₦airaland Forum

Albertone:
undergraduate.

Ah!.. undergrad, The real cash cow for over paid university administrators .
Unlike Nigeria, sir, there is no uniform cost for undergraduate education across the vastness of the american space , Tuition and Living conditions will vary according to the school type.
1) For Profit Private Universities charge Insanely High amount for tuition (>=$40,000 per semester). These universities aren't worth it in most cases due to their lax admission process and unworthiness of their certificate (Let no one deceive you, school matters in great ole murica)
2) Not So great Private Universities - These universities aren't really for profit , and a lot of people on this thread routinely apply to them. But, take heed, their tuition can also be insanely expensive(>=$30,000 per semester,) ,and the degree may not be worth much after you're done. This universities cater mainly to Inner city and not so middle class Americans who have public education out of their reach. These universities also have lax admission. process ( so this may save you from SAT, TOEFL etc wahala)
3) The good and semi-good Private universities - Now these Universities are great in the value they give, and they receive some sort of federal funding and have nice large endowment, hence , even though their tuition is on the high side (>=$20,000 per semester) , There are opportunity for tuition waivers and GPA based scholarships
4) PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES!!- Public Universities are the darlings of any right thinking immigrant. the opportunity for Low tuition, Great ranking ,Great social scene, and closeness to that sweet federal $$ , makes it just right for someone like you. Albeit the admission process is fierce and rigorous as you would be competing with people from literally everywhere (SAT scores ,TOEFL, Transcript, LOR etc would be compulsory). Tuition could range from ($8,000-$25,000)
.......
.....
......
..
Asides tuition, Living expenses really depend in where you are, a sleepy college town somewhere in the mid west would be a lot cheaper than a college In a Urban North Eastern City.
.
.
.

.
BOTTOM LINE : Undergraduate studies in America is insanely expensive , and should not be undertaken by the financially handicapped ; Too many stories of out of status, and incessant transfers to community colleges have become the Norm. If possible, Go to a nice private school like Covenant University in Nigeria, get good grades and then come for Graduate studies, which is a whole lot pocket friendly.

Albertone:
Hello everyone,I want to start my university education in the US.I just want to start all my preparations from the scratch.I will like to know the budget so as to prepare my parents starting from now on.These are my questions:
1.How much is the amount of money that I will need to start my preparations from the begining in Nigeria?
2.Apart from the tution fees,how much will I need in US for my upkeep,bills,accommodation and taxes,e.t.c for a year?
Thanks in advance.

Undergrad or Post Grad

Pearl93:
Hello. I am also going to Texas A and M commerce. Congratulations on getting the Visa. We should hook up

woooah... some tinder sh*t goin' on 'round here

TWoods:
Lol I’ve noticed a habit. People who are approved a visa and who share their stories here, ALWAYS make sure to tell us how many people were denied before their interview. Why is that?

Feel Good Psychology; Hero Bias ; Retrospective Bias; and most of all to proof of "FAVOUR". ... it would be very sad to conquer the great Walter carrington and not come out with stories of unWavering Bravery. Valiance, and extreme wisdom

decide:
Hi everyone,

Please i am a silent follower and I have learnt a lot with the fam., but wants to know if 3.7/5.0 Msc GPA can help me secure PhD admission in U.S.
Hoping to write GRE and Toefl later.

No No No.. at best, this GPA will get him a PhD admission at low tier schools where frustration will eat very deep into his soul, considering that he has no publications In high rated journals. He should remedy the GPA with an MSc, and then proceed for a doctorate.
PS: I speak from the STEM perspective where PhD's are mostly funded , Non-funded Humanities can accept that GPA (But paying for a PhD na correct Gbese)

peacettw:
Terribly disappointed

why

Chidinho10:
Yeah, almost all STEM PhDs are fully funded. That's something we all know
But not all Masters degrees (even in STEM) are fully funded ... Thats what my emphasis is
So it's wrong to generalize that all courses (even STEM) offers opportunities for full funding ... Thats my assertion

As a PhD holder cum researcher, when someone like Twoods mentions Graduate degree, he's automatically referring to a PhD. As a Doctoral student in the sciences, you work for the university (very intensively, and you're not allowed to do anything else), hence the research body must reward you with a small token of the research grant. the same expectations are not granted to MSc students, who may not want to tread the treacherous path of the frustrated academic

Chidinho10:
You are right but not all courses give your "full funding and stipends". So if my course does not give "full funding and stipends", it will be wise for me to seek alternative funding opportunities rather than have fake hope of getting the "full funding and stipends". Your assertion is valid but it doesn't work for all courses - not even all STEM courses.

