In the first two parts, I described my admission to graduate school and the cost of living in the United States. In this part, we will come even closer to the most interesting, and if more precisely, I will tell you how and in what amounts the money comes from the graduate students, how much you have to pay for your studies and what you should go here (or not). Well, finally there will be a beginning of the description of how you can come here.

Part 1: Admission

Lives here

Part 2: Cost of living in the US

Lives here

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Little preface

Everything that is written here, my personal experience (fair for the Automotive Engineering PhD program at Clemson University, South Carolina) and my personal opinion. I will say right away that I like to do what I do and live where I live, but this does not mean that it will suit you. My choice was made consciously and I do not regret about it, but I do not urge everyone to make the same choice, there is no paradise on Earth, there are only different variants of compromises.

Part 3: Where the graduate student has money from and for what to go to the USA for PhD

Part 3.1: Sad

With the cost of living figured out, it's time to go to the sad part :), but in order.

Let's start with the fact that there is no free education in the USA, not at all. There is an education for which you do not have to pay, but this only means that it is not a student who pays for him, but a professor, some foundation, some company or someone else. It is also a fact that education is expensive even for Americans, especially if they are from another state. Due to the fact that graduate students usually do not have money, they have to look for just the option when someone pays for you. Of the most popular options:
1) TA (Teaching Assistantship)
2) RA (Research Assistantship)
3) All sorts of different funds from the Fulbright series (everything is much better with money, but you need to know about them and there are some limitations from the series for 2 years to work at home after school (by the way, too, they manage :)))

Most often, for the first year, students are given a TA position and they are engaged in helping the professor to lead the course: they check home-based undergrounds, conduct laboratory tests, distribute any leaves, etc., etc. After a student has been tormented by TA, they can give him RA (although I personally missed the TA stage and started to do the drawing right away) and then the student begins to engage in some research project of the professor (roughly speaking, becomes a cheap labor). Officially, a student must work 20 hours a week, i.e. 0.5 rate, in fact this rarely happens and almost everyone works 20-60 hours a week (at least we had one Chinese, whom I always saw in the laboratory collecting some engine at the dynamo, and it always means: Monday early in the morning, Saturday is midnight, normal working hours). Officially, graduate students can work only on campus, usually in the role of TA or RA. If the tax finds that you receive money from US firms, then there is a big chance to go home ahead of time forever. But usually this is not a problem, since taking 4 courses + RA, you still do not have time for normal work, so you shouldn’t hope that you can earn a lot of money freelancing all the time. This all concerns PhD, with masters everything is a little more fun, they usually don’t get TA or RA (Although TA is sometimes given) and they have to pay for everything themselves. Moreover, they also have to take much more courses in order to finish in 2 years. For example, many Indians (yes, I know about Indians, but it’s simpler and clearer) take a loan from a bank at home and go to the United States for 2 years to study, and then return and give it away. For masters this pleasure costs about $ 40k per year for study and life.

Now for the bad part :). PhD students are always paid so that they can live normally, but could not save anything. Those. if you live somewhere in South Carolina and have RA, then you are paid (or, more precisely, to us :)) about $ 1,100 a month clean, plus pay most of the cost of tuition. At the same time, once a semester, you need to pay ~ $ 1,400 for medical insurance, all university fees, etc., etc. Those. from 1100, we need to take about 300 and we will get the amount to live on (by pure chance, it is equal to the amount I spend per month :)). If you live in the north or in California, then you will receive 1500-2000 per month, but you will also pay more for the accommodation / food, i.e. on average everything will be exactly the same as mine in the south.

As you see, you should not go here for money (at least, you should not go to the PhD program). I will say more, after you arrive and you begin to receive much less than you received in Ukraine as a student, it becomes very sad. And I can also say that graduate students in Europe get several times more, this makes it even sadder and you begin to wonder why I am in the US, and not in Europe? But this is the sad part. I think that by this time I scared enough people and there will be no more Russian IT specialists; there are no more graduate students in the USA :).

Part 3.2: Not so sad :)

For those who are not scared, I will describe why it is still worth going to study at the graduate school.

First, officially, you get this money for part-time, i.e. If you count for a full-time job, then it is close to the average salary of a quite decent programmer in the CIS (minus Moscow / Kiev) and you get an education for which others pay many tens of thousands of dollars. So you should assume that you are simply investing money in your education, and this, as you know, is one of the best investments (which under certain conditions will be mentioned later).

Secondly, you have a very unique opportunity to extend your studenthood. And this is the last chance, even getting a second tower in 40 years, the sensations will not be the same when around the same age. This may sound a trifle, but it is really cool and there will be no second chance. I think that older people will confirm this.

But it was in general, and now a little more about the USA and my personal experience / opinion:
1) Americans spend a lot of money on the academy. As a result, there is access to any of the most modern and expensive equipment. For example, this is how our research center looks like, where students are given new BMW, Mazda, Ford, machine tools for many hundreds of thousands of dollars and practically unlimited access to materials for their experiments.
Show me a university in the CIS, where students will be given a five such new behuing for bullying (the old photo, at that time, it was the last one)?

I was also quite surprised when we were asked to buy our own laptops for work, but we didn’t say the budget, and when we scored $ 4k, we signed papers and didn’t even ask why it was so expensive.

