External Funding: Graduate Fellowships and Grants | The Graduate College | The University of Vermont(title)

The University of Vermont’s graduate college encourages all eligible graduate students to seek funding from federal agencies, private foundations, and other external sources.

Even when you have guaranteed funding from the University, we encourage you to consider applying for competitive external fellowships which are a prestigious honor that will stay with you throughout your career. The proposal writing process will help clarify your thinking about your research and expose you to valuable feedback. Extra-mural fellowships will distinguish your CV or resume when you enter job markets – whether in academia, business, industry, government, or the non-profit sector. Cultivating the skills and practice of grant writing will stand you in good stead for careers within and beyond the academy.

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

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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:

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* filter for academic level (e.g. Master’s, doctoral)
+  filter for citizenship status (e.g., no citizenship requirements; US citizens; permanent residents)

Additional databases for external funding

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  • 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 potential for external fellowships

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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.

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.

Selective nationally competitive fellowships

Diversity fellowships
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Humanities and social sciences fellowships
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International study and research
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Science, technology, engineering and mathematics fellowships
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