Clemson University's PhD in Economics program is a 4-year program that I paid for myself for 2.5 years ($280,000 in tuition and $450,000 in living expenses), and I passed the qualifying exam for my PhD without being given any funding, so I don't know what happened.
As soon as the school started, our professor Curtis Simon told me that there was no funding, I said I had to transfer and he said I could only go to University of Georgia or University of Houston, I don't know if it was discrimination. Why can't a normal person go to a university like Harvard? Especially if you are self-funded.
I heard that Prof Curtis Simon is mentally ill, I think it's okay, I don't discriminate him. But then I went to him for a scholarship, and he discriminated against me and said I was mentally ill instead.
But now I have suffered a big loss, if I had dropped out at the beginning and not gone to this school, how good it would have been. Now I have 2.5 years of self-funding and 1.5 years of half-award, but I found an RA job in the Department of Public Health first, and Professor Curtis Simon sensed that I had found a job opportunity and gave me the scholarship beforehand.
Later, even if I was given a half-award, it was for a very old professor, Gerald Dwyer, to do RA, which seriously affected the pace of my doctoral dissertation research. There are also students from Falun Gong who are also under this teacher, so it is very dark. I also felt that this teacher was racist before, and I was persuaded to come back by my Falun Gong classmates, and then I felt that he was delaying graduation indefinitely, which made me want to commit suicide. What bad luck!
But the reason also lies in my family. I was going to drop out of school after 1 year and return to my home country to retake the GRE and TOEFL to apply for scholarships, but it was my stepmother who forced me to continue my studies.
If you don't have money to spend, I don't think you should study for a PhD at your own expense, because it's hard to find a job, I applied to many American companies after graduation, none of them are willing to accept me, and now I've been back to China for 5 years, almost in a deserted state of unemployment.
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