Once again on how to go to study abroad
This story is almost a year old, but after a recent chat with someone who invited me to Habr andorro, I decided to post this text on Habr. The topic seems to me quite relevant - how to continue studying abroad for free. Now I am studying in the graduate school of the University of Melbourne (Australia) at the Faculty of Information Systems. I hope my experience will be interesting and useful.
I had an idea to make a career in science in January 2011. At that time I was already a graduate student at the HSE, where I entered in November 2010, but I didn’t like the option of going to science with the opportunity to study for 2-3 hours after work. Before my eyes, I had examples of my classmates and classmates, who did not particularly stand out while studying, went to get a PhD in Switzerland, the UK and the USA, while receiving scholarships / salaries comparable to programmers' incomes 1-3 years of experience. From that moment I decided to follow them through.
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For a start it was required to determine the area of ​​scientific activity. The choice fell on Machine Learning, since this area is very practical, it is now finding more and more real-world application, it uses many different results from other areas and overlapped with the theme of my research work in HSE. For example, I constantly saw a growing number of contests on the site kaggle.com, where you can get good rewards for the best solution of a machine learning problem.
After that, I made a CV and Cover Letter, went to the site topuniversities.com and began to study universities one after the other in terms of the presence of groups dealing with this topic and the opportunity to get a scholarship. Almost all Americans immediately disappeared, because to get a scholarship, you need to apply approximately 9 months before the start of training, i.e. December. In the remaining ones I found the professor heading a particular group and sent him a letter.
In total, I sent about 20 letters, of which the answer came in about half. Most of the answers told me that they would have liked to take me, but at the moment they have no places / scholarships, but in 4 universities I was asked to send a diploma or a thesis. I had a blue diploma, but with an average score of 4.6, which instilled a certain confidence. Among these universities were ETH Zurich, National University of Singapore and the University of Melbourne itself, where I eventually left. However, in the ETH they finally answered that they found a more suitable candidate.
After that, I needed to prepare an official application for admission, which in all cases should have contained the result of testing in English. Therefore, the whole next month I was preparing for testing. I decided to take the IELTS, because even then Melbourne was considered as the main option. With reading, I had everything ok, with listening worse, and speaking quite a disaster. I found a tutor on Skype from England, with whom I worked for 1.5 hours after work. As a result, I passed the first time, typing 7.0 with the required 6.5 (c minimum score of 6.0), receiving just 6.0 in speaking.
The next item was research proposal. In total, his training also took about a month. I read several articles on my topic and came up with some generalization of existing models, which I sent to the professor as a preliminary version. In response, he sent me the topic of the grant, within which they work, and asked me to rewrite the proposal in accordance with it, which I did.
For the complete set, it was necessary to get 2 more reviews, which were written by me, fill in all kinds of questionnaires, etc. As a result, I sent everything only at the end of May. It was decided to leave the option with NUS, since I already had no time for the deadline to pass also the GRE (test for logic, mathematics and language skills), which is also needed there.
About a month later I had an oral interview in which I asked all sorts of primitive questions like “What sorting you know and what their complexity is” or “What is a Turing machine”. After that, it only remained to wait.
We had to wait until early August, when they sent offers for enrollment and for scholarships covering tuition and accommodation. All of August went to various bureaucratic procedures such as paying for insurance, receiving CoE, diploma assurances at the embassy, ​​etc. In late August, he applied for a visa and bought tickets for 16th East China Airlines with a transfer in Shanghai. However, by the 16th they did not have time to make a visa, and therefore the departure had to be postponed for a week. Given that I changed the ticket on the 14th, to my surprise, they did not charge me at all. As a result, I flew away only on the 23rd, and at 9 am on September 25 I was already in Melbourne.
Briefly talk about finances. The scholarship is A $ 1900 / month, the Australian dollar is slightly more expensive than the American one. Of these, $ 600 goes to housing (a room in a 2-bedroom private house 15 minutes drive to the city center), $ 500 dollars for food (if you don’t eat lunch like I do in a cafe every day, then it's cheaper), $ 100 for a phone + internet ( in fact, unlimited, the 4th iPhone as an attachment to the 2-year contract), I don’t spend much on transport, because to the university I ride a bike.
The training system is very simple. You can do almost any topic within the scope of Machine Learning, the only regular reporting form is meeting with scientific advisers once a week. In six months, we need a written report on the work done, in a year - an article or ready-made material for an article. A year later, there is a conversion to the PhD program (since formally, the first year a person receives Masters by research). The next stage is a dissertation. There are no required courses, which is very suitable for me. I prefer to study with textbooks, and it is much more convenient for me to choose what to read and when.
