How to get into funded grad school abroad without research experience

It’s grad school application season and a lot of applicants are looking for tips to improve their chances, help them stand out, and secure funding for grad school. One of the most common questions I have received from potential applicants is how to get into grad school, with funding, when they don’t have research experience. 

As I shared in this article, I went from working as a data scientist in the industry to beginning a fully funded Master’s in the United States. I didn’t exactly have any research experience while applying to grad school, and if this is similar to your current situation, you might be wondering what you could do to better position yourself as a strong applicant.

In this article, I will share five ways you can strengthen your grad school admission and funding application without prior research experience. Some of these tips worked for me and I have seen the other tips work for people in my network.

Five tips when applying to grad school abroad without research experience

1. Publish your undergraduate project, if possible: If you are still an undergrad or a new grad, try to speak to your undergraduate project advisor about developing your work for publishing, either in a peer-reviewed journal or presenting it at a conference. If you’re not able to publish, even as a solo author, you can confirm with your advisor and collaborators, if you can upload it to arXiv. arXiv is an open-source free-access archive for scholarly articles and materials across all fields. It is a non-peer-reviewed platform to share your research on the Internet. Uploading your research paper to arXiv could result in increased visibility, and easier sharing, and could even lead to more collaborations to develop your prior work.
2. Seek unconventional research experience: I know this might sound counterintuitive to this article title, but if you’re still in school, you have a gap year, or have the opportunity to get some research experience, it’ll be wise to take that up. It might not be a conventional or even highly paid role, but it could be a huge advantage. You can explore volunteering at a research lab, working with a nonprofit, joining a fellowship, internship, or even a contract role that could give you some research experience.
   Suppose you’re in the AI field as I am, some organizations that you could join to collaborate on projects and obtain research experience are AI Saturdays Lagos, Masakhane, ML Collective, and Cohere For AI.
3. Work on a personal project: Another great tip, one which I personally used and it worked for me, is taking on a personal project. Preferably, an end-to-end project. What do I mean by this? It means scoping a personal project from, first, deciding on a research problem to solve, coming up with a proposed approach, implementing, testing, evaluating, and if possible comparing with some other method, and finally, sharing your findings in some way. In this entire process, you will pick up many skills and experiences that can help your grad school application stand out. Even if the project does not work out as you expected, being able to report that and possibly diagnose where you could have done it differently is still a big win. In research, this happens a lot more than you can imagine, so you don’t have to feel like you failed. 
4. Aim at getting excellent GRE scores: I believe in going the extra mile and putting in extra effort whenever possible to give yourself an edge. Given that you don’t have research experience, working really hard to get a very high GRE score and being in the top percentile is an added advantage. There are a lot of valid arguments as to why the GRE exam is not a correct measure of intelligence. While that is outside the scope of this article, I encourage you to take the exam if you can, whether the schools you’re applying to have decided to make it optional or not. I think about grad school applications as a race—a race with extremely qualified people. Some of them might have research experience, which you don’t, so if there’s anything you can do to get an additional point to your name and set yourself apart, please do it. The GRE could be one of those. 
5. Highlight your other skills in your Statement Of Purpose (SOP): While core technical research skills are good, there are a lot of soft skills that are also crucial for research success. Some of these soft skills are teamwork, collaboration, leadership, communication, self-motivation, persistence, attention to detail, and personal drive, among others. In your SOP or cold emails, you can focus on highlighting scenarios where you exhibited these skills and the impact these skills had. There are also relevant hard skills that could be transferable from some of your previous experience, such as technical writing, public speaking, presentation skills, etc. Highlight instances where you have utilized these in your CV, SOP, emails, and interviews, as much as possible.
6. Write about your projects: As a bonus tip, share your learnings, knowledge, skills, and projects in professional writing. It doesn’t have to be fancy or at such a large scale, but being able to clearly communicate your thoughts and findings is very important in research. If you have a way of demonstrating this alongside your application, it could act as an added advantage for you. You don’t even have to set up your own blog to do this. You can write on sites like LinkedIn, and Medium, or even contribute articles to reputable journals, publications, and blogs in your field.

Conclusion

In this article, I shared some tips you could apply to improve your grad school admission and funding applications if you don’t have research experience. I hope this is helpful to you and can help you improve your application. If you know anyone who is planning to send in grad school applications or might benefit from this article, kindly share it with them. And if there’s any other aspect of grad school and applications that you’d like for me to write about, please drop a comment below or shoot me an email at: contactaniekan at gmail dot com. 

I wish you success as you apply and I pray that your dreams materialize. 

Thank you for reading. 

Aniekan.