When faced with the task of applying for external funding many of us do not know how or where to start. Fortunately for graduate students at Rutgers, the university has provided you with an office within the School of Graduate Studies whose task is to provide our students with guidance about how and what to apply for in the world of external grants and fellowships.
The following four posts are meant to help you understand the role of GradFund, the services we offer, what we do and what we don’t do, and how and why you can (and should!) take advantage of our meetings, workshops and mentoring programs. To read the posts, click on the bolded titles above the summaries.
Top Five GradFund Myths
In this post, Assistant Dean Teresa M. Delcorso-Ellman addresses some of the reasons that students give for why they come or do not come to GradFund, and also some of the pre- and misconceptions they have about this office and our services. This post will help you clarify some of the ideas and questions that you may have regarding our services and their usefulness throughout your graduate journey.
Stop, Collaborate, and Listen
One of our peer mentors, M. Hyacinth Gaynair, explains how GradFund’ advisors and mentors belong to a diverse number of disciplines. This is something for all graduate students at Rutgers to take advantage of because your grant applications will also be seen by an interdisciplinary committee. In addition, she briefly talks about how our services go beyond individual meetings, and encourages readers to attend some of our workshops and writing bootcamps, which can also play a key role in helping you write a competitive application.
How to Make Best Use of GradFund Services: Tips from a New Fellowship Advisor
In this post, fellowship advisor Senem Kaptan talks about her own experiences both as a student attending individual meetings at GradFund, and as a GradFund fellowship advisor. She gives six practical suggestions on how to come better prepared for your meeting with us. These tips cover a range of things, from what to put in the form when you schedule a meeting, to what to do after the meeting is over. This post will also help you understand what to expect from an individual meeting at GradFund.
Using GradFund Over the Course of Your Graduate Study
Like Senem does in the previous post description, Mimi Winick also invites her readers to walk with her through her experiences at GradFund since she came to Rutgers in 2009. She explains how meeting with us and working on different applications helped her thrive throughout her graduate journey. This post is different from the previous one in that is more focused on how working on grant and fellowship applications helped Mimi become better in other genres of academic writing, such as proposal and dissertation writing. This post’s goal is to help students see how using our services when applying for external funding can help you in all areas of your academic career.
If you have never met with us, we hope these posts encouraged you to schedule a meeting today! If you have already scheduled a meeting through our meeting platform, we hope that the information provided here can help your meeting become even more useful and productive.
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