2) They teach here exactly the way I wanted in Ukraine. I do not say that education is better here than in Ukraine, it is different. There is much more practice and all knowledge is tied to practical application, but in Ukraine there was a pure theory (but the theory, as it turned out, was better than in the states). My personal opinion is that there is no point in going here to get a bachelor’s degree, much better knowledge can (still) be obtained at home, but on one condition: the student himself must understand why he is told all these strange things and, first (second , third, tenth) glance useless things, because no one will tell him about it. In the states, it’s the other way around, if they talk about some kind of management system, they’ll use something real as an example (in our case there were cars). As a result, when you do a homework and you get the value of some parameter 10,000, then in the case of Ukraine you simply write it, because you have no idea what it can be. But if you get that the wheel jumped up by 10 meters, you immediately understand that there is a mistake somewhere.

3) And here they are constantly trying to acquaint students with people from the industry. For example, one of the directors of BMW came to us from Germany to give lectures during the week on how they make cars. Or another example: in order for us to talk and ask questions, a group of presidents and vice presidents of rather big companies from the Okuma, Michelin, SEMA, Timken series were brought to us (these are industrial offices of the MS, Google, FB level in their fields). Or, on the same business course, we were constantly taken to receptions, where we could communicate with the presidents of large banks, financiers, and owners of large successful firms.

4) The fact is that the USA is still the center of all high-tech developments and there are a lot of different interesting laboratories. For example, I worked for two years at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories ( MERL ) and I can say that it’s really cool and interesting when you see how technologies are developed that will go into production in 5-10 years and will be used by millions (or and billions). And the main thing in such places is not even the lab itself, but the people. It is very interesting when you work with top people (in your own areas) of the planet who are developing something new. For example, in front of me sat one man, whose code is used by the entire planet (he wrote the font renderer, which is used in Flash), other groups developed pieces of H.264 that we all watch or LTE which is already in every second phone, and on the court of Apple vs Samsung another guy walked, because a patent for zoom with two fingers also belongs to this lab.

5) Immediately I must say that interships are another source of income for graduate students. (Otherwise, personally, I would have already gone into minus). I can not say how much they pay for sure, but the salaries are quite adequate for industrial interns.

6) Unlike Europe, in the states everything is easier with the language, everywhere one is English and everyone understands you.

7) Due to the many public organizations, here you can travel around a lot of interesting places almost on the ball. Yes, and eat on the ball, you can almost every day :)

8) Many big meetings are held in big cities, where you can meet people from the same area and chat on interesting topics live over a glass of beer (most often sponsored by a company)

9) There are very, very many foreigners. There are two big advantages: you can learn any language and it is easy to find a native speaker to practice. And here they are very, very well treated by foreigners (as I understand it, not everything is so joyful in Europe). Well, you can learn a lot of interesting things about different cultures.

10) As for me, people here do their job better and are much more benevolent, at least in the bureaucratic sphere. For example, I was very, very surprised when, after buying a car, I managed to register it and get numbers in ONE HOUR.

11) Well, PhD sounds good :)

It's time to sum up. IMHO, it makes no sense to go here for heavenly life, here it is not. And it makes no sense to go here to study in the hope of making money while studying, it will not work. But if it is interesting to be one of those who move humanity forward, and not just consume, then you will like it. In general, everything is simple (at least among Americans): there is work — everything is good and stable, there is no work — everything is bad and you need to look for another one.

Part 3.3: Anyone?

I think that after the previous story, there are very few people who want to go to the states, but I will still tell you about one interesting way to get here.
My friend, with whom we worked here on the project, recently defended himself and got a job as a professor at a university nearby. He also managed to get a grant for research somewhere and for complete happiness he lacks only the last component: graduate students. Finding a good graduate student is, in fact, as difficult as finding a professor who agrees to pay for a graduate student, so I decided to do a good deed (well, almost) and solve the problem of both parties. Therefore, the idea arose: to hire several fifth-year students (in fact, this is a mild restriction and everyone is welcome), give them some tasks and, depending on the results, invite 2-3 people here to graduate school. At the moment we are still trying to deal with the payment process (bureaucracy is everywhere and we need to understand how to get around it :)), as well as tasks. Most likely, it will look like hiring a freelancer to complete the task (which will be part of the project), but if you have ideas on how to arrange this all, I will be glad to hear them.

And now a few words about what we are doing here.
The project is connected with the automation of the industry, and if more precisely, with the automation of writing programs for milling CNC machines, simulation of material processing and calculations on the GPU. Those. working with geometry, 3D graphics, mathematics, GPGPU, simulation, a bit of computer computing (maybe more), and it is potentially possible that some of this will go to the web and be counted in the clouds. In general, in total and in many :) From the languages ​​currently Python, C ++, OpenCL.

For example, here is a video of my simulator, an analogue of which you will have to do if you decide to go here :)


In general, if among habrazhiteli or guests of the capital :) there are people interested in getting a PhD in the states, I am on soap (welcome DOT to cnc DOG gmail DOT com), and I will answer with details when we deal with the bureaucracy and prepare tasks .
Minimum requirements for candidates: the desire to study, a great desire to study, English at an adequate level (pass TOEFL and communicate with the professor on Skype at the time of the move), know one of the programming languages ​​(C ++, Python, or the ability to quickly go to them).