Are there lots of grants which can support students among the research faculty?
Most students begin at NMSU with a state-funded Graduate Assistantship, which includes 10 hours of teaching and 10 hours of research per week. If a student wants to and is qualified, they can start research immediately. The department usually does not expect much research to be done the first semester, since most students are barely getting used to graduate school. By the third year students usually shift to a Research Assistantship (RA) funded by their advisors’ grants, but this does not always happen, depending on individual student progress and the number of students needed to teach classes that particular semester. There are also grants for students, such as the NASA funded Space Grant (which just about everyone from the astronomy department who has ever applied for has received) and the Consortium for Higher Education (CHE) grant for women in the sciences. It is surprisingly easy to get research funding here, which cannot really be said about other departments. There are also some
