What does the Graduate Student Grants Service (GSGS) do?
GSGS helps University of Massachusetts Amherst graduate students identify and apply for fellowships and grants from outside the University; we also provide information services, individual consultations, and a variety of workshops for UMass graduate students.
What types of workshops does GSGS provide?
GSGS does provide departmental workshops, which faculty members can request in our office. We do present both in proposal writing and research methods classes as well as for specific seminars arranged by Graduate Program Directors or other faculty to serve a particular graduate student population. In these workshops we introduce the Community of Science Database (COS) and the Illinois Information Researchers Services (IRIS), talk about the grant seeking process and the common attributes of a fellowship application.
What is COS and IRIS?
UMass Amherst subscribes to these funding databases in order to help graduate students find funding. Both COS and IRIS list federal and non-federal funding opportunities for all levels of academic study and research. You can access these databases by logging on with a UMass account and selecting the database you wish to search.
What is the IRIS Alert Service?
The IRIS alert service allows graduate students to create individual search profiles that are run against the IRIS database. The database then e-mails you funding opportunities that match the specifications in your profile. This is a great service for graduate students.
What is the difference between a scholarship, a fellowship, and a grant?
Scholarship – Refers to financial aid to cover tuition and fees for study, more often at the undergraduate, rather than graduate level. Note however that this term is often used interchangeably with “fellowships” and “grants”.
Fellowship – these are awarded to graduate students based on merit, mostly for professional development through research or project implementation, and occasionally for courses. Fellowships also include basic living expenses.
Grant (or “Grants-in-Aid”) – These are usually awarded to offset costs incurred while carrying out research projects. In general, grants do not cover living expenses.
Are fellowships taxable?
Yes.
What are some suggestions for success?
· First and foremost: Identify your needs.
· Have your advisor or your department backing you. Hopefully, this will spur you to carry on through the searching as well as the application process.
· Give yourself time—we recommend at least 6 months—to find good funding opportunities.
· Do some research on the funding agencies you are considering: go to their web site; find out if there is a contact person; find out what type of proposals are being funded by this particular agency; does your proposal match the funding criteria.
Does any population of graduate students have a funding advantage?
The amount of funding opportunities varies by discipline and the stage of your academic career. There are more funding opportunities for students in the physical and life sciences than there are for students in the humanities. There are more opportunities for entering, PhD, and Postdoctoral students than there are for students who are mid-career. However, these populations have no clear advantage over the other. The greatest advantage any graduate student has over another is his/her ability to write a clear, well thought out funding proposal.
What are some funding opportunities for entering students and/or students who are early in their academic career?
There are many good funding opportunities for these populations. A partial list of some of these opportunities can be found at: http://www.umass.edu/gradschool/gsgs/example.html. Please note that this is only a partial list. Students searching for funding should become familiar with the funding databases COS and IRIS early in their academic careers. Using COS and IRIS will allow students to take a more proactive approach towards finding grants and fellowships.
|
