Paying for Grad School

First thing we're going to talk about is, how much does grad school cost? Just kind of getting an awareness of what to consider. The different types of aid you can expect and look for, FAFSA and loans, internal awards and external awards. We're going to talk about some other campus opportunities and general tips and advice and then we'll have time for you guys to ask questions. So how much does grad school cost? This is obviously very important. It is variable based on lots of things. So the things you are going to kind of have to consider is what type you're getting, of course. What's the mode? Are you online? Are you in person? Are you part or full-time? And where are you going, right? Obviously we know some universities are much more expensive than others. The US is more expensive than going overseas. So there's lots of things that you can be considering as you're thinking about master's programs and PhD programs. Master's programs range in cost from about $30,000 to $100,000. A PhD program, given that it is, and that's a two-year program, I know for you in VAM, it will be probably slightly different. Those are usually about five plus years and those can cost a lot, up to $105,000. Just in general, because I know a lot of people are probably looking at master's programs, $63,000 is kind of the average in the US. So note that these numbers are not for overseas. If you are a person who's thinking about overseas, it's going to be dependent on where you go. So I'm going to give the example of myself. I did my master's overseas. It was, I think I paid a total of like $15,000 for two years. So it's very different depending on what countries you're in, what you're doing. So that's kind of a different, we'll touch on that. But if you have specific questions about that, you can let us know there. So common grad school costs that you're going to have to take into consideration, tuition and registration fees, health insurance, because remember, at that point you will probably be off of your health insurance. With master's, maybe not, but especially for PhD, at some point that's going to kick in. Living expenses and research and academic travel. So especially for PhD, research and academic travel is going to become really important as you're doing dissertation things. But that can be true at the master's level as well with your thesis. So because there are different kinds of costs here, right? Tuition, health insurance, living expenses, research, academic travel, you're going to want to be looking for different kinds of support that can cover different things. So what aid types do we have? You all hopefully know about these, FAFSA and loans is our first one. A lot of students are going to combine multiple forms of these to cover the cost. If you want to get funding for grad school, or at least be considered for funding for grad school, I can't, this is not going to guarantee you get funding for grad school, you should fill out the FAFSA. That is how the US government determines financial aid. So please make sure you fill that out, be thinking about that already if you have not. And do remember, I think this is important that's on here, graduate and professional students are considered independent. So you are no longer considering your parent and guardian info on the FAFSA. So just be aware of that. If you have questions, that's a really good thing to take to financial aid, especially for those of you thinking about BAM, I would talk to them about that, of like, is there a shift in that for me? What does that look like? Can you get loans? Like you did for undergrad? Yes, you totally can. Something that is insanely important, I know some people, undergrad parents help out and then you get into grad and you're like, so what am I doing? People have different deals with their parents, right? In terms of how they handle this stuff. If that is the case, and this is your first time looking over a loan, even if it's not, make sure you read carefully. Loans are all different and they have different rules about, you know, can you defer payment? Is there a loan forgiveness? So for some students, if you're going into a public service career, I have a friend who did this, right? Where if you work for a nonprofit or an NGO for 10 years, then your grad school got paid for it. Up until that point, they kind of still were making like minimum payments on things just to keep the villa, but that was a possibility. So make sure that when you're looking through loans, you're really looking for all that nitty gritty. Like, what is this loan asking of me? And what happens if I can't pay it back? What happens if I have a delayed payment? Is there room for a deferred payment? You know, do they pause and the money doesn't grow or is the money going to grow if I wait to pay? So be thinking about all of those things. And I know you guys may know some of this already because this might be some stuff you're doing now. The other thing, if you have not done this already, because I know there are a lot of these I didn't know about until I went to grad school, make sure you look at internal awards. So whether you're coming to Mason or going elsewhere, there is usually a lot of internal aid and that can come from a different, different arenas. So some are institution wide. So at Mason, there are general Mason scholarships there just for any students at Mason. Some are at the college or school level. So whether your program is conflict analysis and resolution or early childhood or psychology or finance or any of these things