Although I made up my mind to attend graduate school during my vacation in Guam in January 2017, the biggest obstacle was how I was going to finance my education. The tuition of the US institution has become prohibitively expensive, and there was no way that I could pay this in normal circumstances.
This becomes a significant problem for most of the people, and for my case, it was a big problem. However, I had two ways to overcome this.
Scholarship
Compared to with the undergraduate level, there are many scholarship opportunities for graduate students. For any Japanese students aiming for US graduate schools, the following scholarships are well known.
- Fulbright Scholarship
- Funai Overseas Scholarship
- The Nakajima Foundation
And of course, there are more scholarships available. By becoming a recipient of any of these, it would significantly reduce the financial burden and enable to have better options regarding which institution to attend.
MIT Media Lab
This was the other option I had in my mind. If you get accepted to MIT Media Lab as a graduate student, you automatically become eligible for receiving tuition and a stipend. And this basically comes to every graduate student at the Media Lab.
I decided to aim for both, and started my preparation for applying to graduate schools. As a result, I ended up receiving the Fulbright Scholarship and got rejected from MIT Media Lab after getting waitlisted.
I hope more international students to be inspired and would like to write more about how my process was.
