Grants & Fellowships

Nationally-competitive external grants and fellowships provide valuable financial support, and the prestige associated with these awards can boost the careers of graduate students and postdocs. Events offered by OPD teach graduate students and postdocs tips and tools to strategically search for relevant funding and help participants craft competitive, cohesive funding proposals.

Check out our upcoming grants workshops!

Luis Aguirre

"Going through the preparation of writing a good grant application always forces you to become more acquainted with your own research, either by finding new sources or thinking of new questions while you’re writing down your thoughts. It also improved the quality of my communication and I can now talk to people inside and outside of my field with much greater ease."
– Luis Aguirre (PhD candidate, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology)

Additional Resources

There are several searchable databases to help you find external funding opportunities. Spend some time experimenting with these databases, as each has various strengths and weaknesses. If your first search isn’t successful, try altering your search parameters, then try the same search using one of the other databases on this list.

  • The Fellowship Finder from the University of Illinois is a great general-purpose tool. Funding opportunities are specific to graduate students and post doctoral students and you can filter results based on a variety of factors. Disciplinary categories are quite broad so use keywords or filters strategically to narrow your search results.
  • The UCLA Graduate & Postdoctoral Extramural Support database is particularly useful when searching for post doctoral student funding. This database also includes a wide range of disciplines/fields, and you can filter results based on a variety of factors. 

 

Fulbright U.S. Student Program 

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program supports research, English teaching abroad, or graduate study in more than 140 countries worldwide. Application support from the Graduate School Office of Professional Development will help you develop a competitive application. Visit our Fulbright Information Page for more details on the application support and internal deadlines for current graduate students. 

Questions?

hbauerclapp [at] grad [dot] umass [dot] edu (Contact us for more information) on OPD’s Grants and Fellowships workshops and assistance.