that you all mentioned, you should look at the schools you're interested in and look at their general overall scholarship options and then also scholarships for that specific program you're doing. You should also look at the program level. So I mean, that kind of falls in the college or school depending on what program is going to be more master's or PhD. So sometimes there's master's only options and also PhD only options. So that's that same process for international students as well. In terms of looking for internal awards, the process is the same for the loans and aid. That's going to change up a bit because a lot of those are more for U.S. citizens. One thing to know is some internal awards is that a lot of times they don't require a separate application. So like when you apply to a program, they're considering you based on what you've submitted. But when you're doing that, make sure you have an understanding of when you might get that funding if you are given the funding. So if you're applying in April and starting in September and you need funding before that, you should talk to the financial aid office of the school you're looking at and say, hey, I see that there's awards that I might be being considered for. When would I find out? When would that funding come through? So that you can just be prepared on your own. The other thing I think is really important before I jump into that last note with all of these is you all go to a university now. So you probably have a sense of this. But universities are extremely siloed, especially big universities. Less true if you're going to a small school. But at schools like Mason and other larger ones, things are siloed. What that means is you really have to dig if you are looking for scholarships because scholarships can be, I will talk about it from the Mason side, there are scholarships on at least four different pages I know of just around the university. There's some on the graduate education website. There's some on the school websites. There's some on the financial aid website. There's some on our website. Should they be consolidated? Yeah, they probably should. Unfortunately, big universities aren't always great at that. So whether you are looking at Mason or elsewhere, I highly, highly encourage you. They have that little search bar at the top usually. Put in scholarship. Put in fellowship. See what comes up. Because often there are awards that people cross departmentally may not even realize exist because they only know about the stuff in their area. And you don't want to miss out on anything just due to lack of finding it. So just make sure you dig really, really far into that. Or ask lots of people because people want to help with this. One thing to know about merit versus need based. So a lot of internal awards are going to consider both your need and your merit. So not just one or the other. But it does depend on the awards. You're always going to want to look at eligibility and expectation in terms of that. Types of aid. External awards. So external. In our case, we're saying that's money that does not come for your school. So the ones we just talked about internal, they are coming from the university you're applying to. These ones are from all the other places. So whether they be foundations that are giving funding, whether they be, you know, organizations, libraries, the Smithsonian, whatever. These are all the things that it's not the money is not coming from your university. And that's what we do. So I told you we'd get to us. The Office of Fellowships here at Mason, we help students find awards that are external to the university and applicable to them. And then we help them apply. We also work with alumni as a top tip. These are all external awards. And they are all nationally competitive, right? So these are awards that people from across the U.S., sometimes across the world, are competing for. So with that, I want to be clear that these are not I wish I was Santa Claus and could guarantee that you all would all get funding. It would be wonderful. That would be great. I would make my my life. I don't have that kind of funding on hand, and I can't guarantee that, unfortunately. So we are here as the Office of Fellowships, not only to help you find these and but we also help you apply to them. So we have contacts with a lot of the major awards. Yeah, maybe 15 to 20 awards that are very popular at Mason that are external to Mason that we get students applying for every year. We know these awards really well. We know the organizations that run these awards. So if we have questions about the application, we know who to ask. We are usually the first to know about what's happening with funding. Are they running this year? And we know how to help you apply. So we are here to help with that so that you are not in this alone, because we know that they're competitive awards. So while we can't guarantee you will get them, we are here to help make your your application to these awards as competitive as possible. Now, I know we're called the Office of Fellowships, which I think confuses people. Is there a difference between fellowships and scholarships? A little bit. If you're really looking at the dictionary definition, we kind of use that interchangeably. So scholarship and fellowship, what the funding from fellowships and scholarships can be used for is going to differ based on the specific award. So sometimes there are awards for tuition only. Sometimes, especially at the Ph.D. level, they are for research, especially overseas research. Sometimes