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it's the school I want to go the most.... (why does this always happen to everyone? you have obstacle going to the school you like the most, but have random offers from other schools)
the department told me they are working out the financial aid details, but depending on the limited funding, they will not able to fund all the admitted students
it's getting close to the evil 415, the question I want to ask is: besides waiting, is there anything else I could/should be doing?
I did contact that college to seek for teaching related assistantship, but they forwarded my request to my department, and the department told me the cruel "we do not offer any teaching related fundings". I emailed the department heads about some publication update of my current work.
If I do not get funded.... is it a common situation? do students pay for their first year of PhD themselves? I understand after the 1st year, you will likely to find an advisor and have him/her fund you, true?
You neglected to say what PhD program you were accepted into. For most science PhD programs (i.e. biological sciences, chemistry, physics, etc.), you essentially will never need to worry about securing any form of funding yourself. The reason for this is that your tuition, health insurance, stipend, etc. are provided by the department out of the school's indirect overhead charged to each researchers' grant funding by the NIH, NSF, DoD, DTRA, EPA, private organizations (Michael Fox, Bill Gates, etc.). Your costs do not come directly from any one advisor until you commit to joining his/her lab or research team. This usually happens after you transition from being a PhD graduate student to a PhD candidate. Some PhD candidates (post-qualifying examination) and post-doctoral fellows do go out and try to secure their own funding, but this is mainly for them to try to "pre-establish" themselves as semi-independent researchers prior to being totally independent.
You neglected to say what PhD program you were accepted into.
it is engineering PhD... I think it also falls to the category of "science" programs you mention, and I agree with what you said also, I think 98% science PhD students are funded... but is there exception?
to mm_mary and skipcromer, those "jobs" are called RA or TA, you work by doing research or teaching, and yes I know this common knowledge and have contacted them, and they told me the department does not hire any teaching related positions
problem is the department is not able to afford all the admitted students funding....
uh... get a job. All the PhD candidates I know are working.
Technically, being a PhD candidate (in the Sciences because that's what I'm familiar with) is a job. Who do you think are the ones performing the research and identifying all the new cancer pathways, new enzymes, drugs, etc? The principal investigators rarely spend time doing the actual experiments, they're busy writing publications, grants, etc., it's the candidates and post-docs in the labs that are the hands and eyes of research. By the way, if all the PhD candidates that you know are working at another job, then all those PhD candidates you know are probably in violation of terms of the awards that they are being funded by! Funding agencies do NOT stipulate that a researcher is to work 40 hrs a week and then can work elsewhere any other time. The stiplulation is that 100% of a person's efforts must be devoted to that grant (i.e. if a person has multiple grants or is funded by multiple grants, then their overall % effort must equal 100% when totaled across all funding sources). Working an outside job violates the 100% effort term of the award, which if caught by an audit would seriously jeopardize their future funding opportunities.
it is engineering PhD... I think it also falls to the category of "science" programs you mention, and I agree with what you said also, I think 98% science PhD students are funded... but is there exception?
to mm_mary and skipcromer, those "jobs" are called RA or TA, you work by doing research or teaching, and yes I know this common knowledge and have contacted them, and they told me the department does not hire any teaching related positions
problem is the department is not able to afford all the admitted students funding....
If that is the case, you can either:
A) go somewhere else
B) try to secure your own source of pre-doctoral funding (note that this does not mean if you are awarded a grant the money comes directly to you. If awarded, the agency gives the funds to the university, who then allocates the fund to the department to support you)
c) go there and risk being enrolled in a less than optimal PhD training environment
Personally, I would go with option A.
Option B is too risky because you probably don't have any ideas on what research to propose yourself and would have to work closely with a PI researcher to develop a thesis based off of his/her ideas (thus they keep all IP rights). It would means you matriculate in that program and hope for the miracle of funding, which is slim to very slim.
Option C means you always will have a cloud over your head/position. And if the school/department was to lose even more funding in the future, then you can be effectively "fired/laid off" thus losing valuable years. More importantly, if you have a falling-out with anyone you have one less person to back you.
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