Disruptive Technologies, Education and Some Social Issues » education USA http://www.kenneyjacob.com Disruptive Technologies, Modern Education, Shrouded Social Issues and Dirty media propaganda Fri, 25 Nov 2011 10:52:17 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Graduate Students in US – How to Survive Recession http://www.kenneyjacob.com/2009/04/15/graduate-students-in-us-%e2%80%93-how-to-survive-recession/ http://www.kenneyjacob.com/2009/04/15/graduate-students-in-us-%e2%80%93-how-to-survive-recession/#comments Tue, 14 Apr 2009 23:13:45 +0000 Kenney Jacob http://www.kenneyjacob.com/?p=2033 The other day I was talking to a student who graduated in August from my school. He is in OPT for almost 75 days now. He is trying his best to find a job but with an economic recession he is not even getting interview calls. He was so sad and telling me “since I have some good friends I am surviving. I don’t have any money to spend nor any work”. I found him very low in confidence and cursing the luck for his inability to find a job all throughout the conversation.

There will be hundreds of graduate students like this from different countries especially from India who may be going through the same state of mind as my friend. They are subjected to so many pressures at the same time – pressure due to the inability to find a job, pressure to make both ends meet with no income, pressure to repay the huge loan they took back from their home country, pressure of returning back to the home country as a loser not having able to find a job even after studying so hard.

I can understand the pain and agony that goes through those students as I also came to US for my studies during the peak of recession. Majority of my friends were struggling to find a job during that time. I have written earlier about the tough life of graduate students and how we all survived it. But I believe this time it is going to be much tougher – mainly due to some changes in the H1B visa numbers and also the recession is widely expected to be worse than the last one. The only ray of hope for a lot of students is the extended Optional Practical Training (OPT) but lot of students can’t take advantage of it as they need to be employed for at least 9 months during their 12-month OPT to get an extension.

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]]> http://www.kenneyjacob.com/2009/04/15/graduate-students-in-us-%e2%80%93-how-to-survive-recession/feed/ 0 Higher Education American Style http://www.kenneyjacob.com/2008/09/27/higher-education-american-style/ http://www.kenneyjacob.com/2008/09/27/higher-education-american-style/#comments Sun, 28 Sep 2008 02:56:56 +0000 Kenney Jacob http://www.kenneyjacob.com/?p=509 Its only recently that I understood the American way of education. My friend Issac wrote GRE and went to the USA for his masters 3 years ago. A one hour voice chat session with him proved to be very informative.

In India we have a free education system. All government education establishments provide free education. Even many private institutions are funded by the government. The students gets to study for free.

But in the US education is not free. An MS course would cost you anything between 20 lakhs to 40 lakhs based on the course and institution. But quite a lot of students gets to study without paying any fees from their pockets.

The education system there is funded in a superb way. Students have lots of work options. They can work for various departments, they can assist their professors, even they can teach some subjects to their juniors. All of these are not difficult jobs. But they are provided as a means for the government to provide the student with a chance to pay for his education on his own. Also most of the universities are research places. Many companies outsource their research to these institutions and all that money goes into helping these students.

The beauty of this concept is that, students there value education more that we do here. We get it for free, and for them they have to earn it. When you earn something its a lot different from getting something for free. Also, paying for ones own education is an empowering act.Similar Posts:

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