they're stipends, right? So people trying to just get a little bit of funding while they're doing some work on the side. Sometimes they're internship things where you're doing an internship in order to get funding for stuff. Lots of variation in what this can look like. And much like I said with the internal, this is where you really have to look at the eligibility for the award. What year do you have to be when you're applying? What is it for a specific field? Is it for what you're looking for? Like, if you only need, you don't need research funding, you need tuition funding, well, make sure it's for tuition funding, right? So you need to kind of dig into these awards, we're here to help with that, to make sure that it really matches what you yourself are looking for. Something that's really important for these, and this is probably the biggest difficulty for our master's students in particular. So if you have not, if you're going into a master's program next year, this is good, because that means you have some time. Most external fellowship applications, and honestly, some internal ones as well, are on a 12 month basis, which means, I'm going to give the example of which of some we're going to talk about later. I have a few students that are going to be applying to go to school in the UK. Those awards open in June. Those students work with us over the summer to apply to them. They find out late, like late November, early December, and or next spring, if they got the funding, and the funding is going to be for the following year. So that's almost a year and a half from the time you start working to the time you get the funding, right? So that's really important. It's not true for all of them, but it is a lot harder to find scholarships that are smaller, and usually if they are a shorter timeline, they're less money. So if you're looking for tuition funding, you're likely going to be working on that one year cycle. So that's something that's really important, because this is where the importance of having to kind of cobble together funding from different sources is going to be key. So I, obviously, it's my job. I highly encourage you to apply to external awards, but you're going to have to keep that in mind, that the money is not going to be for this fall. It's going to be for the following year, most likely, unless it's maybe study abroad funding. And then if you're, and so for next year, you're probably going to want to focus on internal awards. You're going to want to focus on job opportunities. You're going to want to focus on loans, FAFSA, et cetera. So just keep that in mind as you're thinking, because usually doing just one version is not going to be enough because of that timeline. So just kind of an overview of how to look through external awards, like how do you find these? One, plug, come talk to us. You can email us at fellowships at gmu.edu. I will put some stuff in. I'll give you some links at the end here as well to contact us. If you email that, it will give you an auto response. In that auto response, it will tell you how to sign up to get an appointment with our office. I will also send you a link to fill out that appointment form. But that's how we make appointments with our office. But if you are not looking at Mason, that's okay. You can still, one, you can still come talk to us. But also if you're attending another university, most universities have a person or a office that does something similar as to what our office does. Where that falls under is going to change from university to university, but they usually do exist. So if you know where you're applying or you know where you're going to be going, and you're like, who do I talk to at that university? Please come ask us. We know most of them. It's a very small community of people that do this across the US. So there's that. Online databases. If you have not heard of these, I highly recommend that you check them out. ProFellow is my personal favorite. ProFellow is the most navigable. You do need to create an account to use ProFellow, but it is free. Delete the emails that they send them to you, unsubscribe, whatever. But it's a great database. You can put in what type of fellowships. What area of study are you doing? You can put in all these parameters so that it pulls things that are most specific to you. SPIN is the most unwieldy database. It is massive, but you have access to SPIN through the libraries here at Mason, and you can log into SPIN as long as you're on the Mason network. So if you're off campus, you're going to need a VPN, but you do need to be on the Mason network. UCLA Grapes is another database that's great. Don't have to log in. You can just go into it. And the office fellowships at the University of Illinois, they have like a grad fellowships page. Also wonderful. UCLA Grapes and the Illinois sites are both grad specific. They're only for graduate students. So these are really good ones if you're looking for funding once, usually once you're in grad school. If you are an international student or you are not a US citizen in some capacity, maybe you're a permanent resident. Maybe you fall under some other capacity in terms of citizenship. Immigrants Rising is a really good one. Immigrants Rising does have more opportunities that are that shorter timeline I mentioned, but also they're going to be, they're usually less funding. Not all of them, but a lot of them are less funding. So I just want to give that caveat to that. They also sometimes are, they, they might feel a little sillier, right? Because they're