Find opportunities that are right for you to continue your education outside your home country.
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Find opportunities that are right for you to continue your education outside your home country.
© 2024 Freedom Degree
Freedom Degree, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. © 2024 | Powered by Strapi
Aug 13, 2024
Experience of Olga Doletskaya (University College London)
Perhaps the most important issue for everyone who is going to study in another country is finding funding. High-quality education in today's world is gradually becoming a privilege available to only a few, as the prices of study programs are rising and the cost of living in Europe and North America is increasing. But there is good news. Sources of funding for capable students exist and there are many of them, although they are unevenly distributed among countries.
Today we are going to talk about finding funding in Great Britain - a country with great university traditions and a very high quality level of higher education, which, in particular, is reflected in the world educational rankings. Our interlocutor is Olga Doletskaya. Olg is doing her research as a postgraduate student at University College London.
Hi. My name is Olya Doletskaya. That's right, I'm doing my PhD at UCL. Before that I did my MA at the University of Edinburgh. I'm doing queer and gender studies of Russia, I'm an anthropologist. And I'm also the co-founder of the "Dear Colleagues" project, where we volunteer to help students and Russian-speaking academics - those who are trying to go abroad. “Dear Colleagues” and I post vacancies, and I also do volunteer counseling, where we help people understand different funding systems. The one I know most about, of course, is the UK.
Here I would divide by the level of education. Opportunities are different if we are talking about Bachelor's, Master's or PhD.
PhD is the easiest to find funding for. You need to apply for funding separately from applying to the university, i.e. a place on a PhD program does not guarantee that you will receive funding for your studies. But there are quite a lot of funding options. There are within the university, there are scholarships and there is external funding from so-called Research Councils, for example, ESRC [Economic and Social Research Council - ed] and AHRC [Arts and Humanities Research Council - ed]. In general, these councils are funded by the British state. These types of support are available in many universities. There is even more specialised funding, for example, for some project related to gender studies or medicine or some very specific topic. My funding is from the AHRC, its London branch.
It is also possible to apply for a PhD on an already existing project. This is a certain project, which was made by a researcher and she hires PhD students, for example. The advantage here is that the funding is already attached, but the disadvantage is that you are not doing your own individual project. There is room for manoeuvring, but still the research will not be exactly on your ideal topic. That's roughly how funding for PhD programs in the UK works.
I usually recommend applying to at least three universities and each university for 3-5 funding opportunities. I think I applied for 15 or 16. I ended up getting two funding - one each from two different universities. That's rather a rare story. Usually they give one funding and very often people apply two years in a row because they don't get funding in the first round. So it's quite a competitive system, but most PhD students are funded because doing PhD research without money is rare and rather a privilege for local students. It costs a lot less to study for them.
Let's go further in terms of the level of difficulty. It's very difficult to find money for international students in UK Masters programs: there are literally one or two sources to apply for.
The first is the Chevening scholarship for international leaders, leaders in their fields of study. The idea behind this scholarship is that people come from other countries and come back home after they graduate. Now the requirement to return home has been removed, but it's still a very competitive program, it's quite rare, it's very cool and prestigious.
There's also the Hills Foundation scholarship from Mikhail Khodorkovsky, where he pays students from Russia for education, Master's or PhD and only in Oxford and Cambridge. It's a very good scholarship, quite easy to get, but difficult to get into those universities.
There are some occasional scholarships at certain universities, for very narrow target groups of students, but in general, that's pretty much it. It turns out that there are only two scholarships for Master's programs in the UK [for students from Russia -- editor's note] and they are very difficult to get into. In general, most of the people I know from British master's programs studied with their own money. And now education has become much more expensive and that means it has become much less accessible. You can ask for help from some helping organizations that work specifically with Russian students. For example, the Zimin Foundation, the Boris Nemtsov Foundation. But such assistance is unlikely to cover the entire cost of tuition.
There are no scholarships for international students, as far as I know, in the British undergraduate program. You can only ask for money from foundations through some informal ways. British universities make money on international students, it is not profitable for them to pay for bachelors.
Advice for people looking for scholarships in the UK: you should look at the websites of all the universities you are potentially interested in and find out what funding is available there. There is also a Guide to Postgraduate Funding site, but it's more for PhDs.
