The Office of External Fellowships conducts workshops throughout the year to introduce students to the world of fellowships and the art of proposal writing.  Most workshops take place over Zoom and are advertised through GradLinks. 

Our primary workshop is a two-hour session that provides an intensive “nuts and bolts” introduction to grant writing.  We explain what reviewers want to see in a winning proposal, and we dissect a proposal into its component parts, offering guidance on how to compose each part.  We offer one version of the workshop for students in the social sciences and humanities, and another version for students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. We are also available to conduct the workshop for your particular department, class, or interest group. 

We also offer informational workshops on select fellowships such as the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Boren Fellowship, National Institutes of Health’s National Research Service Award, Fulbright Research Grant, and Fulbright-Hays Research Abroad Fellowship.  These workshops are usually offered once a year.

To supplement our workshops, we have compiled an excellent set of proposal-writing resources, and we have a collection of sample proposals that we keep in our office.  We have proposals for NSF, Fulbright, Department of Defense, Fulbright-Hays, Spencer, NIH, DAAD, AAUW, and many others. Contact us if you would like to see any of those. 

See upcoming workshops.

Here’s what students and professors say about our workshops:

• The session was simply awesome!
• I have never seen an entire package delivered on this topic.  It was seamless.  
• I would like to thank you SO much for your awesome presentation today.  I felt a lot more prepared to apply for fellowships. As a first-generation doctoral student, seeking funding can be overwhelming due to the lack of exposure, but your workshop has definitely motivated me to apply for several fellowships.
• This workshop has helped me in not only preparing for proposal writing, but also in being more specific on my research topic and what to look forward to for the dissertation process as well.  Invaluable experience!
• The presenter was extremely knowledgeable about where and how to look for fellowships.  He made the process seem accessible and doable, which was not how I had viewed it previously.
• You gave a superb presentation in every respect – so many concrete tips, so much enthusiasm, and it was all the more effective insofar as it was tailored for our field. 
• It was extremely valuable that the presenter was blunt, tactful, and impassioned about the subject. He is a phenomenal presenter who made writing these grants seem not only possible but also supported by an entire office. I can absolutely see myself using the information I learned about grant writing not only on my Fulbright application but in future fellowship applications I create.
• I want to follow up and say thanks so much for running the workshop for my students. When we met again in class after the break they raved about it, how helpful it was, and how much they learned. I know several of them will likely be taking advantage of the resources of your office in the next couple of years, and this was a great first introduction to that as well.