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Graduate Student Funding Tutorial

The purpose of this tutorial is to show you how to find excellent prospects for support with a Research Assistantship in your area of interest. Most Federal Agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and many more, award competitive research grants to faculty members. Most of these awards, particularly the large awards of more than $500,000, have provision for support of graduate students as Research Assistants.

This tutorial will explain, by way of example, how to search the web sites of some of these agencies to find large awards in your area of interest and to identify the faculty member or members who administer the awards (they are called the Principle Investigator(s) or PI).

Once you have found a large grant that seems to relate to your area of interest, the next step in the tutorial is to help you find out more about the PI(s) by tracing them to their home institution and getting more information about their general research interests.

Finally the tutorial gives some hints on how to contact these faculty members.

Simply work your way through the examples given, using these guidelines to conduct an actual search on the live agency website. Once you have mastered these examples, it should be fairly easy to apply the same principles to searching the web sites of other agencies to find large grants and identify the PI.

If you are especially comfortable with browsing the web and using search engines efficiently, you may want to simply strike out on your own, following the basic steps as outlined here. Otherwise, the tutorials go into greater detail about searching for opportunities.

Basic Search Steps:

  • Browse the agency's grant database to search for the program, institution or state of your choice; for example, NSF, NIH, EPA, USDA.
  • Locate a specific, large research grant in the academic discipline and the state or the institution of your choice. Read the abstract to collect the basic information needed to investigate the aspects of the grant relevant to you as a prospective graduate student, such as: Principal Investigator(s), their academic affiliation, kind of research project, etc.
  • Investigate the Principal Investigator and his/her research in depth by exploring the links in the PIÕs web page: associates and other collaborators, research interests, ongoing research projects, involvement in graduate education, graduate student participation, etc.
  • Contact the Principal Investigator if his/her research project matches the academic program you would like to pursue.

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