more like, Hey, this is, you know, if you write an essay about helping others, then you can get a thousand dollars scholarship. They're going to look more like that than these big fellowships to get funding for, you know, a full degree at Stanford or something. If you're referring to when we received notification of merit-based scholarships, you don't need to apply to, if you're thinking about the internal ones, that's going to be school dependent. So you'd have to talk to the financial aid office about the specific award and how it works. Usually when you apply, they will list them out. What does a graduate fellowship application look like? So first is that they are going to vary. The whole, I know people hate when you're like, it depends every time it does, it does depend. But I would say the big things you're always going to find, you're going to have to submit transcripts. You're going to inevitably have to write written statements. Usually there's a personal statement or a research proposal, depending on what you're applying for. You're almost always going to have to get recommendation letters, usually two to three. And then they usually have kind of a personal information piece of it, right? So, you know, who are you? What's your email? Blah, blah, blah. So that's just something to expect. And that's important as you start to think like, do I have the time and capacity to do this? Because most external awards are going to be more intensive than there are ones that exist out there where you can just be like, apply. But those are usually for less money and they are more like having your name drawn out of a hat as opposed to these ones where you're being looked at holistically. So just be aware of that. It's not to discourage you from doing it. My whole job is to encourage you to do it. But just know that that's the reality of it. What are they looking for? This is really important, I think, is think less about what you need and more about are you doing academic work? So if you find a fellowship and you're like, this looks so cool and they're giving, you know, also they're going to pay for tuition. Great. I'm so glad they might pay for tuition if you get this. Are you actually doing things that the fellowship or the foundation is interested in? So a lot of these, you know, sometimes you find ones that are STEM only. Cool. So like not quite, not the best fit if you're not doing STEM things. Do you have a career path that this fellowship can support? A lot of times the essays are going to focus on how would getting this fellowship help you long term? How is this going to add to your career and your academics? Do you have the same values as a fellowship foundation, right? The foundations that fund fellowships are across the board. Sometimes they are think tanks. Sometimes they are big, like Carnegie Foundation. Sometimes they are countries and governments. So do you have the same values as whoever you're applying to? I'll give the example of I used to work on a scholarship for students to go overseas and do language study. And that was run by the DOD. So if you, if for students who didn't want, and it was for students who wanted to do public service. So if you didn't have an interest in public service, which is what they were looking for, it's not one to apply for, even if it was giving you the type of funding you wanted. So, and we can talk more about that later if you have questions on that. All right. I promise this is my last one. Sorry. For this one, five out of five. The external awards. So I just want to throw some out there that are popular with our students. The first is Department of Defense SMART Program, DOD SMART. This is specifically for STEM students who are U.S. citizens. It covers tuition, stipend, internship, and employment. So really cool if you want to go into government and also need funded for and you are STEM. National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program. This opens soon. So you should come talk to us if you're interested in this. You do have to apply as a senior or your first year of grad school to get it. You have to be a STEM student that is a U.S. citizen, and it helps cover tuition and stipend. Point Foundation. This is for students that have a strong connection to the LGBTQ plus community. So whether you are a member of that community or you are an ally, both of these things, you could apply for Point. Quad Fellowship is for students from varying countries and in the U.S. that are STEM, which provides tuition, stipend, and professional development. I know a lot of these are STEM. I promise there are ones that are not STEM as well, but these are the ones that are sort of popular in this time frame that are coming up. But something to note here is that it's not just you can be doing things, applying to things based on what you're interested in, research funding, tuition funding, et cetera. You can also apply to things based on who you are as a person, right? Do you have like a specific religious affiliation? Do you have a way in which you exist in the world that are you, you know, maybe you are a person of color, maybe you're LGBTQ plus. All of those things are also things you can look for when searching for scholarships that you might be able to find things that fit with who you are as a person. So it's not just the research, the type of research you're doing or the thing you're studying or what you want out of the funding. So lots of opportunities, basically. There's way more than this. This is just kind of the top four for now. I'm going to jump into