Application for a P.hD position in the US: My experience

For US graduate school normally an applicant does not need to apply for the scholarship, as they will consider it at the time an applicant submit his application for a PhD position. This is normally the case but individual graduate school may have their own arrangement. So the best way to not to miss any possible scholarship is to browse through the web pages of the graduate schools one is applying to see if the applicant needs to submit a separate application for scholarship. If an applicant is in doubt, it's best to write to the person in charge directly, informing he/she that you are lodging an application for a PhD with their university, and request them if you would need to submit a separate application specifically for the scholarship. However, as I mentioned earlier, normally the applicants don't need to submit a separate application for scholarship. Once a graduate school accepts you, they will also take into account your eligibility of a scholarship. If they think you are qualify their offer of PhD position will come with a scholarship. In other words, the offer of scholarship is automatically. If they think an applicant is not eligible for a scholarship but only a P.hD position, they will just offer you the position without a scholarship. In most cases if an applicant is not offered a scholarship the university will usually offer some forms of financial arrangement e.g. in the form of teaching assistantship (TA), which should be enough to cover the applicant's living expenses.

I have no explicit knowledge of scholarship for a Ph.D in US by Malaysian institutions. The only thing i have heard of is the Maxis scholarship. Recently I have met with a few students from Cambridge University in UK who studied PhD with the maxis scholarship. I also heard of Shell scholarship but the details I am not very sure. Another possibility is the local Malaysian universities who offer academic staff training scheme (I think it is called RLKA or something like that). In cambridge for example I met with a few Malaysian Chinese lecturers who are sponsored by UTM and the newly established Melaka University. These students were taken by these universities on a lecturer training scheme. The Universities sponsor them to study Ph.D in Cambrige, and after the graduation they will go back to their respective universities as lecturers.

As I am not in the scholarship business my information about the scholarship information for Ph.D is very much limited. But i do believe that there are many such scholarships available from within Malaysia or in US itself. The problem is how to find out these resources. Unfortunately I don't have much info on this. It is the applicant's job to find out these scholarships resources from either the internet, or posing questions to the web pages maintained by Malaysian students society or organisation who may provide further info on this. My best advice is still the same: find the scholarship resources yourself in the internet. An Malaysian applicant have to learn this trick as it is utmost important for his/her survival in the future. An ambitious applicant has no choice but to learn up how to find his/her own information resources to realise his/her ambition. Our Malaysian students may score good grades in the exam. But real life requires more soft skill than just scoring exams.

When I did my US application for a P.hD position some years ago, I had no one to ask for help, not did I any idea where to apply for scholarships or financial assistance. However I was able to manage the application process until I obtained around 5 offers from US universities, of which one even offered me a full scholarship. I remembered that I spend a few months of time (during my job as a full time lecturer in KDU Penang) to search for all relevant information on the web when the internet was really slow (in year 1998). Then I was also very ignorant about where to find my financial resource, and I also faced huge obstacles during the process of application. Indeed, the current applicants who seek my advice are luckier than me as they got someone to guild them along the application (I had no one to guild me at all). But still I was 'successful' in getting a few P.hD position offers at the end. I attribute my success to my initiative to search the net, to ask, to write and to do many trials and error. During the process I used my intelligence and analytical skill to think hard of how I should handle this task. So, despite my lack of advices from experienced people (well, actually I did receive some not-so intensive advices from my UM senior who were studying in Notre Dame then), I gathered much first-hand experience on how to handle the application procedure. I don't have much resource, but still I manage to generate it myself without much assistance from others.

IF an applicant were to exercise more independent initiative to handle this task him/herself, he/she too can generate his/her own resource. If one does, then success will finally be his/hers.