Summer 2024 Newsletter

Summer is a great time to start working on fellowship and award applications. The Fall fellowship season is busy with most deadlines occurring between August and December. The Office of Graduate Fellowships and Awards offers two Summer Workshop Series to support graduate students in their journey to search and apply for funding opportunities. Our Three-Day Finding Funding Workshop provides an in-depth look at the process of identifying and applying for external fellowships and awards, including guidance on using databases to search for funding and best tips for beginning an application. Our Four-Part Application Writing Workshop provides intensive application writing support for graduate students who have already identified an external fellowship they plan to apply for during the 2024-2025 academic year. We hope that many of you will join us this summer!

If you have won an external award for the 2023-2024 or 2024-2025 academic year, we want to celebrate you! Submit your award information here.

If you are interested in applying for fellowships and awards but don’t quite know where to begin, check out the Office of Graduate Fellowships and Awards Let’s Meet webpage for more information on how to jumpstart your fellowships and awards journey.


Fellowship applications require unique forms of writing, from personal statements, to research proposals, to short-answer essays on a variety of topics. These essays are often challenging, asking you to relay detailed and compelling information in a rather brief document that needs to be appropriately written for a broad audience of fellowship reviewers. Getting feedback from multiple advisors, mentors, and colleagues can help ensure that your application materials are well-written and tailored to the specific opportunity. But who should you even ask for feedback, and how do you incorporate feedback into your applications?

In this edition of our Fellowship Pro-Tip series, Musicology Ph.D. Candidate Alaba Ilesanmi breaks down his approach to obtaining and integrating feedback. Alaba is a recipient of the McKnight Doctoral Fellowship and the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship and credits constructive feedback for helping him submit strong applications for these awards.

“Asking people from different disciplines to review your fellowship application is especially important for several reasons. First, except when the applicant applies for an award specific to their discipline, most fellowship applications are reviewed by reviewers outside the applicant’s discipline. Thus, asking people from different disciplines to read your application is essential. More so, it is imperative to bear in mind to write for a group of educated reviewers but with little or no knowledge of your topic.

Here are some of the benefits of asking different people to review your fellowship application:

1. Broad perspectives: Getting feedback from individuals in different academic disciplines or institutions can provide a broader perspective on your work and help you identify potential interdisciplinary connections or applications.

2. Gaining Clarity: Tailoring your application to an interdisciplinary audience helps you gain clarity on your idea and suggests other directions you might not have thought of.

3. Objectivity: Seeking feedback from individuals outside of your discipline and department can provide a more objective evaluation of your application. This is important because those within your discipline/department may be influenced by preexisting relationships or prior knowledge of your work.

4. Enhancing your application: Feedback from a diverse range of individuals can help you identify strengths and weaknesses in your application and provide suggestions for enhancing it. This can improve the quality of your application and increase your chances of being selected for the fellowship.

Integrating feedback from multiple people can be challenging, but it’s important to take all feedback into consideration and use it to improve your application. Over the years, I have developed a process of integrating feedback from multiple people. To avoid being overwhelmed with several comments at the initial stage, when I’m still working on fleshing out my ideas, I seek feedback in two phases: preliminary and later stages.

At the preliminary stage, I limit my reviewers to my fellowship advisor and major professor. Both bring different perspectives and expertise germane to developing a robust application. Specifically, the fellowship advisor ensures you meet the outline criteria for the fellowship and brings a wealth of invaluable experience to your application. In addition, the faculty advisor has a better understanding of your work and can ensure the content is robust. At the preliminary stage, I prioritize and implement feedback on ideas, content, and structure to make my overall argument and application competitive; grammar and formatting feedback are considered later. 

At the later stage, I share my work with more people in and outside my discipline. The goal is primarily to ensure that my application is understood across interdisciplinary lines. Also, those in my field can offer ideas that my major professor and I might have yet to consider. This process can be overwhelming; thus, I consider each reviewer’s feedback separately, working on it one at a time—and most times, you don’t get the feedback at the same time anyway. In my experience, most reviewers want to help make your application better. Remember that and appreciate their efforts.”


FSU honors cross-cultural exchange during 2024 Fulbright Reception

Florida State University President Richard McCullough recognized international and domestic participants of the Fulbright Program during a reception on Wednesday, Feb. 20, at the Augustus B. Turnbull III Florida State Conference Center. Last year, nine current and former FSU students earned scholarships through the prestigious Fulbright U.S. Student Program to conduct research in places like Greece, Bulgaria, Spain and Taiwan. Read more.

Six FSU graduate students spotlight research from across disciplines at annual Master’s in Four competition  

This year’s competitors showcased topics ranging from the effects of helicopter parenting on college students’ relationship with social media to a discussion of the possibility of eutrophication in Apalachicola Bay to the prospect of using the brown seaweed sargassum as a food additive. Read more.