Full Funding and stipend Mr.Twoods was talking about concerns a PhD. There's a warning everyone on academia stackexchange Gives " NEVER PAY FOR A SCIENCE PHD".

bboy07:
.

, you're. of lying after all.. I've modified my post, let me cc Ymodulus.

bboy07:
I am not a scam o, u can come to canaanland and ask about me. I uploaded my pics earlier but it keeps getting deleted. I don't believe in begging but this one pass Me. Pls pray you don't ever find yourself in the kinda situation I am in right now. I was a public administration student in UNN with reg no. 2012/182452. Dropped out in second year which is the most painful experience in my life. You don't know how difficult life is for me now don't be so quick to use hasty generalisation to conclude say all na scam. Just like the arguments on this thread with Twoods, are all Nigerians bad and dishonest. Not all blacks are into crime either am just a victim of circumstances beyond my control. That's why I came on here to ask for help, this is the only place we Nigerians home and abroad
help each other with information to succeed in all aspects of life so what would I gain to come here and scam a fellow Nigerian like me.

Dude, There is one lesson you obviously have not learned on your stay on this earth, and that is "THERE ARE WORSE TRAGEDIES THAN YOURS".
EDIT: you're not lying.

TWoods:
Visas, visas, visas... a word of advice... those wishing to study in the United States should do so now, likely there will be changes to the h1b and stem opt programs in 2018.

Who has pdf versions of pacesetter novels Thanks!

what of peeps who are yet to graduate

janellemonae:
Olamide did not flop.
Stadiums are really big and no artiste has ever filled one in naija. He's the only one dts even tried it. He had a huge crowd which I'm sure was bigger dn the one at his OLIC last year. Pple should see the pictures from the stage and not the ones of the empty bleachers.

He didn't flop abeg. He's even having another show at Eko hotel on the 30th.

Mr man, Phyno filled an entire stadium with a little crowd outside the gate, so save your excuses.

ecoleco:
Welcome back Ecoleco!

Hoping that this place is sane enough to give helpful tips to genuine people.

Watching...

This place has gone on without your "genuine" tips and will definitely go on without your "genuine tips to genuine people"

The biggest problem is that this question assumed that all 2 Billion + men in the world want one thing

Pbst0887:
?
Vo: kindly ensure there's a significant change in your application before coming back.

Northeastern is very nice school, and I'm pretty confused as to what the problem is here; but I highly suspect that it is your sponsors profile. The profile really doesn't match the financial weight of the school. did you apply yourself or was it done by an agent?. Forget about application for now and restart the whole process next year, ,and preferably visit EducationUSA, they have a consulting session at the embassy for intending students.

Exciton:
Yeah. I've also noticed most people drifted into law (oil and gas law) and economics/finance while the "engineers" went into management. Apart from that, we have had writers and you have to agree that some have been really good at it (e.g. Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe etc). So it looks like it might just have been lack of childhood exposure and a lack of proper teachers to thoroughly teach the basics. From our daily Naija news, you can see that some people are trying to "invent" stuff but lack knowledge.

Sorry my thoughts are a bit shitty at the moment... lots of drinks

Exciton:
I can easily explain why we never do well at the IMO because I first saw the questions when I was at Secondary school and also couldn't solve a full question. Look at our foremost math competition in Nigeria: Cowbell. It's basically EASY plug and play speed math. Nothing more. It doesn't involve any complex problem solving skill. And I watched a movie about the training of kids for the IMO. I assure you, there's not a SINGLE secondary school teacher that can teach our kids number theory and the likes that's a necessary pre-requisite to solve most IMO level problems.

The reason we perform so poorly at the IMO is simply because we have no one to teach our kids the tools needed to solve those kinda problems. It's nothing intrinsic. That I am 100% sure of.

they actually get trained my professors (some non-nigerian) at least 6 months before travel date ... I also tried .. but got cut off during qualifiers

Exciton:
As you said, elites with access to wealth and good education. Only a tiny percentage of the people would ever develop an interest in the hard sciences not to speak of being so good at it as to invent stuff. Not hard to see why none of the Elite's kids have gone on to become inventors. The very few who manage to become really good never come back to Nigeria anyways.