Here is a brief and all.
I had an idea to make a career in science in January 2011. At that time I was already a graduate student at the HSE, where I entered in November 2010, but I didn’t like the option of going to science with the opportunity to study for 2-3 hours after work. Before my eyes, I had examples of my classmates and classmates, who did not particularly stand out while studying, went to get a PhD in Switzerland, the UK and the USA, while receiving scholarships / salaries comparable to programmers' incomes 1-3 years of experience. From that moment I decided to follow them through.
')
For a start it was required to determine the area of ​​scientific activity. The choice fell on Machine Learning, since this area is very practical, it is now finding more and more real-world application, it uses many different results from other areas and overlapped with the theme of my research work in HSE. For example, I constantly saw a growing number of contests on the site kaggle.com, where you can get good rewards for the best solution of a machine learning problem.
After that, I made a CV and Cover Letter, went to the site topuniversities.com and began to study universities one after the other in terms of the presence of groups dealing with this topic and the opportunity to get a scholarship. Almost all Americans immediately disappeared, because to get a scholarship, you need to apply approximately 9 months before the start of training, i.e. December. In the remaining ones I found the professor heading a particular group and sent him a letter.
In total, I sent about 20 letters, of which the answer came in about half. Most of the answers told me that they would have liked to take me, but at the moment they have no places / scholarships, but in 4 universities I was asked to send a diploma or a thesis. I had a blue diploma, but with an average score of 4.6, which instilled a certain confidence. Among these universities were ETH Zurich, National University of Singapore and the University of Melbourne itself, where I eventually left. However, in the ETH they finally answered that they found a more suitable candidate.
After that, I needed to prepare an official application for admission, which in all cases should have contained the result of testing in English. Therefore, the whole next month I was preparing for testing. I decided to take the IELTS, because even then Melbourne was considered as the main option. With reading, I had everything ok, with listening worse, and speaking quite a disaster. I found a tutor on Skype from England, with whom I worked for 1.5 hours after work. As a result, I passed the first time, typing 7.0 with the required 6.5 (c minimum score of 6.0), receiving just 6.0 in speaking.
The next item was research proposal. In total, his training also took about a month. I read several articles on my topic and came up with some generalization of existing models, which I sent to the professor as a preliminary version. In response, he sent me the topic of the grant, within which they work, and asked me to rewrite the proposal in accordance with it, which I did.
For the complete set, it was necessary to get 2 more reviews, which were written by me, fill in all kinds of questionnaires, etc. As a result, I sent everything only at the end of May. It was decided to leave the option with NUS, since I already had no time for the deadline to pass also the GRE (test for logic, mathematics and language skills), which is also needed there.
About a month later I had an oral interview in which I asked all sorts of primitive questions like “What sorting you know and what their complexity is” or “What is a Turing machine”. After that, it only remained to wait.
We had to wait until early August, when they sent offers for enrollment and for scholarships covering tuition and accommodation. All of August went to various bureaucratic procedures such as paying for insurance, receiving CoE, diploma assurances at the embassy, ​​etc. In late August, he applied for a visa and bought tickets for 16th East China Airlines with a transfer in Shanghai. However, by the 16th they did not have time to make a visa, and therefore the departure had to be postponed for a week. Given that I changed the ticket on the 14th, to my surprise, they did not charge me at all. As a result, I flew away only on the 23rd, and at 9 am on September 25 I was already in Melbourne.
Briefly talk about finances. The scholarship is A $ 1900 / month, the Australian dollar is slightly more expensive than the American one. Of these, $ 600 goes to housing (a room in a 2-bedroom private house 15 minutes drive to the city center), $ 500 dollars for food (if you don’t eat lunch like I do in a cafe every day, then it's cheaper), $ 100 for a phone + internet ( in fact, unlimited, the 4th iPhone as an attachment to the 2-year contract), I don’t spend much on transport, because to the university I ride a bike.
The training system is very simple. You can do almost any topic within the scope of Machine Learning, the only regular reporting form is meeting with scientific advisers once a week. In six months, we need a written report on the work done, in a year - an article or ready-made material for an article. A year later, there is a conversion to the PhD program (since formally, the first year a person receives Masters by research). The next stage is a dissertation. There are no required courses, which is very suitable for me. I prefer to study with textbooks, and it is much more convenient for me to choose what to read and when.
Here is a brief and all.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/141655/
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