campus opportunities. You all probably have heard of these before, but they are cool. So the first is assistantships. And you are going to hear lots of different acronyms for these. So wanted to put them here so you know. One is a teaching assistantship or a TA. These are, you've probably had them already. They assist a professor in a course running some of the sessions, acting as an instructor on record. Sometimes they have, if your class has like a big course and then smaller groups that meet, then they might often teach those smaller groups. They often do a lot of the grading, things like that. So that's a TA. Research assistant. This is someone who is assisting a professor with a project or assistantship, assisting a professor with a project. And you're usually part of like a lab team of some sort. So that's awesome if you're wanting to do some sort of research, whether it be STEM or not. Professional. This is administrative work. So these ones are, you will hear, here I've said T-A-R-A-P-A. Sometimes you'll hear people put a G in front of those. So G-T-A, G-R-A, G-P-A, which just means graduate. But these are all things you can apply for. An important note here at the bottom, they are usually nine month appointments with a monthly stipend and not always, but sometimes a tuition waiver. So this is a really great way to one, make awesome contacts on whatever campus that you are attending grad school for. Get some internship-esque experience. You can throw in your resume and get funded for your school. Sometimes you'll see universities say, hey, it's a fully funded program for X. A lot of times what they mean is not that they're going to just hand you money for getting into the program, but that they have opportunities like these available to students. And maybe it's a mandatory thing that the students partake in. And therefore they have to do work, but they're getting funded. Another thing you can look at is research centers and institute fellowships. So here at Mason, we have a bunch of research, right? We have five big research centers. Look at those for jobs. They often have kind of part-time gigs for students that can help fund things. And then of course your general on-campus jobs. Maybe you're working at the library, at the smoothie shop, et cetera. And those are opportunities as well to help get funding. All right. So some just general tips and advice. First is when applying to grad programs, make sure you look, like we said at the beginning, look at what funding is available internally and not just to your program. So look and beyond that, just look at funding overall. So for example, I know I mentioned earlier, like students who my grad degree was cheaper, but for the students that chose to live, I was doing it remotely. But for students who chose to be there, you still have to pay for living in that place. So the tuition is very cheap. For other schools in Europe, sometimes there is no tuition, which is lovely, but you still have to live. You still have to get housing, et cetera, which is something to consider. And then if you're in the US, you also still have to live, but then you're also paying tuition, right? So make sure you know the cost of living in the area you're going to and have a sense of like, what is this really going to cost me? Not just for the schooling part, but the overall existing in this location to complete this degree. The second is read your acceptance letter carefully. I know this probably is obvious, but really look, sometimes people get so excited, which you should. If you got into grad school, that's amazing. You should be so proud of yourself, but also make sure you read carefully. So after you've gotten over the excitement, go back, read the letter again and make sure it doesn't have any, you know, or make sure that you do not miss out. If they're handing you financial assistance or they're saying, hey, you know, you've gotten in, you know, you will be required to pay for housing, whatever on campus. Make sure that you know those things and then plan ahead. So that's why I honestly, cheers to you all. You're here. That's good. You're already thinking about this, but even if you get partial full funding for the first year, be already thinking about what those other years are going to take hold. Partially because of that year for external fellowships, you're going to have to be thinking about that year in advance for internal fellowships. It usually is maybe twice a year, maybe once a year. So you really need to be thinking from the jump. How do you fund each of these years? So I often work with grad students who maybe they came to Mason and they got their first couple of years paid for with through some fellowship or other. And now they're like, oh, I got to pay for the rest of these years. Right. So make sure that you're ready for that. And also summer funding. So make sure when you're getting that funding again, read that fine print. Is it covering you over the summer too? Or is it only during that school year? That's really important. All right. So investigate, read, plan. So key things to remember, explore and apply to lots of different funding because the things you have to pay for are going to be lots of different things. Make sure you have funding for grad school. It's going to require some long term planning because of those timelines. We're here to help you find funding. And if you have questions in terms of what to do next, make sure you start researching. Do that research for where you're looking at. Make an appointment with our office. Thank you again.