SL2College

By Sahan T.M Dissanayake*

Continued from last week…

(4) Funding opportunities

As I mentioned earlier, I received a scholarship that covered my tuition and in addition as part of the F1 visa I was allowed to work on campus. At Ohio Wesleyan, international students on a F-1 visa were only allowed to work up to 10 hours a week during semester time but it was possible to work 40 hours a week during the break, including the spring, thanksgiving and winter. (In addition many international students applied for an Economic Hardship Work Permit that allowed them to work off campus. The University assisted the students with these applications, but your financial circumstances would have had to change from when you applied for the visa, since you have to show sufficient funding in your visa application.) Given that I had previous work experience and programming and web design I was able to find work fairly easily on campus. My first year I worked for the alumni office as part of the group that contacted alumni to ask for donations. At the end of my first year I was promoted to the role of a supervisor and this allowed me to work more for a higher pay. In addition to that, I worked at the University Library, Chaplains Office, Information Systems and I also created websites for different campus groups and organizations over the course of four years. During the summers I worked for the Upward Bound program, a program designed to help high school students from low income neighborhoods to get into college, where I taught classes and worked as a TA for an Economics Professor. I also worked for a gifted and talented summer camp for 12-14 year old kids. Between all these jobs , especially after the first year, I managed to earn a considerable part of the money I needed for my lodging and board.  Many international students also work for residence halls, as a resident assistant, which typically comes with a rent reduction and sometimes even a meal plan.

In my senior year I moved out of the university residence halls and got an apartment that was considerably cheaper (As a residential liberal arts university, Ohio Wesleyan prefers that students live on campus and they only allow a small number to live off campus).

My experience in finding on-campus employment was similar to those of many international students at Ohio Wesleyan as well as my friends at other colleges in the US. It is important to pursue opportunities that you might find and to talk to both faculty members and staff who might have available positions.

5) Internship opportunities

I was interested in pursuing a PhD and therefore wanted to get research experience. Even though Ohio Wesleyan is a small liberal arts institution, similar to many other small liberal arts institutions, it has an active research agenda and encourages students to get involved in research. My first summer I applied for a Summer Research Assistantship position and received an opportunity to work with a Physics  professor on modeling Josephson Junctions. This work later resulted in a journal article and I was able to present the work at a research celebration and at a physics conference.

In my senior year I applied to and obtained a Student Assistantship Position, a competitive position given to senior students to work under the mentoring of a staff or faculty member. I worked under the Director of Web services and got involved in getting various campus units to create and update their websites.

I did not pursue other internships, mainly because I was working on campus and was also focused on trying to apply for graduate schools. Many of my friends at Ohio Wesleyan sometimes did internships with faculty members who were involved with industry and sometimes in other cities in large firms and companies  depending on their interests. There are a lot of opportunities for internships and though they tend to be competitive, good students who put in the time and effort to look and apply almost always find something that they like.

In the US, many companies see internships as a way to find good permanent employees. If you are interested in obtaining a job in industry after getting your undergraduate degree, internships can pave the way as many companies hire their interns and even if you do not get hired at the company that you are interning in, the experience increases the possibility of finding employment in other similar firms.

Many Universities and Colleges have Career Centers that can help in identifying opportunities for internships and jobs and also assist with preparing your application material. The Ohio Wesleyan career services office had a large database of alumni and locations where past students were hired that current students could use when looking for internships and jobs.

6) The Liberal Arts Experience

I applied to liberal arts programs to experience learning a wide variety of subjects. During my time at Ohio Wesleyan, in addition to my computer science and mathematics classes I took classes in philosophy and psychology and considered either majoring or minoring in both. In addition to that, I took classes in religious studies, music and these all contributed to an education that was well rounded.

In addition to taking a wide variety of classes, the liberal arts experience provides opportunities to grow as an individual. Ohio Wesleyan as many cultural houses, called small living units, where 10-15 students who are passionate about a common cause live together. Many international students lived in these houses which include the Foreign Language House, Women’s House, Tree House, (For a full list see, http://reslife.owu.edu/smallLivingUnits.html).

Along with another of my friends from Sri Lanka, I served as a Buddhist Peer Minister, where we worked with an inter-faith group to celebrate culture and diversity within the university. There are also many opportunities to travel abroad either for a short period or for a semester.  In my second year, I applied and was selected to be part of a Spring Break Mission Week group that went to Peru for 10 days. We raised funds over a semester to fund travel and worked with orphanages, day care centers, volunteers while in Peru. I still see this as an incredible part of my time at Ohio Wesleyan. After I graduated, a former classmate and I led a group of 10 undergraduate students, which included two students from Sri Lanka on a 10 days Spring Break Mission Week as part of the Appalachian Service Project, where we rebuild houses and worked closely with low income residents in Kentucky. In addition to taking a wide variety of classes, a liberal arts education consists of many experiences like this.

The classes that significantly changed my future career goals were the economics classes that I took at Ohio Wesleyan. I had never studied economics thoroughly and loved the first economics class that I took and kept taking more and more classes. I loved physics and computer science because they were fields that tried to explain the physical system of the world that we live in.  Economics is similar because it involves using mathematical models but they are applied to describe and understand the human system that we live in. As I was getting ready to graduate I was very interested in studying economics and public policy as a way of understanding and guiding the evolution of the human system or society. At the same time I still felt a strong passion for continuing my education in computer science. I had conducted an independent study on artificial intelligence and was interested in pursuing graduate studies in artificial intelligence.

6) After graduation.

In my senior year I applied to a few select computer science graduate programs at the same time I was offered a job to take over maintaining the University web systems as my supervisor during my Student Assistantship was  promoted.  Unfortunately my initial application to graduate school was not successful and I realized I would need to apply to a wide range of programs and I therefore gladly took the offer to work at Ohio Wesleyan as it gave me the additional time to  apply to graduate programs. (Since this was after graduation, I applied for OPT - Optional Practical Training, which allows students on F-1 visa to work for up to a year)

While I was working,  I redid my applications and applied to a large number of graduate programs in computer science, public policy and international studies and economics. By this time my first choice would have been to go to a graduate program in public policy or international studies. I received admission from two computer science schools and four economics schools and had a very tough decision to make with regard to where I wanted to pursue my graduate studies. 

*Sahan T.M Dissanayake is a PhD student studying Environmental Economics and Mathematical Modeling at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign. A future article will discuss Sahan’s graduate student experience.

Article published on: May 1 (Part 1) and May 8 (Part 2), 2011

SL2College would like to thank Sahan Dissanayake for sharing an account of his undergraduate experience to inspire other potential Sri Lankan students.

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