Searching for external, nationally competitive scholarships and fellowships

Dr Duban

James Duban, Director

Office for Nationally Competitive Scholarships

Many nationally competitive scholarships can help fund your educations and bring added distinction to you, your résumés, and UNT. Thanks to the Internet and to the sharing of websites, highly advanced search engines are at your disposal. Still, finding an opportunity is just the beginning.

The UNT Office for Nationally Competitive Scholarships stands ready to work with you and your faculty mentors by offering feedback on style, tone, and organization on any essay you plan to submit for competition. You will enhance your writing skills and arrive at a better sense of your future plans and commitments. Moreover, undergraduates will find that they can adapt national-scholarship narratives to graduate-school admissions essays, with better chances of garnering internal fellowship support. Graduate students, in turn, end up transforming their scholarship proposals into the theoretical introductions to their master's theses or doctoral dissertations. Stated otherwise, the process of applying for a nationally competitive scholarship is a "no lose" scenario, relative to the writing you will undertake and refine.

Here's how to proceed in a way that will let you know what's "out there," and how my office can assist you in this process. You can start by visiting the home page of the National Association of Fellowships Advisors to see some of the higher-profile opportunities. There are, however, many more external scholarships and fellowships than these, and here's a quick way of accessing those through multiple Internet sites. (While you are at liberty to visit these sites, including those of other universities, kindly address any questions you have about these awards to me, at jduban@unt.edu. Other universities must attend to their own students.) This search may well take several days; don't let that deter you. In days before the Internet, the search would have taken several months or years.

  1. Graduate students should starthere. Both graduate students and undergraduates should then consult https://spin.infoedglobal.com/Home/SOLRSearch.
  2. The following website (U. Maryland) allows you to search by multiple categories, with hypertext links to the scholarship sponsors: http://www.scholarships.umd.edu/diversity.html. Click on the category, and then click on the optimal sub-category. Study those opportunities, scholarship-by-scholarship, before moving on to any of the sites below. If you try to do too much at once, the search will appear overwhelming.
  3. Then visit https://gradschool.cornell.edu/fellowships For more scholarships for women and minorities, please check:
    http://scholarships.fatomei.com/scholarships-for-minorities.html
    http://www.awis.org/ (awards for women in science)

    An additional resource for International Students is the following: https://www.grinnell.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Scholarships%20Ap...
    https://www.ucl.ac.uk/prospective-students/scholarships

    Visit, as well, the following links, where you can search for opportunities under multiple categories:
    Kansas State: https://www.k-state.edu/sfa/aid/scholarships/outside-scholarships/
    U. Arkansas: http://fellowships.uark.edu/634.php
    Yale University: https://funding.yale.edu/fellowships/search-fellowships
    Vanderbilt: http://ohs.vanderbilt.edu/
    U. Illinois, Chicago: https://oef.uic.edu/
    Williamette: http://willamette.edu/offices/saga/students/external/category_lists/inde...
    Notre Dame: https://isla.nd.edu/fellowships-grants/search-for-funding/
    Smith College: http://www.smith.edu/fellowships/alternate_independent.php#service
    Michigan State Univ.: https://libguides.lib.msu.edu/grants

    1. Search by field of study, etc., clicking on the hypertext of each fellowship
    2. Click on each hypertext to view a description of the award, the amount of award, and deadlines.
    3. Copy the title of the award
    4. Paste the title into a Google that title to obtain application forms or upload instructions.
    5. If applicable, also search, in the category box, for scholarships for "International Students," "Scholarships for Women" --or "Scholarships for Minorities."
  4. Check out my homepage.
  5. Note, as well the link UNT Scholarships. It will lead you to numerous hard-copy and many more Internet library resources that will prove helpful in searching for scholarships.
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