Study

STUDY ABROAD

People choose to study abroad for quite a wide variety of reasons.

➤ The quality of education in another country may be better than in their home country, courses that are not available at home may be offered, or cost-of-living or educational costs may be lower.

➤ Qualifications gained abroad may be more prestigious, which can be useful when seeking work in the home country.

➤ Foreign qualifications may also be more useful for immigration, even to a third country.
For example an Indian doctor who hopes to practice in Canada will have an easier time with licensing if he or she has a British medical degree.

➤ Studying abroad is also an opportunity for language learning.
For example, someone who has graduated from a university in Paris is almost certain to speak excellent French, and to have no trouble convincing potential employers of that. Studying abroad is one of the ways in which a traveller can live in a particular place for an extended period.

➤ Studying is more interesting for some travellers than working abroad, volunteering or just being a tourist, and in some places a student visa may be easier to get than other types.

➤ Studying abroad will give you a different set of contacts than you would get at home.
For example, an American who wants to work in foreign trade might make more useful contacts in Beijing or Buenos Aires than at Berkeley.

VISA

See also: Border crossing, Visa

While you may not need a visa for short visits to certain countries as a tourist or for business, going there as an international student generally requires a longer stay than going there just as a casual tourist, and regardless, you may not be allowed to study on a tourist visa. Studying abroad will require you to obtain a visa in advance in most cases. Student visas generally have different requirements and application procedures from normal tourist or business visas. For most countries, you will need an offer letter from the institution you wish to study at, and also evidence of funds to support yourself for at least the first year of your course. Check with the institution, as well as the immigration department for the country you wish to study in for detailed requirements.

Some countries, such as the United States and Canada, explicitly prohibit foreigners from studying on a tourist visa even if their length of stay is short enough to be covered by one. There may be exceptions for some types of short courses, though. In the case of the U.S., the relevant State Department site specifically states that “enrollment in a short recreational course of study, not for credit toward a degree (for example, a two-day cooking class while on vacation)” is permitted on a tourist visa.

There are multilateral agreements in some groups of countries, such that you need no visa even for long-time studies if you are a citizen of another country in the group. The most well-known examples are probably the European Union, and the Trans-Tasman Agreement between Australia and New Zealand.

If a (specific) visa is required for your studies, studies without one may be regarded illegal and void. Thus your diploma may be worthless in many contexts even if you succeeded in graduating. This varies between countries, and may change abruptly.

THINGS TO CONSIDER

Moving to a foreign country for the first time is a daunting experience for many people, and going abroad to study is no exception. Going to another country to study will need you to start making preparations many months in advance, from making the application to obtaining your visa and making final travel and accommodation arrangements, figure on the whole process taking anywhere from three to ten months. These are some questions for you to research on before you make a decision:

Often, culture shock is one of the main things people experience when moving overseas for the first time. You will have to adapt to the local customs and lifestyle, and these can often be radically different from your home country. In addition, the study environment also varies radically from country to country, and sometimes, even between different institutions in the same country. For instance, undergraduate courses in the United Kingdom tend to be very specialised and structured, and aim to provide their students with in-depth knowledge in their chosen major. In contrast, undergraduate courses in the United States require students to study a broad range of subjects, and aim to provide their students with knowledge in a well-rounded range of areas.

In addition, you will need to consider the language barrier. Most institutions teach in the official language(s) of the country they are in, meaning that unless you know that language well, you will have to put in more effort than the local students studying in their native language to get the same grades. Of course, this is great for those whose purpose of studying in a foreign country is to improve their proficiency in a foreign language (e.g. an Italian studying in Hong Kong to improve his Cantonese). However, if that is not your aim, then you should seriously consider the factors, as having to learn a foreign language at the same time as having to juggle academic knowledge in your chosen major subject is often an unwelcome extra burden. Some institutions do have courses and entire programmes in a foreign language, often a lingua franca such as English, Arabic or Mandarin, or have the course literature in that language. Not knowing the local language will still be a drawback, as it will be used for much informal communication. Some institutions offer beginners’ language courses for foreigners.

The good news for English speakers, though, is that English has emerged as the international language of communication in science, engineering and medicine, and the vast majority of academic publications in those fields are done in English. This means that many of the more reputable institutions worldwide give postgraduate research students the option of completing their thesis in English instead of the official language of their respective countries.

COSTS

Finally, you will need to take into account your school fees and cost of living. Many governments subsidise school fees for citizens and permanent residents of their respective countries, but these subsidies are usually not available to international students, meaning that you will have to pay your school fees in full. In many countries, foreign students are charged much higher fees than locals. Fees for some schools, notably some of the prestigious American places (“Ivy League” and some of the others), can be several tens of thousands of dollars a year.

In some countries, such as Germany and several of its European neighbors, there is no tuition fee for university, even for foreign students. However, these are generally countries with high cost of living and students will have to pay for things like books and probably a good computer, so costs may still be high.

