How To Search Schools That Offer Your Course

How to search schools that offer your course is still headache for many scholarship and funding applicants in 2022.

In this article, we will take you through how to search schools and also the right way to send emails to your preferred school faculty professors to get you on a higher pedestal of landing a scholarship.

Practical Steps On How To Search Schools That Offer Your Course.

• Go to 4icu.org where you will many features and search courses and universities by countries from the search bar

• If you click on North America in the above image, you will see countries with universities in a deop drown as shown below.

• If you clicked the United States in the image above, you will see the number of schools in different states as shown below:

• If you click Georgia in the above image, you will see the 52 schools in it.

• If you click Georgia Institute of Technology in the image above, you will see a quick description of the school as shown below.

• Now, you can scroll to the bottom of the page to see the postgraduate and undergraduate courses in the school. Then you can scroll up and click on the name of the school to take you to the school’s website.

• If your course is related to Science and Engineering, as shown above, you are sure of getting your course in that school. This is why the above step is important.
• On the school’s website as shown below, you are most concerned with ‘Academics’ and ‘Admissions’ as shown in the image below:

• If you clicked Admissions in the image above, you can then click ‘prospective students’. Look for admission requirements, majors and degrees, and other kinds of stuff. Remember that you are sure you can get your course since you have already seen Science and Technology.

• If you click on Majors and degrees in the image above, you can then check for your courses based on the program as shown below:

• If you click on the Master’s Degrees above, you will see all master’s degrees programs. All the courses under science are shown
• If you click Chemistry in the image above, you will be redirected to the chemistry page on the school’s website as shown below.

• Now since you are looking for funding, it is better to look for all the names of the lecturers in the chemistry department and their research interests.

So after clicking, ‘People ‘ in the image above, click ‘Faculty’ as shown in the image below.

The faculty members are the lecturers involved in the teaching and research. They have the funding if you can convince them enough.

• The image below shows the members of the Faculty in the department. You now have to visit each profile and look for the ones that align with your interest.

• So below is the profile of lecture number 1 on the list above – Vinayak Agarwal. All you will do is take time and read his research interest and if it falls in line with yours, send him a good email via his contact details as seen below.

• Now head to scholar.google.com and search this lecturer. You will his name and profile and most importantly, his latest publications.

• Copy the title of one of his publications and paste it into this site’s search bar. sci-hub.tw. It will give a pdf copy of the publication which you can download for free.
• Read 2 to 3 articles of the lecturer/professor and send him an email by following the steps that l explained below.

The steps below show you how to write the perfect email to any professor in your scholarship quest.

How To Write An Email To A Professor.

Questions That Will Help You Write A Better Email To Any Professor.

To write a better email, consider answering these questions.

1. How does your current research knowledge relate to the professor’s current research?

Find what connects you to the Professor. This could be your undergraduate publications (If you have). If you don’t have any research knowledge, no worries, just read the Professor’s publications and find a way to link them to your previous knowledge.

2. How many of the Professor’s papers have you read and what did you learn?

This is usually the core of any email. You need to tell the Professor the name of his/her paper you have read, the keywords in those papers, the problems he/she solved in the paper, and the method used.

This is to show that you are a good research student. Note, you don’t need to understand all the ‘jargon’ used in the paper, but you must read the paper over and over again till you have an idea. The Professor is hiring you to produce papers for him/her. If you can mention more than one paper, this will be fantastic.

3. Do you have questions or other methods of improving the current research?

You can offer suggestions or ask questions based on the papers you have read. This shows that you can improve any result. (This is the most important skill required of any research student).

Let the Professor know that you would like to investigate these questions/suggestions in his/her lab. This will make the Professor happy (The Professor has already calculated 1-2 publications from you)

4. What do you need from the Professor and why?

Let the professor know that a space in his/her lab is not a waste of opportunity by the way you construct the mail. Ask him/her for a skype call for further discussion. This is called ‘Incentifying opportunities’.

General Tips For Writing A Professor An Email

A. Use appropriate Subject Line (E.g Prospective Msc/PhD Student, MSc/Ph.D. Research Inquiry, etc…just be smart)

B. Use appropriate salutation e.g Dear Prof. XYZ or Dear Dr . XYZ. (Don’t use Dear Sir/Ma)

C. The first paragraph should tell the Professor how important you are. You don’t necessarily need to Introduce yourself too much: your attached documents will do that. Put accomplishments that are research-based. (3-4 sentences).

D. The second paragraph is the most important. This is where you will fuse points 1-3 described above to form 5-7 sentences.

E. The last paragraph is where you will discuss point 4 above(2-3 sentences). In total, you should have 3 paragraphs with about 12-15 sentences.

F. Don’t sound apologetic. You are not begging for a favor, you are earning a position by showing your skills. Don’t be desperate; it’s a big turn-off.

G. Please don’t put any religious comments(e.g God bless you sir/ma). Keep them to yourself.

H. Don’t lie, don’t exaggerate your skills.

I. Show that you are part of the best in your country/continent.

J. If you can attach your CV and Test Scores as a link, it will be better. This will reduce storage space.

Read: How To Write Best Scholarship Leter