On-Campus jobs

The basic difference between a scholarship and an aid is that the student works when given an aid, but scholarships are offered purely to extra ordinarily talented candidates with no extraction of work. Aids are of three types - Teaching assistantship (TA), Research assistantship (RA) and Graduate assistantship (GA).

The department offers TA, where as RA- the faculty allots. TA may involve teaching in some universities, but mostly involves assisting the faculty by preparing slides, grading, keeping track of records, handling UG labs etc. In RA the student assists a faculty in his/her respective field of research. GA the easiest of the three involves working for other departments with jobs like maintaining data base, web pages, libraries and could work in admission cell etc. Every office is a potential employer (for GA)! These assistantships cover a full tuition fee waver plus a stipend to care of the living expenses in most cases. In some cases they result in partial wavers, maybe 50 to 80%. These assistantships are usually offered in the beginning of the year in the fall semester.

In some universities students are supposed to take the TSE (this could also be substituted by the speak test conducted on campus) in order to get TA. The policies in some universities are such that TA is given to international students only after one semester. Scholarships are very few and are offered to only few deserved ones. US students are eligible to for most of the fellowship programs.