The difficulty in coming to the UK from the US, and prob most EU countries, for a PhD is that the tuition fees are not the same relative to a ‘home’ student. Home status usually extends to anyone from the EU.
So from the POV of our home students, graduate school admission is similar to the the US in that you apply for a PhD position which will come with a stipend (research council standard is currently 13.5K pa, tax free, in the UK), plus your tuition paid for (varies according to university but between 3 and 4K pa for most places). We don’t have the formal TA system in the UK. If you get the PhD place then it’s game on. Simple.
Tuition fees for an international student are far higher - of the order of 15-20k pa. This creates a problem, as this is not covered by the PhD studentship which the faculty member is offering. The only way to make up the difference is on you - either your own funds or through a scholarship. You should look at either end for scholarships - usually easier in your own country. Major universities in the UK will offer scholarships for international students to attract the brightest and best, but you’ll be competing against the rest of the world.
In light of these financial considerations, if you show up at cambridge looking to give them 60 grand in tuition fees for a CS PhD then they’ll roll out the red carpet for you.
Like Francis Vaughan says, it’s largely a structure designed for an academic system that is quite different from the US. In the UK, a masters is separate from PhD and generally you aren’t going to fulfil the requirements for a masters degree by doing a PhD because that’s just how it’s set up.
Even in the US, it does vary by discipline as to whether or not you get a masters first or along the way. I know several people in the US who completed their MA in fields like English and history before they ever applied for PhD programs. A not-insubstantial number of Americans and Canadians in such fields actually go to the UK to do their MA before going home for PhD because British MAs are shorter and often more specialised… and sometimes better funded than an MA program back home.
And TATG, what’s a BPhil? I thought I had a handle on most of the degree variants, but a BPhil’s new to me.
I thought it was Oxford’s version of an MPhil (with the possibility that some other Unis do the same), but it looks like it is even more restricted, it is Oxford’s philosophy department’s version of an MPhil.
As an extra twist then, note that if you do an undergrad degree at oxford or cambridge, and manage to stay alive for 3 years (I think) afterwards, you get awarded a master’s degree.
It’s a strange system that exists for basically historical reasons.
But it does give oxbridge grads an extra advantage here. Even if they’ve just finished their UG degree, so don’t yet have a master’s, they could argue they can work towards one while doing the PhD. Where the “work” will basically involve not playing russian roulette.
In the US (and Canada) they are not “paying you” to go to grad school. First, it happens mostly in lab sciences. You will not get “paid” to do a PhD in English or History. Second, what they are really doing is hiring a well-trained and horribly underpaid lab technician. In return for the low pay, they do offer you the opportunity to get an MSc and, eventually, a PhD. Once, when I was on the Graduate Faculty Council there was a proposal to offer a non-credit ESL course to grad students because so many of them could barely speak English. This was heavily denounced by the reps from the science departments, especially the biologists because it might take time away from their lab duties.
What I can’t really understand is why math depts give these awards. I guess because we get govt research grants and there is, in truth, not much else to do with them. Support grad students or post-docs and the latter are too expensive for our small grants. There are only so many meetings you can go to and so many computers you can buy. But grad students certainly don’t help our research. A colleague of mine once described a PhD thesis in math as a paper by the advisor written under adverse circumstances.
Hence the scare quotes around “pay you”. They waive your tuition and give you a stipend for being either an RA or a TA (at least if your advisor has funding), and whether you do an RAship or TAship depends on what semester it is, who your advisor is, and the focus of the department/school. and I realize it’s mainly in STEM fields. I’m in Comp Sci, by all accounts it applies to my field.
Eh, many humanities programs do provide stipends and assistanships in the US. It just depends on the program. I know quite a few of my friends who did/are doing PhDs and Masters in various programs (film, comparative literature, Romance languages, etc.) and are getting a stipend.
In return, they do teach the undergraduate courses (the writing general requirement courses, the language courses, perhaps some advanced undergraduate course). Depending on the program and year they are in, they have more or less control over what they teach.
Many of the responses so far have focussed on payments and stipends from universities, rather than directly from a government, which I took the OP to be asking.
When I was attending grad school in the US, I got a grant from a Canadian federal funding agency, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Math grad students help your research by doing much of the teaching in the department, freeing you up to do your more important work. At least, that’s how it worked when I was a grad student.
The entirety of my RA work went into my chemistry dissertation (minus the many, many pages of “no reaction”), so yes, they did pay me. I was paid the same as a TA or an RA, but time spent TAing was time spent not working on the stuff that was going to get me out of there. RA was the default. Doing more than the minimum (2 semesters) of TAing in our department either meant your advisor hated you or you were in a scrub lab with no funding.
People don’t volunteer? My primary interest is research, but I have a strong secondary interest in CS education (I’m even writing an educational CS web series right now, I’ve TA’d upper division courses as an undergrad already, and I’ve taught CS camps for both kids and college students), I’d gladly volunteer to TA more than 2 terms, even if it means less sleep for me to get my diss done on time. Or should I fail to mention that because places will reject me for being a freak?
