How It works

As we said in our main page, the key to success is to identify those professors, who have “fresh” assistantship job openings in hands, then, communicate with these professors directly, send in the application materials as soon as the professors give the “go ahead” sign. But how to identify these professors who have “fresh” assistantship job opennings ?

Because the university website is not controlled by the individual professors, when the professors got some outside funding for the research projects, he/she may need some graduate students to do the research assistantship job, but, since the professor is not in control of the university website, he/she cannot post the assistantship opening info at the university website. However, these days, virtually all the university professors have personal academic websites, for random examples:

http://www.kenrogoff.com/            http://www.dansimons.com/            http://www.kroto.info/

Professors personally control these websites and can upload assistantship info whenever it is available. Most "fresh" assistantship opennings can be found on these websites.

In conclusion most “fresh” assistantship job openings are posted on professor websites, not on university website.  Assistantship jobs posted at professors' websites receive hardly any application because students do not know about them.  This is to say that in order to find the “fresh” assistantship jobs unknown to the general public we need to search over all these professors websites, not the university websites. Unfortunately this is a daunting task, manully impossible, because you must search over tens of thousands of professors websites, and you have to keep searching to see when one comes up, and you need to do it again, and again and again…, since the new job openings could be posted at any time. This very much like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Thanks to the search engine technology (software) and senior computer software engineer in our team, now we can use our computer to conduct a search across the web (here we don’t want to go too far on the technical details, if you are interested in gainning more knowledge on this technology, you can Google it with key words: search engine, web spider, and read this paper). By adjusting the searching algorithms our search engine software can scan over the entire professor websites across the US and Canada, extract and index all the newly updated webpages that have new job postings, this information can be used to guide our students to the right direction in seeking for the financial aid - Graduate Assistantship.