indian-students-abroad

NOW - Mar/Apr 2006 - is the right time to start making preparations if you are planning to come abroad for studies in 2007. Anytime after June, dates for exams like GMAT and GRE are far and few in between with waiting as long as 4 months. Those of you who give their exams by end August will be able to apply to universities in time. What is the benefit? All of you who want to corner a scholarship from a US/UK university need to be in the first round of applicants. Universities that normally give out scholarships tend to be more benevolent in the first round. Second and third round applicants find it harder to get those much needed aids. Also fellow ships are easier to secure and you have decisions by the universities by end Jan for the fall semester.

By getting early decisions you have more time to decide and a wider choice when accepted to multiple universities. So get going now. Most of the students think that preparing for the exam and appearing for it is the major part. Do not be fooled. Applying to an average of 7 universities takes at least a month. I will address university applications in another post.

So pull yourself up and start preparing and scheduling your exams. Majority of the students start preparing AFTER they have scheduled their GMATs, GREs or USMLEs. Before that the discipline is just not there. Getting the language exams - IELTS and TOEFL out of the way sooner is always recommended.

For more information on giving TOEFL in India visit
TOEFL

For information on IELTS visit
IELTS

For information on GMAT visit
GMAT

For more information on GRE visit
GRE

We are always available if anyone has any specific questions. The above links are made available only to help you get started.

indianstudentsabroad

Today I was talking to a friend of mine and that talk resulted in my friend saving $3800. While discussing taxes it came to my attention that my friend had been paying Social Security and Medicare while she was still working on her OPT.

PLEASE TAKE NOTICE - On OPT you are not required to pay Social Security or Medicare. If your employer has been deducting that, then you are entitled to a refund just like my friend. Give Uncle Sam what is due, but no more than that.

Since this is the tax season my next few posts will be along this topic.

9:50 PM

Hi Everyone

First I will start by telling a little about myself. This is my first post so a short introduction is in order. I will be joined by 3 of my friends who will also be moderating this blog along with me. The description of the forum tells you that we are 4 friends in US, Canada, UK and Australia. We are starting this blog to provide information to students who are in India and planning to come to one of the above mentioned countries on study basis. We will provide you only with the information that is relevant and you ask for. As students who started off in the dark, we believe it can be really helpful and time saving to get all your answers at one place.

I have an engineering and MBA. I did my engineering in India and moved to Los Angeles to do my MBA. Currently I work in product management for an ecommerce company. Along the way I learnt a lot and feel that information can be really valuable to everyone back home.

In addition to providing information to students from India who want to come abroad for studies we will also try and answer any queries related to taxes etc for students and working professionals. Using the information collected and researched over the last few years I can provide help in the form of information for both F1 and H1 visa holders.

For us it is a hobby, so we will try and answer all your queries at the earliest. We expect question to range from - best ways to prepare for tests, to timings to how to contact recruiters at different universities. However there might be delays of upto 24 hours before we could answer all questions. We all have full time jobs so we will try and check the blog as regularly as possible.