It depends. Certainly, I have friends in the STEM fields who liked teaching, either because they wanted to become professors or because they plain liked it, so they did it more times than required.
Some schools have specific programs and certificates to help create good college professors (besides the researching). So in those programs, something like what you said would be looked as favorable. OTOH, you have to make sure you get a major professor that would be A-OK with that (my friend’s was).
Thailand has – or at least used to have – a program that covers your costs to study abroad, but you must agree to work for the government for at least twice the amount of time you spent studying after you return. My wife took advantage of this. Already a government employee, her office sent her to the University of Hawaii via the East West Center on that campus for a second master’s degree, in Biostatistics, which she would use in her work. To ensure she didn’t decide just bolt to the private sector upon her return, she had to put up some property deeds that covered the cost, and the government would have gotten those if she had decided to quit early. (This is where we met, at the U of Hawaii.) While there, she continued to collect her monthly salary in addition to having all expenses including living costs covered.
She spent 2-1/2 years in Hawaii and so had to work five years more upon return. But she’s still on the job now, much more than five years later. And I’m not sure if this program even exists anymore. It may have been canned during the turmoil of the 1997 economic crisis.
Applying the US models of funding and research outside the US is fraught with problems. The US system is a bit of an anomaly, and trying to make direct a translation often won’t work.
In most countries the universities are almost all government funded. There are no equivalents of the big prestigious private universities. This includes Oxford and Cambridge. This means that for most purposes, all student funding is government in origin. Whether you get a direct government scholarship, or one from the university, both are government money. So are most research funded scholarships. The money comes from competitive grants funded by the government. The difference comes in level of flexibility.
Here in Oz, if you get a commonwealth scholarship you can take that to any university that will have you. You can shop around for a research area you like, and if they will have you, you can join with your living expenses already taken care of. Typically the terms of the scholarship allow you to supplement your income with a small amount of teaching - limited to a total number of hours spent. But this will be your choice, and it is never onerous. A university funded scholarship is much the same, typically a bit less money, and obviously not portable to another university. A research grant funded position can be any amount of money, in some areas it can be better than a commonwealth funded scholarship, but there is no flexibility - not only will you study in that university, but you will work in that one research project. In no case are you likely to pay tuition fees as these will be covered by the HECS exemption scholarships each university has. All this applies to Oz citizens wishing to study for a PhD.
TAs are employees. They deal with dangerous substances*, with morons who eventually fail in their study course due to failure to comprehend “no horsing around in the lab”**, they must be at their assigned spot at the assigned times unless too sick to work, etc.
Volunteers on the other hand come in when they can and not when they cannot; volunteers can be assigned hours but cannot be held to them. Volunteers cannot be put in the Employees Preventive Healthcare Plan, which happens to be compulsory for employees.
Volunteers are not for something where you need to have reliability or for something where you have a high risk. I often read descriptions here of voluntary work in hospitals which in Spain would also be completely unacceptable: volunteers can accompany patients, visit them, go to their houses to bring items the patient needs… but they can’t do paperwork or medical work in a hospital setting (Red Cross and DYA don’t work in the hospital).
I studied ChemE and Chem.
** I have eyes because I was wearing my goggles when that asshole figured it would be a Good Idea to slap my ass as I carefully dropped one drop of H2SO4 onto an organic mix which refused to crystalize. He still has his life and all his limbs because one of the TAs had the presence of mind to kick him out of the lab and into a professor’s office before the students could react and grab him.
I meant “volunteer to be a TA instead of an RA above and beyond the minimum teaching requirements”. Not “random blokes don’t come out of nowhere to volunteer to teach random classes?”
I understood what you said, Jragon, and I do know of some who volunteered for extra (besides the minimum required). I even did extra once my requirement was done, towards the end of my program (when I had basically ABD).
And also, there are programs where you’re supposed to teach at least one class every semester throughout your stay. Some of those programs expect to make professors, so it is reasonable that they want to give practice to the students, so that they can be somewhat decent professors.
Oh, I understood that. Do you understand that in Spain it would be illegal to accept such an offer (and it’s not the only country where that would be unacceptable)? A volunteer cannot teach a college class. In this case it isn’t a matter of the educational system being different, it’s the labor system and the healthcare system which wouldn’t make such an offer acceptable (plus all those TAs who are trying to get their salaries raised to living wage levels would want to kill you on account of wage-bombing).
You’re assuming that you’d get paid, and either get paid with the requirement to teach or get paid without the requirement to teach.
In those same countries which wouldn’t have a volunteer (which is by legal definition unpaid) teaching a class, TA positions are fought over. You don’t volunteer for one, you apply for one, politick for one, bicker for one, pray for one… RA positions don’t even exist in some schools, either you’re a TA or you’re paying for your grad school through external funding (family or external fellowships). TAing isn’t a part of minimum teaching requirements, it’s how (if you can get it) you manage to make your grad school less costly. Minimum teaching requirements are solved in other ways (seminars, presentations, tutoring).