Wanted: Wealthy Patron(s) to Fund My Last Year of Dissertation Work
No one ever said that being a doctoral student was easy, especially at the Graduate Center. GC students lack the financial support that private institutions with large endowments, such as New York University or Columbia University, generally provide to their doctoral students to complete their graduate work. Some people say that this disadvantage actually works in our favor as we are forced to become go-getters who push ourselves to the limits. I have been told that taking on multiple jobs in teaching, communications, office work – anything to survive, pay the rent, and invest in a few libations to sustain myself through the darkest hours of graduate school – in the end makes me more attractive on the job market. This is all well and good but it certainly does not help me reach my end goal: finishing the damned dissertation.
One solution is to apply for funding: funding for research, funding for travel, funding to allow you to spend most of your week writing rather than running around from campus to campus. For those of us in the social “soft” sciences, there is a natural disadvantage to the grant/fellowship application process in that each year there are thousands of applicants against whom we compete to win the few coveted fellowship or grant opportunities available in our respective fields. Moreover, for most of us, there are very few large fellowships on offer (defined as those of $16,000 or more), so too often we are competing with everyone in the social sciences. Word on the street is that within the “hard” sciences funding is much easier to obtain and not as cut-throat a process.
If you must travel overseas for your research, then funding applications take on a much greater importance. This is an added factor of stress because with the way that the dollar is behaving, it will now require greater sums of money to fund that research trip to the archives and libraries abroad. Best case scenario: even if you were selected to receive a $2,000 research grant, your purchasing power just went down the drain. Let’s be realistic – with the dollar’s exchange rate at 2£ or 1.5€ – your $2,000 grant just became 1,362€. It is no longer only 30 cents for each photocopy you’re making at the National Library, but now 45 cents. This adds up when you have to make tons of copies because you do not have the luxury of a two-month long research trip as the funding you have received will barely cover three or four weeks abroad. Anyhow, I digress…
The procedure of applying for funding is long and convoluted. The first step is to identify fellowship or grant opportunities that seem like they might fall within the parameters of your dissertation work. There are programs that are a God-given fit with your work and then there are those that require creative ingenuity in rewording your dissertation proposal to meet their guidelines. One of the best ways to start finding funding sources is to check with your department, as oftentimes announcements of competitions and fellowships are sent to the Program Assistants. My department – History – has a terrific Program Assistant who forwards all funding opportunities the department receives to our email listserv. Another avenue of inquiry is the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs, which has several resources for students seeking to identify funding. http://web.gc.cuny.edu/orup/funding.html. Professional associations and societies that you may belong to will also generally have some form of funding for doctoral student members or be able to point you in the right direction, and lastly, never under-estimate your advisers, who generally have a good idea as to the main sources of funding within their disciplines.
To say that the process of applying to these financial sources is mind-numbing is an understatement. Once you have identified a host of fellowships or grants to which you wish to apply, you have to get organized. Each application differs from the others, quite often times in the most nuanced of ways. Take for example three of the major fellowships to which I applied for this year: one required a two-page proposal, one wanted five pages, the third sought a 10-page proposal – and of course each institution wanted the documents formatted differently! This is just the tip of the iceberg, however, not only are page lengths and formats different from application to application, but so, too, are the supporting documents that you are required to submit. Some desire one letter of recommendation, others two or three; some wish to see official transcripts of every institution of higher learning that you attended while others are content merely with graduate school transcripts. Lucky is the applicant who encounters an application that does not require a graduate transcript. Look, I understand the merits of showing the selection committee my grades and what types of coursework I have completed over the years; but I nearly had to take out a loan to pay for each $7 official Graduate Center transcript I was required to send. In an application year where I have sent off over 10 funding applications, that $7 per official transcript really adds up. Fiscally counterproductive to what I’m trying to accomplish, yes?
Thus, it helps to be overly-efficient in your organization; the long and colorful spreadsheets of due dates and necessary application materials could impress even the biggest honcho on Wall Street. It is even better if you have a combination of excellent advisor(s) and recommenders who earnestly believe in you and recognize the odds of the system that you are daring to take head-on; those who are willing to write one letter of recommendation after another – even when there is a very small turn-around time as you just discovered a great funding opportunity five days before the deadline!
One word on deadlines: application submission season opens in late August and ends in January and February, so again, being organized and cogniscent of which deadlines are rapidly approaching is important. Don’t let a funding opportunity pass you by because you “forgot” about a deadline!
Writing the proposal is the next significant step (after procrastinating), which can be even more painstaking than all of the preparatory work. As I have yet to win any major funding competitions, I am perhaps not the best authority as to what constitutes a good proposal. I can tell you, however, that concise, to-the-point introductions that strongly state your topic and why it is important are vital. Be sure that you read over that specific application’s guidelines as quite often they state exactly what it is that they want you to tell them. Oftentimes you may spend hours writing and rewriting the same paragraph over and over, trying to get it just ‘right.’ At other times, usually just prior to a submission deadline, you will frantically edit and re-edit a paragraph to make your proposal fit within the two-, five-, or 10-page limit.
But, suppose you apply to all funding sources by the stipulated deadlines – what happens next? Essentially, you embark upon a four- to six-month waiting game. Regardless of how valiant you are in nobly trying to forget about your applications, every single well-meaning person you know will ask if you have heard back yet. This results in some or all of the following:
- Anxiety
- Neuroses
- Disillusionment
- Learning how to tell people variations of: “No, I still have not received a letter/email that will decide my fate for the next several months.”
- Wishing that some catastrophe will occur to the nation’s other social sciences applicants, thereby significantly improving your odds of winning said-funding
- Waiting on pins and needles to figure out just what exactly you will be doing next fall; any planning you may undertake so easily shaped by the wills (ill or good) of some unnamed and scary selection committee
Starting last week, the mailman began to usher in a slow trickle of responses and so far, I have no good news. This is not unexpected as I have preferred to take the path of “it is better to be pleasantly surprised than bitterly disappointed,” but a bit disheartening. I continue to apply to the smaller travel grants that are due in the upcoming several weeks and to keep my chin up. However, if you happen to know of a wealthy patron who is willing to grant a fellowship or travel grant to a poor graduate student, please send them my way!
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