For examples of recent national fellowship award winners, see these stories about UVM’s NSF Graduate Research Fellows, Bryn Loftness, Piper Welch, and Andrew McCracken and Gilliam Fellow Aura M. Alonso-Rodríguez.
To help you navigate the process of applying for competitive fellowships, we are developing these resource pages. Please email us if you have suggestions as to how we might further improve the usefulness of these pages.
Please scroll down to find resources to identify and pursue external funding. Various tools let you filter by intellectual field, academic level, citizenship status, and more. As one further convenient starting point for your exploration, we also feature selective nationally competitive fellowships grouped by intellectual fields.
Identifying External Funding
Pivot (for admitted and enrolled students only)
The University of Vermont subscribes to Pivot-RP, a web-based funding and collaboration tool. Students are encouraged to sign up for a Pivot-RP user account to track, save and share funding opportunities. Visit the Research Development website for instructions on setting up your account and to request additional assistance with the database. This resource is available to anyone who has a current UVM email address.
To learn how to make the most of the platform, see also this YouTube channel.
The following databases, maintained by other institutions, are publicly searchable:
* filter for academic level (e.g. Master’s, doctoral)
+ filter for citizenship status (e.g., no citizenship requirements; US citizens; permanent residents)
- University of Chicago Fellowship Database * +
- UCLA Grad and Postdoc Funding Database * +
- Harvard Grad and Postdoc Funding Database * +
- Duke University Research Funding Database
Additional Databases of External Funding Opportunities
- Foundation Directory Online includes over 140,000 foundations, corporate giving programs and grantmaking public charities in the U.S.
- Philanthropy News Digest
- Grants.gov is the single point of access for searching competitive funding opportunities from hundreds of grant programs offered by federal grant-making agencies.
Resources to Support the Pursuit of External Fellowships
UVM’s colleges and schools, and many of our departments and graduate programs, offer programming to support grant and fellowship writing. Your graduate program director or coordinator and other graduate faculty in your program can advise on external fellowship and grant opportunities.
You may also wish to check out programming hosted by the Office of Fellowships, Opportunities, & Undergraduate Research (FOUR), the Office of the Vice President for Research, and the Graduate Writing Center.
- Open Grants: examples of fellowship and grant applications submitted/funded; includes NSF GRFP, DoE, DoD, NASA
- Grant-Writing Tips for Graduate Students (Chronicle of Higher Education)
- Applying for Competitive Dissertation Fellowships: 5 Key Tips (HigherEdJobs)
- Writing Your Research Statement (Cornell Graduate School)
- University of Illinois: robust online resources (incl. guidance for Humanities, Social Sciences, STEM; guidance for specific fellowships incl. NSF, NIH, Fulbright, Ford)
- Identifying Funding Workshops (for Humanities and Social Sciences and for Science & Health, UNC Chapel Hill, slide decks)
- External Fellowship Workshop (Brown, video)
- Applying for Graduate Fellowships (Cornell Graduate School, video)
- Start a Draft: Jump Start Your Statement (Howard University)
- Grant Proposals (The Writing Center, UNC at Chapel Hill)
- On the Art of Writing Proposals (Social Science Research Council; download as pdf)
- Tips For a Successful Grant Application (EPA)
- Successful Fellowship Recipients Offer Their Suggestions (Tips from Cornell Graduate Students)
Many fellowship competitions list either reviewers from previous years’ competitions or current fellowship recipients who may be contacted to address questions.
Advanced graduate students in your field (or a related field) who have applied for the same fellowship competition may be willing to answer your questions.