Rutgers Graduate students have a strong tradition of excellence and success in prestigious external fellowship and grant competitions, and GradFund is proud of the role that we have played in supporting students throughout the application process. At GradFund, we recognize success as being about more than winning prestigious funding competitions. We are especially proud of the roles that we have played in the professionalization of graduate students and the outreach and educational activities we have done both within the Rutgers community and for the general public.
School of Graduate Studies Graduate Student Successes in External Fellowship and Grant Competitions
From multi-year fellowships to small archival grants to international travel awards to scholarships for language training: School of Graduate Studies graduate students have been successful in some of the most prestigious competitions in the United States, and have been awarded funding that has had a lasting impact on their graduate careers.
To see the recent successes of our students, visit our Success Stories page.
Professionalization of Graduate Students
GradFund plays a dual role in the professionalization of graduate students. By working with graduate students to help them find funding opportunities, we help them develop a plan and timeline for their graduate studies, and support them as they develop and carry out a concrete plan of action that will integrate funding applications into their graduate careers. When working with students to revise and refine their draft applications, we help them to develop valuable, transferable grantsmanship skills.
GradFund works with graduate students throughout their graduate careers, from the time they matriculate into a graduate program and are looking for early graduate fellowships or predissertation research support, until they graduate and need support through the process of applying for nationally-competitive postdoctoral fellowships. At all moments in this process, we meet with graduate students to help them understand and assess the funding opportunities available to them, and to support them as they make decisions about which applications will best fit their plans, interests and timelines. In doing so we help to facilitate planning discussions with their advisors that can bring much-needed clarity to our students.
Grantwriting is a valuable skill, whether graduate students are planning for careers in the academy, or in the public or private sectors. We help graduate students learn how to understand the priorities and expertise of the audience they are writing to, and help them tailor their description of their work to that audience. By helping them to describe both the big picture and the rigor of their work in a way that is clear and compelling to the audience they are writing to, we provide them with a valuable transferrable communication skills that will be of use whatever their career ambitions.
Ultimately, whether students are successful or not in their applications for external funding, working with GradFund will help them to develop important planning, self-advocacy, and professional communication skills that stay with them over their careers.
Outreach and Education
In addition to our one-on-one work with individual graduate students, GradFund plays a key role in providing educational presentations and material about external funding opportunities and grantsmanship to the Rutgers community and beyond.
We work closely with New Brunswick graduate programs to provide their students with the information they need. By offering tailored presentations, award lists, online courses, and other educational materials, we have been able to incorporate education about graduate funding and grantsmanship throughout the graduate careers of many students.
We also closely collaborate with graduate program leadership teams and individual faculty to help them most effectively guide and mentor their students through the grant and fellowship application process.
Our extensive online presence provides valuable and timely information to the Rutgers community and to the general public. We offer exclusively to the Rutgers New Brunswick community our proprietary self-paced mentoring programs Knowledgebase of award information.
Our website, which has been recently redesigned and relaunched, offers a unique database of awards that support graduate study. Unique among our peers, our database interface allows students to intuitively describe their situation and funding needs through a series of drop-down menus. In addition to facilitating useful search queries, this interfaces serves an educational purpose by teaching users about the ways that funders classify and target their awards. Our frequent newsletters offer up-to-the minute details about upcoming deadlines for major awards, announcements about our program offerings, and guides to our services. GradFund is a major clearinghouse for targeted and timely information about graduate student external funding.