by Steven Tagle
Five Tips for Applying for Graduate Fellowships and Scholarships
Obtaining scholarships and fellowships for graduate school is more complicated than finding scholarships for an undergraduate degree, and more is expected from your application. This makes sense, given that you are training to be an expert in your field, which will undoubtedly be reflected in your CV and other application materials.
However, before you can prepare a brilliant application, you first need to find scholarships and fellowships to apply for! Both identifying opportunities and applying for them require strategy and work, but once you get the hang of things, the process becomes much less difficult. To guide you in this endeavor, I have five tips for discovering relevant scholarships and fellowships and then submitting a successful application for them.
But first, let me clarify the difference between scholarships and fellowships. Scholarships can support you more broadly in your studies and often come with fewer requirements and expected deliverables from the recipients. Fellowships are usually awarded for research and sometimes involve research requirements or even structured programs. Fellowships are more common in graduate study, because most money at this level is intended to support research.
When exploring your options, pay attention to what stage you are in in your program. This is typically less important for master’s programs, but PhD fellowships and scholarships are usually divided into three broad categories: pre-dissertation stage, dissertation stage, and postdoc for after graduation/early career. Sometimes, the same organization will offer a fellowship for each of these stages, so investigate all your options, and save any information about relevant opportunities for the future.
Table of Contents:
- Start searching for scholarships and fellowships locally.
- Identify your specialization and the stakeholders for that area of study.
- Work smarter, not harder, to expand your scope and increase your chances.
- Learn how to explain your research or practical experience to both specialists and nonspecialists.
- Learn to describe your impact on the academic community and beyond.
1. Start searching for scholarships and fellowships locally.
When looking for available scholarships and fellowships, think locally first, and then expand your search outward. By this, I mean that you should first look within your program, then your university, then your region, then your country, then internationally. This will ensure that you don’t overlook any possible funding. Opportunities within your program might not be well advertised, but they often require less work, and professors and fellow graduate students can help. Reach out to peers and mentors in your area of study to see which scholarships and fellowships they have applied for. Also, make sure to sign up for any university newsletters or social media that might advertise opportunities outside of your department. Also, check the campus resources available to all graduate programs at your school. Regionally, consider local chapters of major professional organizations. For example, the Modern Language Association is the main professional organization for the study of literature, and it has regional chapters that offer additional resources for students in the area. Look also at the webpages and resources for similar university programs. They might advertise local, national, or even international scholarships and fellowships for which you could be eligible but that are not well advertised at your institution. Creatives might be interested in these graduate and post-graduate fellowships.
2. Identify your specialization and the stakeholders for that area of study.
Funding at the graduate level depends significantly on which area you plan to study within your field. For example, the very broad field of engineering encompasses numerous areas, including electrical, computer/software, and chemical. And within these specialties are subspecializations. You might be in a chemical engineering program and work on manufacturing research, while a fellow engineer in your program is focused on nuclear energy. To identify appropriate scholarships and fellowships, you need to have a clear sense of the areas of study you want to focus on and the professional organizations, corporations, government agencies, university departments, and other groups that might be invested in that type of work. This is especially the case if your work could intersect with other fields of study. A good example of this is environmental studies; centers and organizations around the country concentrate on multiple fields that address environmental concerns (e.g., sociology, engineering, legal). Don’t ignore the possibility of funding from these multidisciplinary organizations.
3. Work smarter, not harder, to expand your scope and increase your chances.
At first, applying for scholarships and fellowships might feel like a chore on top of all your other responsibilities. It’s a numbers game, and even the most compelling applicant will need to apply for multiple opportunities to see results. In fact, in a recent trend on social media, academics shared their “failure CVs,” listing all the fellowships and awards they applied for and didn’t get! Once you have completed one or two fellowship applications, though, you will begin to see broad similarities between them, which will allow you to start reusing materials. In the broadest strokes possible, most scholarships/fellowships require some description of your current or planned research project(s) and a CV highlighting your past research experience. Once you have prepared statements on these two issues, you will be able to copy and paste quite a bit when applying to new opportunities.
4. Learn how to explain your research or practical experience to both specialists and nonspecialists.
Keep your audience in mind when drafting your application materials. Some of your application readers will be experts in your specific area of study, but others might be experts in different fields. I recommend preparing two descriptions of your work or research. The first should be for fellow scholars in your research area. It can be very technical and specific. The second should be for readers who are in your field of study but have a different research focus. It should be more understandable to people outside your specialization. Having these two versions on hand will serve you very well when applying.
5. Learn to describe your impact on the academic community and beyond.
Explaining your scholarly impact is an important component of most scholarship and fellowship applications, though what this means will vary by opportunity. For some applications, your impact refers to the intervention you are making in a field of study (e.g., “People have studied X, but no one studied Y until I came along!”). For other applications, it could refer to the real-world impact your work will have on a societal issue (e.g., “My engineering work on nuclear power safety will give the United States better options for energy consumption.”). If you can describe your work in terms of impact, you will be well prepared to tackle any application.
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