MessiahAndrw wrote:
To cover the cost I was going to work an extra year or more to cover the cost. But for every year I work, that's a year more until I graduate. Starting locally and then transferring credit is difficult or near impossible I read, also adding that Australian and US course units differ in what they cover. I thinking about online tuition from a US university to at least cover some of the courses required while still in Australia and gain college credit, then transfer to a campus university when I'm ready to move. I'm worried about this because even though there are a lot of accredited universities offering online education, mentioning 'online' may automatically make an employer think I attended a diploma mill. Considering that, I think I'm better off just waiting and doing all my studying on campus.
Sorry if this has already been covered, but you can sometimes earn a stipend at most graduate schools by just working for them (teaching simple classes and grading). These can be anywhere from 4k to 20k USD depending on the size/funding of the university. I think these are usually offered when you get a reply to your application.
Someone mentioned the grueling pace. That should be emphasized. The top graduate from my school in recent years went to UNC (#20 in the US) for a master's in CS and has found the theoretical part to be particularly challenging. To give you an idea of the type of person we're talking about, he double majored in pure math and cs and wrote a genetic algorithm based part of speech tagger for his final project. The point is that upper middle class schools (like UNC) will still be challenging and interesting.
EDIT: I just noticed how old this thread is... Oh well.
And stuff you produce at school isn't always the school's. It depends on the rules of the school. A friend of mine developed an app for tracking our campus buses for his final project and tried to sell it to the school. They tried to say it was theirs anyway, but the legal team apparently disagreed, b/c they didn't take it.