Is Edyssy still a place to upload a resume or post a position?

No. The accounts, resume uploads and the position board closed years ago, and nothing on the restored site collects personal data. What remains is the part people kept asking about: how to find funded professors, how to write to them, and how to read an offer.

Where do the grant records come from?

They are the records Edyssy displayed in 2014, drawn from public federal award data (NSF, NIH, DOE, DOD and others). Amounts and dates are shown as they were listed then. For anything current, search NIH RePORTER or NSF Award Search directly.

Why look at grants instead of program rankings?

Because a funded PhD or research master’s usually means a specific professor is paying you from a specific award. Rankings tell you about a department; a fresh grant tells you who is likely to be hiring a student next year.

I am applying from outside the US. Does any of this apply to me?

Most of it does. Research assistantships are paid from grants regardless of the student’s citizenship, and professors read emails from international applicants every week. The help desk articles flag the places where visas, work-hour limits or tuition rules change the picture.

Your Education Odyssey starts with the money.

Most funded graduate positions exist because one professor won one grant and now needs a student to do the work. Edyssy was built in 2014 around that plain fact. Find who just got funded, read what they plan to do with it, and write to them before the admission season crowds their inbox.

Guides on this page: |

How it works

First, pick a field, not a school. Write down the three or four research questions you would happily spend five years on. That list is your search key for everything that follows.

Then follow the funding. Search grant databases for those topics and note who holds active awards that started in the last year or two. A new award with years left on it is the strongest signal that a lab will need hands. The grant search guide shows how to do this with free federal tools.

Before December, make contact. Read two recent papers from each professor on your shortlist and send a short, specific email. Our sample emails show what that looks like, line by line.

By April, compare real offers. An offer is a stipend, a tuition waiver, fees, health insurance, summer support and a number of guaranteed years. Put them side by side with the offer calculator.

From the help desk

All 13 questions from the Support Center →

Quick guide

For students

Learn the three kinds of assistantship in What are TA/RA/GA?, then build your calendar with the Application DIY kit. If your grades are uneven, read applying with a low GPA before you cross any program off.

For the undecided

Torn between a job offer and a doctorate? The $150K question runs the math honestly. Comparing two admits? Use the Purdue vs USC worked example as a template.

Before you write to a professor

Agricultural Research Service Administrator Chavonda Jacobs-Young speaking to a group of fellowship students — ARS Administrator Chavonda Jacobs-Young talks to Wallace-Carver fellows, college students in paid USDA research fellowships, Washington, D.C., August 2017. USDA photo via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Two things decide whether a cold email gets an answer, and neither of them is your GPA.

The first is whether you can say in one sentence what you want to work on. “Machine learning” is a field. “Spotting crop disease in drone images when you only have a few hundred labeled photos” is a project a professor can picture you doing in their lab. If your shortlist of questions is still at the field level, spend an evening on how to choose a science research topic you can actually finish, then match what you end up with against the awards in the grant search.

The second is for applicants from outside the US. A professor can want you and still lose you to the graduate school, which checks English scores before anyone weighs research fit. Many programs post a TOEFL iBT minimum somewhere between 80 and 100, and teaching assistantships often come with a separate spoken-English requirement. Find the exact number on the program page. If you sit close to the line, read up on what TOEFL and IELTS scores mean in a US application before you hit send. Then open the sample emails and write yours.

The 2014 graduate engineering board

Edyssy kept its own rank tables, mixing the US News order with Shanghai (ARWU) subject positions so you could see a school from several angles at once. Here is the top of the engineering list as it stood in 2014. The full table and how to read it are one click away.

#	University	ARWU world (2013)	ARWU engineering
1	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	4	1
2	Stanford University	2	2
3	University of California Berkeley	3	3
4	California Institute of Technology	6	20
5	Carnegie Mellon University	52	8
6	Georgia Institute of Technology	101+	9
7	University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign	25	5
8	Purdue University West Lafayette	57	10

Where Edyssy came from

2013A founder notices that students finish a whole semester without knowing the people next to them, and that professors pick graduate students from whoever happens to apply.
2014Edyssy.com launches as a search engine for assistantships, professors, grants and fellowships, plus a Support Center answering applicants’ questions.
2015The team ships ClassMade, a campus app for class schedules, study chat and student clubs, on iOS, Android, Windows and the web.
TodayThe search engine and the app are gone. The ideas and the questions are back, rewritten for current admissions. Read the full story.

Questions people ask about this site

Is Edyssy still a place to upload a resume or post a position?: No. The accounts, resume uploads and the position board closed years ago, and nothing on the restored site collects personal data. What remains is the part people kept asking about: how to find funded professors, how to write to them, and how to read an offer.
Where do the grant records come from?: They are the records Edyssy displayed in 2014, drawn from public federal award data (NSF, NIH, DOE, DOD and others). Amounts and dates are shown as they were listed then. For anything current, search NIH RePORTER or NSF Award Search directly.
Why look at grants instead of program rankings?: Because a funded PhD or research master’s usually means a specific professor is paying you from a specific award. Rankings tell you about a department; a fresh grant tells you who is likely to be hiring a student next year.
I am applying from outside the US. Does any of this apply to me?: Most of it does. Research assistantships are paid from grants regardless of the student’s citizenship, and professors read emails from international applicants every week. The help desk articles flag the places where visas, work-hour limits or tuition rules change the picture.