<p>You would think that after making it all the way to the point of being able to consider Grad school that one would have it all figured out. It seems that navigating through college is endlessly confusing.</p>
<p>How can you discover if what you are interested in is actually offered anywhere? The study of ancient symbols is what info is needed on.</p>
<p>Has anyone ever heard of a graduate level course of study relating to this?
Would it be an art degree, history, or anthropology focus?</p>
<p>The other confusion centers around the possible ways to pay for said degree. Is there any government money available for students at a graduate level? Are there grants or scholarships around or is all that just for those getting four year degrees?</p>
<p>It seems like whatever financial aid that is out there would be getting handed to those that are getting degree’s in those fields that would be considered more immediately useful to the human race, such as medicine, research, and engineering type stuff. </p>
There’s no general purpose government funding for grad students. However, most PhD students (at least the ones I know) do receive funding in the form of a tuition waiver and a stipend for living expenses from some source. How that happens depends on the field. Teaching assistantships (funded by the academic department), research assistantships (funded by faculty’s research grants) and fellowships (funded by the university or external organizations) seem like the most common sources of funding.</p>
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Quite to the contrary, actually. There’s almost no aid for degrees with a high expected salary (medicine, law, professional engineering, etc).</p>
<p>It sounds like you will need to do some research, in a few areas, to get those queries answered. Discovering what available funding is out there from different schools will probably help to decide what school would be the best to go to. The more that you find out, the better prepared you will be to make a choice. See what grants and fellowships are out there and then see what you have to do to apply/qualify. There is probably a whole slew of people doing the same thing.</p>
<p>Discovering if what you want to study is an actual possibility will mean research of a different sort. Studying ancient symbols is hooked up to a few different disciplines and is probably a part of a degree that encompasses more. You will run into a lot of art history with this because it is all art. there will also be the study of a variety of religions, because symbols are all based in religion somewhere. </p>
<p>Once you have started to learn about the possibilities, you will be able to narrow down what you are interested in studying, It sounds very interesting.</p>
<p>What I would recommend for finding programs that will be relevant to you: Using Google Scholar, find some research papers on your topic of interest that are exciting to you/the kind of thing that you are interested. Then, look at the authors/institutions where that research was done, and find the programs that the papers came from. That would probably help you identify specific programs that would address your interests.</p>
<p>There is generally funding for the sciences, including engineering and biomedical sciences (but not medical school itself). There may be funding in humanities and social sciences, but it tends not to be as common and it often requires more teaching commitments (TA vs RA).</p>