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This information is addressed to PhD applicants. A short summary of available funding is here. Your comments are welcome! Please send them here.
NB: Much of what is below is for information only and does not require
any action from you. But there are some important exceptions, indicated
by the icon
,
where you must take the initiative.
There is a separate FAQ about the rest of the PhD application procedure here.
Can I get funding for a PhD from my prospective supervisor's research grant?
How does the Neuroinformatics Doctoral Training Centre fit in?
What is the ORS awards scheme and how does it work?
What are SICSA prize studentships
and what is the application procedure?
What are Baltika Scholarships and what is the application procedure?
What is the Kerr-Fry PhD Scholarship and what is the application procedure?
Can students get PhD funding from their national governments?
Do you have any special funding schemes for Chinese students?
What are
Google Europe Anita Borg Memorial Scholarships?What are Commonwealth Scholarships
and what is the application procedure?Are there any other scholarship schemes?
Are loans available to support postgraduate research study?
The answer varies depending on your residency status and in some
cases on your proposed area of study. Below is a list of
funding sources; click for details.
The Informatics Graduate School handles the job of matching candidates
to funding sources so in most cases
you should not take the initiative, apart from indicating on your
admission form that you require funding, unless you particularly enjoy filling
in application forms.
When you have been selected as a candidate for a particular funding
source that requires a separate funding application then we will ask you
to complete it.
However there are some important exceptions, indicated by the icon
,
where you must take the initiative.
In particular: if you are a non-UK student, you are
VERY STRONGLY ENCOURAGED to
apply to any
national funding competitions
for which you are eligible. The success rate of such
applications is likely to be greater than for any source of funding we can
provide, and in some cases stipend levels are more generous.
But before you do anything else, please submit an application for admission since most funding sources require candidates to have already received a formal offer of admission.
Research grants,
School of Informatics,
Neuroinformatics DTC,
SICSA prize studentships,
Wolfson Microelectronics Scholarships,
IBM PhD fellowships,
Microsoft Research European PhD Scholarships,
Google Europe Anita Borg Memorial ScholarshipsORS Awards, Dorothy Hodgkin
Postgraduate AwardsChina Scholarship Council awardsBaltika ScholarshipsCommonwealth scholarshipsStudent loansKerr-Fry PhD ScholarshipOverall, these funding sources provide support to 40-50 PhD students per year. Click here for details of funding awarded in previous years.
Some of our scholarships are earmarked for work in a specific topic area. Some of these are advertised here, but others arise at short notice or have no specific closing date and are offered to applicants who apply for admission in the usual way. Another broad area with earmarked scholarships is Neuroinformatics, see here. But the majority of our scholarships are allocated to the best applicants, without regard to topic of study.
Can I get funding
for a PhD from my prospective supervisor's research grant?Grants from some funding agencies can fund PhD study.
Sometimes fees are paid by the grant (at the
"home fees" level,
so non-EU students will need a way of covering the difference between
overseas fees and home fees, such as an
ORS award)
and sometimes not. Sometimes the scholarship will
involve periods working with an industrial collaborator
("CASE" studentships).
Research grant funding will normally
dictate your choice of PhD topic within fairly narrow limits because
of the need to justify your contribution to the project that provides
the funding. Your prospective supervisor will know whether or not he/she has a suitable
grant. Some of these opportunities will be advertised
here
and you should apply before the indicated deadline.
How does the
Neuroinformatics Doctoral Training Centre fit in?The Neuroinformatics Doctoral Training Centre, funded by EPSRC and MRC, provides an average of ten 4-year scholarships per year, covering a 1-year MSc plus 3 years of PhD study. Information is here and you need to follow the application instructions here. Although the Neuroinformatics DTC is run by ANC, some DTC students are supervised in other Institutes and other Schools.
There is some funding for PhD students from the School of Informatics and the College of Science and Engineering, which is managed by the Informatics Graduate School. In addition, some Institutes in Informatics offer funding to PhD students through the Graduate School. Sometimes this funding is combined with funding from other sources. Most offers are made in May and there is no need for a separate application.
What is the ORS awards scheme and how
does it work?An ORS (Overseas Research Student) award is a grant covering the difference between the home and overseas PhD fees. New overseas applicants and first-year PhD students are eligible, and the award covers the remaining 2-3 years of fees. The University provides so-called "ORS linked" scholarships, covering the home fee element, to some ORS award holders; there is no separate application procedure for these.
To apply, submit an ORS application and a separate application for PhD admission at the same time or earlier, and provide references that will be used for both PhD admission and ORS selection. All these things need to be with the Graduate School office by the ORS application deadline - 28 February 2008 - which is much earlier than most other deadlines! Decisions are made in late March.
What are SICSA prize studentships and what
is the application procedure?