However, of late, I have become very interested in the history of high level science education in the colonial times to have a fuller picture but there's hardly any information available. I know the indians + pakistani, Japanese and chinese already had knowledge of hardcore modern math and physics pre-1960 thanks to the British. The question is: what sort of education we're we getting during the colonial period?

a lot of biographies and pre-civil war writings shows that a lot of Nigerians drifted more towards the arts and humanities, the few in the sciences were almost all gone by the end of babangida's SAP. A simple example, that I want to give is the International Mathematics Olympiad; save for south Africa and North Africa that fields white contestants, No african country has won a single medal except for Nigeria's not so deserved bronze medal in '11(dude answered only one question, the easiest). These students are supposedly picked through rigorous competition and are given hard core math drills, yet for some reason they are never able to answer one single question at the IMO. The situation becomes worse in the international Physics Olympiad where all the African contestants routinely score zero. Same story in the ICho, The informatics Olympiad. The situation is aptly described in Feynman's memoir when he visited Brazil and complained that not a single person was learning science there even though they excelled in class. The average African, save for a few like you , have not and will never know the joys of science. it's somehow not just in most of us.

Exciton:
I think you implicitly exaggerate the extent of the level of our (and other sub-saharan) civilization as at the time of contact. Apart from the nothern empires (Sokoto and Bornu-Kanemi due to trade with arabs), we were at the level of subsistence economy, not even large scale agrarian, zero concept of wages nor knowledge of the wheel, no written language etc just as the article said. Till date, I don't think yoruba has up to 5 words for colors... that's how bad it is. There's simply no way we could have gone through all those stages (dark ages, Renaissance etc) in such a short time (100-200 years) without their help. We weren't ready when they left.

I think we could have improved if they stayed. I think the reason we have remained backward is cultural. I think we are now stuck in survival mode and there's so much emphasis on making money to get by so we have no time to be curious and explore the world around us. Our culture might have fully evolved if we mingled much longer with them (assuming no apartheid, but that's not a guarantee because they weren't as morally superior as they were technically advanced).

True, but I don't think survival mode has inhibited any curiosity; amongst out elite who have gone to schools I'm western societies, hardly do we see any who had science lab in their garages, rapid self development in tech (e.g palmer luckey et al), go on into the hard sciences and at least do one awesome thing with daddy's money; instead a large portion of them have become regular rehab Tennant's and prefer to wallow In self deceit in shyte like African leaders training etc. if those with the money, western exposure, and training in the best places in the world that have given us Nobel prize aficionados and Silicon valley giants, can't at least do something useful, then the problem is neither culture nor survival mode.

Exciton:
Okay, to be clear, you didn't like the article for the writing style but not for the uncomfortable truths: that cultures aren't equal - some are more advanced and better than others, colonialism was inevitable because of the huge gap in complexity of our cultures with respect to theirs, most African countries shouldn't have had independence that early until a good number of people were educated enough for democracy to work properly etc.

Yeah, just the writing style made me iffy. Honestly I still think even if they stayed up until the 21st century, nothing would have changed either. Our historical timeline obviously did not show any signs of cerebral or mental positive evolution. While the world went through the dark ages, Renaissance, enlightenment; somehow we were very content with the Grinding stone, which we used for a f*cking millennia. Our ancestors didn't question the status quo, they never wandered outside in curiosity, they were just content with eating, marrying and increasing the population faster than one another.

Exciton:
I now see why you disagree with the article I shared some time ago. Political correctness.

There's simply no nice and gentle way of telling people they're ignorant and wallow in intellectual squalor. Just look at the quality of news/discussion in Naija social media, the sort of shallow [sexual] jokes that gets Nigerians laughing on Twitter and Instagram, the constant use of "African culture" [which is nothing but ignorance and anti-intellectualism dressed in 'iro and buba' of culture] to oppose learning, liberalism and development etc etc. If we don't face facts and work hard to gain proper scientific and political knowledge, we will never develop.

I didn't like the article also, but for the reason that the writer was just zig zagging round the whole issue without structure, the writer should spend a few weeks on the economist or WaPo and see how lengthy articles can be written in style.

Drocks:
Thanks for the advice bro, but I want to tell you that I am going to get the visa, then come back here and share the testimony.

6*64000 == 384000 NGN == $1050.24. Unless you want your total visa fees to add up to a comprehensive health insurance plan, I would ask that you don't bother to apply anymore. Forget motivational talk, you have been marked with serious immigrant intent, or placed on a medium term ban. 64000 NGB is not beans in this economy. turn your sail elsewhere!!.

