美国教授对选校的建议[分享]

starlityangUID：144081

PSU is, as most State schools in the US, a very poor school; Oregon is hit (like many states) with a major budget crisis.  In addition, my own grant that I had for three years is expired;  l submit a new proposal for funding but these are hard to get and even if I receive funding, this will take time.  I will also be on sabbatical from next winter on for a year, so I won’t teach during the first quarter for the new incoming students.

Unlike Germany (where I’m from, and where State schools are the better than the others) and probably China, State schools here are usually not fell funded, teachers have to usually teach a lot and not enough time for their research often not enough time for graduate students.  It is usually better to go for a University of **** school (the name gives something away about their status) or a private school (typically if the name is a state name, it is a state 揻lagship?school, if it is a town or other name, it is private; so, the best state school in OR is the U of Oregon, Oregon State is second, we are at the end of the food chain and when it comes to funding; the U of Portland is private and rich, but they don’t have a graduate program).

To be honest, we have been very cautious in recent years about accepting applicants from China, because the Educational Testing Service sent around reports that many Chinese students were able to cheat on the GRE exam, thereby making it a poor predictor of success in US universities.  When we admit a student, we agree to support him or her completely for five years (that is, we pay the person's tuition and also pay a stipend that is, just barely, large enough to live on here in California).  A problem for us with foreign students is that the tuition is much higher for non-California residents than it is for in-state residents.  (This is because we are a state-supported university, and the state government wants us to pay most attention to residents of the state, who are, or whose parents are, tax payers.)  Thus, we have to be very sure with foreign students that they will be worth the higher cost for five years.  For every foreign student we admit, there are two in-state students that we have to reject.  

I don't mean to discourage you by being honest about this situation, I merely want you to realize that your application would be considered with care and caution, and it would be compared with the alternative uses we could make of the money we would have to provide for your support.  If your test scores are accurate, you are obviously an excellent student and would be highly competitive with our other applicants.  You should also apply, however, to several other good universities, not all of which will have the same problems we have with long-term support of non-California residents.  Many other universities waive the tuition fees for talented foreign students, so there is no difference for those programs between in-state, out-of-state, and out-of-US applicants.  Since each program, including ours, can accept only about one tenth of the people who apply, the list of people we accept is affected by matches in interests between students and faculty, distribution of accepted students across the various areas of our department (social/personality, cognitive, developmental, etc.), which faculty members need new students most, what other applicants wish to work with the same faculty member, etc.  Applying is somewhat like gambling, so it is sensible for you to apply to several places to increase your chances of winning the gamble at one or more programs.  


In general, private universities (such as Stanford, on the west coast, and the Ivy League schools -- e.g., Harvard, Yale, and Princeton on the east coast, and places like the University of Chicago, Rice University, and Washington University (in St. Louis, Missouri) in the middle of the country -- can waive tuition for foreign students if they want to.  Those schools are not supported by local or national governments, so they do not have to comply with the wishes of tax payers, who are the ones supporting all of the state universities, such as University of Washington, University of Oregon, University of California, University of Arizona, etc., etc.  There are one or two such universities in every one of the 50 states.  Every one of the universities I've mentioned has a website, and every one of them has a psychology department, so you can go to the websites and find out who is in the department, what those people's email addresses are, etc.  


If I were young again and thinking about which programs to apply to, I would find out which researchers are the most active and important in my fields of interest, then check the websites for the departments they are in, and then find out what the most interesting programs are like, including whether they support their graduate students for X years and do or do not pay the student's tuition.  Most good programs will completely support their students for 4 or 5 years, but some places, like my own university, will have trouble paying the higher tuition that is charged to people who are not state residents (a status that a non-US resident cannot attain while attending school here).  They will be able to tell you what their policies are.

慕波UID：123535

鬼子说的有道理啊！