Florida State University doctoral student awarded inaugural Guy Harvey Fellowship

Annais Muschett-Bonilla, a doctoral student in the College of Arts and Sciences, received a $5,000 research stipend and certificate personally designed and signed by Guy Harvey, world-renowned marine wildlife artist, conservationist and GHF Founder/Chair Emeritus. Read more.

FSU celebrates 2023-2024 McKnight Doctoral and Dissertation Fellows

In February, 24 Florida State University doctoral students were celebrated for receiving the McKnight Doctoral or Dissertation Fellowship at the 38th Annual McKnight Fellows Meeting and Research & Writing Conference in Tampa. The Fellowships, made possible by the Florida Education Fund, aim to combat the underrepresentation of African American and Hispanic faculty at colleges and universities in Florida and throughout the country. Read more.


 

Funding Your Graduate Education: Database Search
OGFA staff will facilitate small group meetings to assist graduate students with navigating award databases to identify fellowships and awards that are a good "fit" to support their graduate education.

Three-Day Finding Funding Workshop Series
June 25, 26, and 27 | 10AM - 12PM | Register here
Don't know much about the process of finding and applying for external funding? This workshop series is for you! 

  • Day 1: Introduction to the process of finding good fit funding opportunities
  • Day 2: Navigating funding databases and organizing a list of awards
  • Day 3: Researching funding organizations and planning a funding campaign

Draft-Write-Repeat Writing Workshop Series
July 9, 11, 16, and 18 | 10AM - 12:30PM | Apply here
Are you planning to apply for a major competitive fellowship in the next six months? If so, this series is for you! Join the OGFA and the Reading-Writing Center for this exciting 4 days of learning and refining effective writing and language strategies for fellowship and award application essays. Please note, this workshop is limited to 15 participants; selection is based on completed applications. 

  • Day 1: Plan. Research the funder and the award, review criteria, make checklist and set goals.
  • Day 2: Draft. Getting started with communicating your research and your fit. Thinking holistically across an application.
  • Day 3 & 4: Edit. Receive feedback (one on one consultations), edit, & edit more. Set up a plan to turn what you have into a complete application.

All award titles below are hyperlinked to the award webpage.

Graduate Research Program at Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL)

The Graduate Research Program at ORNL (GRO) offers a path by which you can conduct research that contributes to your degree at the nation’s largest multiprogram science and technology laboratory. From designing revolutionary energy materials for energy generation, storage, and use to helping to secure cyberspace, you will have the opportunity to conduct basic or applied research. GRO students follow the course and graduation requirements from their home universities and frequently have finished all their coursework before spending time doing research on the ORNL campus.

Deadline: Applications accepted throughout the year

Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library
Research Travel Grants Program

The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation awards grants of up to $2,200 each in support of research in the holdings of the Gerald R. Ford Library. A grant defrays travel and living expenses of a research trip to the Ford Library in Ann Arbor. Library collections focus on Federal policies, U.S. foreign relations, and national politics in the 1960s and 1970s. There are earlier and later materials depending upon your topic.

Deadline: September 15, 2024

American Heart Association Predoctoral Fellowship

The AHA Predoctoral Fellowship is intended to enhance the integrated research and clinical training of promising students who are matriculated in pre-doctoral or clinical health professional degree training programs and who intend careers as scientists, physician-scientists or other clinician-scientists, or related careers aimed at improving global cardiovascular, cerebrovascular and brain health.

Deadline: September 4, 2024

PEO International Peace Scholarship

The P.E.O. International Peace Scholarship (IPS) Fund provides scholarships to international women pursuing graduate degrees in the U.S. to foster global peace through education. IPS recipients carry the spirit of P.E.O. back to their home countries where the degrees they have earned positively impact people’s lives around the globe. At time of application, students must have a full year of coursework remaining and be enrolled and in residence in the U.S. for the entire school year.

Deadline: Eligibility forms open on September 15, 2024

 
 

Funding Booklet

Visit Archive 


The work and research in action of graduate students at Florida State University broadly impacts the campus community and the world around us. OGFA initiated the Grad Impact: Digital Narratives Project to capture and amplify the lived graduate student experience at FSU. Check out some of our grad student highlights below.

If you are interested in sharing your experience and research, please submit your profile info here.

Jorge Galeano Cabral

Mechanical Engineering
"Make the World a Better Place"

Alumni Spotlight
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Talethia Edwards

Urban and Regional Planning
"Eager to make a positive impact in my field"

Alumni Spotlight
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Sarah Matthew

Social Work
"Empower yourself to empower others"
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Josh Burns

Higher Education
"Continued learning, growth, and holistic development"
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Korrin Sheahan

Communication Science and Disorders
"Embark on a journey of lifelong learning"
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James Hernandez

Educational Psychology and Learning Systems
"Freedom to boundlessly serve students"
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Click here to see more #Gradimpact student profiles.

 


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