There are a lot of information about this topic on the net, and many of them are more comprehensive than this post. If you’re still interested in reading, go ahead and thanks.
I am now a student in National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (NTUST), a technical university in Taiwan. I’ve been living here for almost 3 years, and this is the end of my second year of doctoral degree program. Prior to coming to Taiwan, I applied to three different universities: NTUST, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) of NTU Singapore, and the University of Queensland, Australia. I received the letter of acceptance from NTUST on early May (2008). I passed the technical test conducted by CEE, and later considered for a research-based doctorate program. How I can end up here is a long story. We’ll talk about that later.
Getting scholarships abroad is tricky, if I don’t want to use the word ‘hard’. It is a combinations of ability, effort, and luck. By luck I mean ‘the right moment’. I will try to write this in a structural way, and if you feel it is useless, or not informative enough, please do ask me.
1. Knowing Your Potential
It is a mandatory. Scholarships are given to selected candidates, so at first we have to know our best traits, skills, wills. What our abilities are, what we have done, how good our performances are. Universities offering scholarship will receive many applications, and they will select the applicants based on what we can offer. By knowing we also have to make sure what we write on the application is true, solid. Fulfilling our desires to study abroad by no mean of I don’t care of what happen next, getting in first. Getting in might be not so hard, but surviving there, it is a completely different problem. So first, analyze yourself. Ask yourself several times about your capabilities. And what makes you distinguished than other applicants.
2. Gathering Information
After convincing yourselves about your aptitudes, the next step is gathering information about scholarship opportunities. If we do this first, we might end up confused, disappointed, pessimistic, and probably apply to the “wrong” university. It’s like when you want to have PhD degree from a well-known university (MIT for example), and on a whim you just focus on that without really looking into yourself, or asking whether you are able to survive there or not. That’s wrong. Do this step after you have assurance on your “ammunition”.
Google provides many information on scholarship opportunities, and you can always refer to the university’s official website. Other than that, we might obtain the information from friends, teachers, mailing-lists, anywhere. Having friends who have already studied (or is studying) abroad is also beneficial, since sometimes professors look for students independently.
Some majors have different names in different countries. This can be tricky, because what we think is A sometimes only covers a small part of A and focuses on B. Read the description of the major carefully, if necessary read the full credits/courses. It is important to avoid Chemistry people get into Chemical Engineering, for example (yeah, maybe people think it is the same, but it is not).
3. Understanding The Requirements
