Up until this point, I got rejected by UMass Amherst and Emory University. For Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), I was offered for Master's. Considering that CMU is one of the top schools in CS along with other well known universities e.g. Stanford, MIT, I really want to go there. However, for Master's there is no certainty in funding. Financially, it's almost impossible to afford $18.000 dollar a year just for tuition fee. I have to sell my house in Salatiga to obtain such a lot of money! (which is crazy).
In terms of academic path, honestly I don't mind to do Master's, as the credits obtained in Master's can be transferred to PhD. In fact, according to one of the PhD student , many of Master students in CMU continue to PhD program. Indeed, the PhD program is extremely competitive. In terms of academic excellence, I would say the admission committee would prefer a CMU student or other students from well known university with the GPA of 3.6 rather than, say, a graduate from a university in Indonesia with the GPA of 3.9. So, what can I do is to compete from research experience e.g. publish a paper in a difficult conference, then I think my chance to be accepted will be increased. However, this is difficult to achieve, research is just a rigorous activity and you really need to focus.
The bottomline is, I think I have to close my dream to go to CMU T_T
From the Fulbright program, I got accepted for PhD in University of Delaware. I never heard about this university and I do not know whether the research group in IR/NLP is active. In addition to that, the Scholarship from Fulbright only covers about $40000. Yes, the scholarship is very limited. Therefore, I would have a shortfall around $7000. Financially, it's still manageable, however I'm still not sure about the academic & research quality in the University of Delaware.
So... Should I go for PhD now or push myself to the limit this year and re-apply again for the school that I actually wanted?
