Muneeb Ali

NSDI'06 is coming up! Please consider attending the conference.

Posted by muneeb at 05:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

No offense to USEFP (United States Educational Foundation in Pakistan) or the Fulbright Program (they indeed are providing a great service to students with their scholarships) but, in my view, students should think twice before relying on a scholarship grant like USEFP Fulbright. So, here I am going to try and shed light on some points that you should consider before you get too excited about the Fulbright scholarship (these points are specific to PhD Fulbright grants via USEFP):

• If you are applying to a PhD program in the USA most PhD programs have their own funding and in most cases if a university is giving you admission they would offer you funding as well. So the Fulbright scholarship makes sense for Masters study (because Masters programs are generally self-financed). For a PhD study, the Fulbright scholarship helps in cases where the university wants to admit you but they are short on funding.
  
• You give a "list of preferred institutes" to USEFP and IIE and after that they tell you to sit back and relax. You are not allowed (or discouraged) to apply to US universities on your own. The way this works is that IIE doesn't notify you about universities they applied to (on your behalf) untill February and by February the admission deadlines of all good schools expire. So you just sit there thinking

  "Should I apply to UC Berkeley? Oh but what if IIE also sent my application there. The folks at UCB would think I am an idiot who sent two applications. So lets not apply!"

  
  
• At the end of February there are two things that can happen:
  1. you get a notification from IIE that they applied to the school of your choice (well and good!)
  2. they did not apply to the school of your choice (lets say UC Berkeley) on your behalf because their "experts" don't think that you had a good shot. So they sent the application to University of Disney Land instead.
  
  
• So if you are the "Disney Land" case they would try and convince you how U.of Disney Land is not that bad a university and you should accept the offer while you sit there thinking that:

  "Hey wait a minute! I didn't get rejection from UC Berkeley or CMU, infact my application never got there and CMU etc has a policy to fund all PhD applicants anyway. What were the benefits of the fulbright scholarship again?"

  
  
• If you are not the "Disney Land" case and you are happy with your placement, pretty soon you would receive a notification that HEC is partially funding your PhD study and as the cost of your PhD. Program will be about $250,000 therefore,

  "everyone will be required to post at least a partial bond, that is, a bond for as much as their family owns up to a fixed amount, but not more. At this time you should be identifying the people who will post their property ..."

  Apparently, this bond will be fully redeemable without any cost to you or your family when you have returned to your home-country and served your home-country for five years after you complete your degree. Let me simplify this for you - the minute you accept the Fulbright offer and hand-in your passports to them you have sealed your fate for the next 10 years of your life. And incase you don't comply to the bond (lets say you feel like going to Europe for research) they would send your parents a bill that would have a lot of zeros on it.
  
• Also, keep in mind that the "experts" at IIE deal with students from various different fields and deal with a lot of different universities and programs. They are going to evaluate your application (in a Microsoft Excel-style) GRE + GPA = high rank fashion. They would not know what SIGCOMM conference is and how and why is it different from WMSCI conference (computer networks researchers and faculty at places like MIT etc. consider having ONE publication in SIGCOMM conference a career-goal whereas WMSCI is a conference where MIT PDOS students pulled a prank and their junk paper generated from a random computer program was accepted. Most probably IIE people would be unable to differenciate between the north and south pole of computer systems research and publications and you cant really blame them for that)
  

Hope this information clarifies some issues for future PhD Fulbright applicants.

Posted by muneeb at 04:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)