Poll - Graduate Education

[eredien]

Please fill out this poll on graduate education. I find myself woefully undereducated on:
- How other people decide what they want to do for graduate education
- How they fund it when they decide what they want to do

[Edit: this poll hasn't gotten any responses today. Do you guys think it's too personal?]

Since I want to go back to school, I figured I should at least figure out which directions to start looking in and try and ignore the ones that are not actually salient, but I realized that I didn't actually know which directions those were.

Typing "grad school funding" into google is a nightmare of conflicting advice, and talking with people about how they picked their career path seems to net me a lot of people who either already knew what they wanted to do and what degree they needed to do it with, or got a job doing something they liked and then ended up going to graduate school for it, but I don't fit into either of those options and figure some of you might not, either.

I figure that a poll of several hundred people is bound to get more than 10 replies and is a good place to start.


[Poll #1617042]

Comments

[capsicumanuum.livejournal.com]

As you can see from the boxes I ticked, I pieced together funding for my graduate education from a variety of sources. The scholarship I have was awarded by my department on the basis of my admissions application -- there was not a separate scholarship application. I do not have grant funding for this year, but will be included on my advisor's research grant for next year. I'm transferring credits I took at another university while I was working full time (and paid for by my then-employer) to meet part of my degree requirements. I'm paying for a portion of my tuition bills out of savings, and have a private loan for the rest (did not qualify for federal loans). I expect I will have to TA for at least a semester or two, and will get partial funding from that, but that is not definite yet.

In general funding is a horrible confusing process, and the best way in my field to find funding (and i have no idea how it works in humanities) is to find a professor you want to do research with and ask them to help you scrabble together grants & fellowships.

[eredien]

Wow. That does sound confusing. Thanks so much for your advice!