The problem with studying in the UK is that the price of tuition itself is very large. There are not many of these large funding programs that cover the entire cost of tuition, and they are usually listed on university websites.
Takes a whole year. It's a very big task, it's practically a full-time job writing applications. You start applying (I'm talking about PhD and Master's funding) around October-November, you apply separately to each university. Each funding has its own set of documents - sometimes it's a very small letter of 500 words, and sometimes it's a giant questionnaire that you fill out with the help of a potential supervisor of your program for a long time, several weeks.
You get to know the results usually in April-May and you kind of learn how to do it a little bit better in the process of writing all these applications and something decent comes out of it.
Scholarships start in the first month of training. Tuition in the UK starts somewhere around October 1, which means the scholarship doesn't pay for the flight or the visa and healthcare fees you have to pay when you apply in advance. The UK visa is very expensive because of this, for a PhD it will cost somewhere around 3000 pounds. In fact, it's insurance for the next five years. For a Masters, it's about £1,500 and you have to pay it in a lump sum. You need to have a lot of savings.
There are no special changes for Russians. There were at the beginning of the war [Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 – editor's note] some special opportunities for Ukrainians, academics and students at risk at institutions like Kings and LSE, for example. I understand that these were temporary measures and are now almost non-existent.
I wouldn't say that it has become more difficult for Russians to get scholarships, but as I always say at my consultations, grantors, especially for PhDs, pay a lot of attention to how feasible and realistic the project is: the student really has to finish the PhD and the investment has to pay off, as it were. And if you are planning a field in Russia [empirical part of research - editor's note], they probably won't give money for such projects, because British universities don't allow their students and staff to go to Russia.
In general, it has become more difficult for Russians to apply, because exams, such as language exams, have to be taken somewhere outside of Russia, there are difficulties with bank cards, visas, and so on. But there are no special restrictions or discrimination against Russians.
I guess the main problem is simply that money and funding is really scarce and tuition is very expensive. Also, prices in the UK have gone up a lot now because of the economic crisis with the war and Brexit. It's hard to survive on that and it would be great if scholarships were indexed better.
Usually any scholarship is set up so that you're paid for your tuition and paid some stipend to live on. It's not very big, somewhere around 1700 pounds a year for London and somewhere around 1500 outside of London. It's usually not enough to live in London, but if you have some extra part-time work or live on a budget, it might be enough.
I wouldn't say that the application process itself is somehow highly bureaucratic - it's just specific. The letters and applications you have to write depend a lot on your supervisor. You have to contact potential research assistants first, and when they approve you informally, you write applications to both universities and funding together. And if your research supervisor has a good track record, she's probably heavily involved in your pitch. And if you don't have one, it's harder to deal with the bureaucracy yourself.
In general, British universities are contactable, you can always write to them with questions, especially if there are some confusions in the documents. And in general, my advice: it is very important to write a lot of emails, you need to write to everyone. When you are applying for a PhD, you should write to the universities you are interested in, to people who, as you think, can evaluate your project, and just ask them for a call, ask them to discuss, look at your application, ask for recommendations. That helps a lot. I had this experience where I wrote to a potential researcher, she couldn't take me on, but she recommended four other people. I wrote to them all, and one of those recommendations ended up being my researcher at UCL.
Another good tip, if you're applying for a PhD, don't just look at the department of your discipline. PhD programs - they're very interdisciplinary and often you end up in a different department, especially if it's social sciences, humanities. For example, I'm an anthropologist, but I'm in the Slavic Studies department because I'm doing research about Russia. I would also say that you should not be afraid to apply to Oxford and Cambridge. They seem like very scary institutions for the elite, but they have more financial opportunities. Because they have a lot of colleges, there are more chances that there is money somewhere.
And one more piece of advice: look not only at the top universities, but also at the worse ones, because, on the whole, the UK has very high quality education. Often, even in small universities, in small towns, there are very good professionals, especially in a particular field. Sometimes small universities have special scholarships for refugees.
Anything is possible. People are actually enrolling abroad, even now, even after the war started. Studying is hard, but if you really want to do it and you do your research, you have the will to figure out the system yourself. No one is going to figure it out for you, unfortunately, and no one is going to write all those applications for you. But yes, it actually does work.