to answer the most critical question of all. How should one select the universities to apply to? Now keep in mind that some of the things here are general and applies to all engineering and non-engineering streams.

The most important thing to know here is that many times when people apply, they have a specific area interest in mind. However, it is not necessary that you will end up with a group working in the same field. Here’s how it works.

Once you get an admission offer, the research group you will end up working in often not decided. It becomes clear at the end of the first semester. So when you reach the university, the first semester is spent mostly in coursework. During the end of the first semester, potential advisors will give a presentation in which they will talk about their work and whether or not they will be taking any new Ph.D. students. It depends on their research grant. If they already have a research grant, they will have a clear idea of whether or not they will take a new Ph.D. student. This is the period when most of the decisions on research grants are declared. So either they will explicitly declare they want to take new Ph.D. student or might hold their decisions till they hear back from funding agencies. This brings me to the most important point to look when you are going to apply for Ph.D., Research Grants. 

I always recommend new Ph.D. applicants to ensure that their potential advisor has research grants. It is a good way of increasing your admission chances. Suppose you are a new student interested in working on electrochemical or catalysis related research. Now you have shortlisted few universities and finally, you are confused between two universities X and Y. University X is more popular and highly ranked, but the Professors in both universities have the same impact and research citations. Now if you want to apply to only one out of them, a better option would be to look at their group website for research grants. A typical example would be like the image below.

I would suggest to go with some with higher research funding and apply to that particular university as it has a higher chance of taking students.

Apart from the existing funding, I would suggest exploring websites like NSF, DOE, and NIH for current funding results and probably select university with higher funding.  Let’s take an example here, suppose you are a biomedical/biochemical student and want to do research on cancer treatment. Here is how you can narrow your selection criteria

1. Go to NIH RePORTER
2. click on browse NIH tab
3. Click enter and look for your potential advisor and their funding

For people working in a field supported by NSF and DOE projects, you can go to their websites and look for department-specific resources. One such example is shown below.

https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/servlet/A6RecentWeeks

Note: I also recommend writing to Ph.D. students in a particular research group and asking about groups funding scenario and whether they are looking to take new students in the coming application cycle or not. This has a higher chance of response than writing to a prospective professor and asking directly about it.

All the best in your application cycle and let me know if you have any questions. Also, subscribe to my blog to be updated about new posts. Thanks.

 

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