The cost of living varies considerably. It can be very cheap if you are in a small village in India or Southeast Asia, but living in major cities of the developed world such as New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong or Melbourne can be very expensive indeed. Also in countries where cost of living is generally cheap, this may not be true in cities with universities. There is often affordable accommodation for students, arranged e.g. by the university or the student union. The university may be able to give advice on such matters also when you have to use the private market.

SCHOLARSHIPS

Sometimes, the educational institution, a foundation furthering international contacts, or your home country’s government or a private company can cover all or part of your expenses by giving you a scholarship. In the latter cases this will often mean that you have to work for your government or that company for a certain number of years after you have completed your studies.

If your country receives foreign aid, that may include scholarships for promising students to study in the donor country. Many governments have programs along those lines. The United Kingdom has scholarships for Commonwealth citizens, Saudi Arabia has scholarships for Palestinians, China has scholarships for students from other developing countries across the world, Taiwan has scholarships for citizens of countries that recognize the Republic of China diplomatically, Singapore has scholarships for other Southeast Asians and so on.

Two scholarships stand out as remarkably prestigious; both take a large number of students every year but are quite hard to get since competition for them is fierce:

Rhodes Scholarship for graduate study at Oxford. It requires not only a brilliant academic record but also evidence of athletic activity and involvement in politics. Fulbright Scholarships for foreigners to study at U.S. universities, and for Americans to study at foreign universities; a program run by the U.S. State Department. In general, finding scholarships you might be eligible for will require doing a lot of your own research. However, you may be able to get helpful advice in several places — your current school, your own government, or the embassy for the country you want to go to. Particularly in the U.S., many prestigious private universities provide limited financial aid to undergraduate students from less well-to-do families, and PhD students are often provided with a comprehensive funding package by the university.

GRADUATE STUDY

For many students it may make sense to consider undergraduate study at home followed by graduate work abroad; this may be cheaper because you have to pay for fewer years abroad, and for future employment your graduate work will count more than undergrad studies. Also, most schools make some effort to support graduate students, in particular those studying for a PhD. They may get work from their professors as teaching assistants for undergraduate courses (paid by the university) or research assistants (paid by a grant or commercial contract the prof has) on some project. Such work rarely pays very well, but it may cover a lot of your costs and fairly often work as a research assistant can also serve as your thesis research.

Sometimes research grants will also cover trips to international conferences, though usually only for the principal author of an accepted paper and the professor who supervised the work. Such a conference can be a fine opportunity to meet people in your field and to look for employment or for a potential thesis supervisor for further work abroad. For most fields there are many conferences, perhaps including one reasonably near you; for example in cryptography the main professional association runs three large conferences a year — Crypto is always in California, but Eurocrypt and Asiacrypt are in a different city each year and Asiacrypt is sometimes in Australia — and there are at least a dozen more all over the world run by other groups.

ADMISSION TESTS

A good score on an English test is almost always required for students not from an English-speaking country to study at a university that uses English (sometimes even when the university has a different primary language).

The term “English-speaking country” is often defined to only refer to the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Students from countries such as the Philippines, India and South Africa where English is widely spoken, or even the lingua franca but not the primary first language are generally required to take these tests. Some universities may waive the requirement if you obtained a previous degree in one of the aforementioned English-speaking countries.

THE TWO WIDELY-USED TESTS:

➤ TOEFL, for admission to US universities

➤ IELTS, for British, Irish, Canadian, Australian and NZ universities (Many universities accept either)

➤ See Teaching English for language tests used for other purposes, such as business English tests required by some employers.

Other tests are not testing language proficiency, but are pre-admission tests designed primarily for native English speakers. US universities generally require one of these for most admissions; in other countries they are not always required but are fairly common. The main ones are:

SAT and ACT for undergraduate admissions

GRE (Graduate Record Exam) for most graduate programs, with both a general test and subject tests for different fields. With the exception of professional and business schools, almost all graduate programs require the general GRE. The subject GRE may be required by some programs in addition to the general GRE; the goal is to test whether the student has had an adequate undergraduate education in the field. These tests are quite broadly based and students whose undergraduate work has not been broad enough may score poorly. For example if you are about to take the Psychology GRE and — either because of your own interests or the biases of your school — you have studied mainly behaviorist psychology, it would be a good idea to read up on other branches of the field before the test.

Some universities may also use the Miller Analogies Test:

MAT for graduate study, sort of a high-end intelligence test for any field. That test relies on a subtle understanding of English and non-native speakers are at a serious disadvantage unless they are utterly fluent; most should do the general GRE instead.

SPECIALIZED TESTS FOR MANY AREAS OF GRADUATE STUDY LEADING TO PROFESSIONAL QUALIFICATION:

➤ MCAT for medical school

➤ LSAT for law school

➤ DAT for dental school

➤ PCAT for pharmacy school

➤ GMAT for graduate business school

In some countries, such as China and South Korea, there are thriving test prep markets with courses designed specifically to prepare students for any of these tests, with the obvious caveat that the courses are conducted in the local language. Courses for at least the commonest tests — TOEFL, IELTS and SAT — are available in most countries.