.

ekiee:
Nothing they happun, e just depend on the the exact reasons. you tell the VO, just know you would be asked
Let your OT be strong

NYSC isn't an admission requirement anywhere in Trumpland hence the consular has no business with it, so no questions asked

oluwadamilare26:
I have nothing to say to you! From your words I know the kinda person you are.

indeed o ye pharisee, after you lots come to NL and glean the forum of information, you start pandering WhatsApp group of foolishness. Shame on you!!!!

oluwadamilare26:
Join the chat dot whatsapp dot com together with rest

justwise, please ban this ungrateful son of Beelzebub who thinks his snazzy WhatsApp group is better than the wealth of information he got here.

Mstrsheikh:
DISCLAIMER: This are from my personal thoughts and observation, I do not expect everyone to accept it, read it and take whatever points you seem useful and leave out the ones you deem as rubbish.

Well, thank you for this disclaimer, because I get very iffy, when people suddenly become Visa experts after landing an F-1

morgandy:
Good evening house please EZEIGBO1OFIMO can we talk on phone?

unfortunately; No sir.

omohayek:
It's funny how those without the level of education required to evaluate how much education is worth are the same ones who are most enthusiastic about this utterly ridiculous post! One can never lose money catering to the vanity of Nigeria's less educated and less intelligent!

As someone already mentioned, uneducated people are only more "successful" in "business" in poor third-world countries where "business" doesn't go beyond the buying and selling of unprocessed commodities, or mass importation of low-quality consumer goods (aka "container" ). Let's see how far anyone will get in automobile or airplane manufacturing, heavy engineering, pharmaceutical development or financial portfolio management without serious education! How many uneducated people have even a prayer of even breaking into software development, machine-learning, quantum computing or genetic engineering, let alone thriving in such environments? Where do you think Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates both started their businesses? At Harvard University! And where do you think Elon Musk was when he first decided to become an entrepreneur? In a PhD program for Applied Physics at Stanford University! Do these sound like uneducated people to any sane person?

The real problem with Nigeria isn't that its educated people are any less good at "business" than the uneducated ones. The real issue is that Nigeria is so badly led and so rife with corruption that educated people aren't able to grow the sorts of businesses that would make proper use of their skills; that's why the same "overeducated" Nigerians are able to thrive once they get to America, Canada, Europe or other such places. Why should people with curiosity and intelligence be content with "business" like filling containers with second-hand goods in Hong Kong and bringing them into Nigeria? Of course the uneducated will be better at such menial "business" - at least until it is automated by the educated so it too can be handled over the internet!

if only NL had a give gold option like reddit, I would give you a billion of them.

safarigirl:
Precious Eze is an idiot

That is why she can sit down in her face me I slap you apartment and write trash about people making a living.

I was even concerned that Patience Ozokwor went for the premiere of Wedding Party 2 without make-up and was lookin like an abused woman and this uncircumcised goat is complaining that she put make-up in the movie

We need to start exporting these idiots in Nigeria to Libya

you haff develop bad mouth pinish

ekiee:
Brothers, I got admitted to FIU, and visa approved, but I wasn't given funding, but as a hustling boy, I intend proceeding with the program, my questions. Goes thus
1, can I get a job at miami, that I can confidently save 3k a month, I have skills in painting and interior decorations
2, to people to FIU, I read my books well and get a high GPA, can this make me applicable for a TA,RA,GA or grants, as I really need this masters certificate,
Bros TWOOD, abeg don't start with me abeg, I'm just a Nigerian boy looking for greener pastures

This is why twoods hammers that you plan and not just waka go amelika
1. As an international Student, you're entitled to 20 hours per week of work, on Campus; Anything outside this is illegal, and may earn you persona non grata status by Department of Homeland Security. Most Jobs on campus are minimum wage. So, it is IMPOSSIBLE to save $3K a month from minimum wage campus jobs
2. FIU is a school whose total endowment is not enough to fund one Lab at MIT , so I highly doubt if they have scholarship packages. If you can get a Co-signer, there may be some loan packages you can obtain, but Federal Aid is off limits.
The only available option Right Now, Is to resume and immediately transfer to a dirt cheap community college ( it is fully legal to do so) and transfer your i-20. If you had some Mad ass coding skills, all these advise wouldn't have been necessary; just 3-4 freelance jobs would fetch you $4K +. . The life of an undocumented immigrant is a hard one sir

k199192:
Me sef tire for the guy. Wetin concern ezeigbo1ofimo and futa. Come to think of it, I am impressed with your sudden change. I once asked you a question and you told me about your signature. I vex sha but I am glad the way you now respond to questions. Thank you for nothing.

Its Christmas, the season to be jolly