The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA)
runs an annual competition for
these scholarships,
which cover fees and stipend at UK/EU level for 3 years.
The overriding criterion is quality, with adherence with
SICSA theme areas as a
secondary criterion.
Candidates apply directly to SICSA; for 2008 the application deadline
is at the end of July.
Wolfson Microelectronics plc provides five scholarships per year to PhD students in Informatics or in Engineering and Electronics at the University of Edinburgh. Each award is worth £15000 per year for three years, covering home fees and living expenses. Any applicant to the School of Informatics is eligible, irrespective of topic. The Graduate School pre-selects 5-6 candidates and asks these students to submit applications to the Scholarships Office. The application deadline is 1 April 2008.
These are PhD scholarships for students from India, China, Hong Kong, Brazil, South Africa, Russia and the developing world. Each award covers the full overseas fee plus a stipend of £12000 per year for three years. These are highly competitive since it is the only scheme that offers full scholarships for overseas candidates and there are only a few scholarships available across the entire university. The Graduate School pre-selects a few candidates in March and asks these students to submit applications to the Scholarships Office. The application deadline is 1 April 2008.
What are Baltika Scholarships and what is
the application procedure?These scholarships, funded by Scottish & Newcastle, are for Russian postgraduate students at the University of Edinburgh (including PhD) and provide a one-off grant of £20000. The application deadline is at the beginning of May.
What is the Kerr-Fry PhD Scholarship and what is
the application procedure?This scholarship is for former pupils of at least three years standing at George Watson's College with a first-class honours degree from a UK university, or the overseas equivalent, and who have been accepted for full-time PhD study at the University of Edinburgh. The value is £10000/year for 3 years. The application deadline is 1 April 2008.
Can students get PhD funding
from their national governments?National funding competitions are an excellent source of funding for non-UK students, and you are VERY STRONGLY ENCOURAGED to apply to any such schemes for which you are eligible. (Research Council scholarships are the main corresponding scheme for UK students.) Often the success rate is greater than for any source of funding we can provide, and in some cases stipend levels are more generous.
The British Council is a good source of information for non-UK student funding opportunities.
Do you
have any special funding schemes for Chinese students?The University of Edinburgh and the China Scholarship Council provide funding for 20 PhD students from China who are working or studying in China at the time of the application. Under this scheme, the CSC provides a scholarship to cover travel and living expenses and the University of Edinburgh provides a scholarship to cover the overseas fees. The deadline for applications to the University of Edinburgh (for admission, indicating an intention to apply for this funding) is 31st January 2008. Candidates must also apply to the CSC for funding, as soon as possible after the online CSC application form becomes available on 20 February 2008, and in any case no later than 20 March 2008. Successful applicants to this funding scheme will not need an ORS award but there is no harm in also applying for that. The CSC also administers various other scholarship schemes.
IBM runs an international competition for these fellowships. Students must already be enrolled for PhD study to be eligible. Successful candidates receive a stipend plus fees for one year, renewable for up to two further years. They also receive an IBM ThinkPad and are encouraged to spend time at an IBM research or development lab as a paid intern. The Graduate School nominates 2 candidates in October and asks these students and their supervisors to fill out IBM's application form. The application deadline is at the end of October and candidates cannot apply directly.
Microsoft Research runs an international competition for these scholarships. Awards are made by Microsoft Research to prospective supervisors for specific projects and then the supervisor nominates a student to receive the funding. Such students must have been accepted for a PhD or be in their first year of PhD study. They receive an award of £22000/year to cover fees and living expenses for up to three years. They also receive a laptop, an invitation to a summer school at Microsoft Research in Cambridge at the end of their first year, and possibly a subsequent offer of a paid internship at Microsoft Research. Candidates cannot apply directly to Microsoft, and supervisors apply via the Graduate School. Once an award has been made to a supervisor, the availability of the scholarship will be advertised in the same way as with scholarships funded by research grants.
What are Google Europe Anita Borg Memorial Scholarships?This scholarship scheme, run by Google, offers a 5000 euro scholarship for a single academic year. Only females are eligible. The application deadline is 18 February 2008.
What are Commonwealth Scholarships
and what is the application procedure?These are full scholarships for Commonwealth citizens. Information is here (click on "General Scholarships"). Selection takes place in the home country, and procedures and deadlines vary. Here is a sample, but note that deadlines vary from year to year.
Are there any
other scholarship schemes?Yes. The Scholarships Office's A-Z list of awards and per-country list of awards provide some information to get started. Another list, accessible only inside the www.ed.ac.uk domain, is ERI's list of funding opportunities. Finally, your university library probably has a copy of The Grants Register which is an encyclopaedic directory of funding opportunities.
No. When you accept a self-funded place, you are agreeing
to fully cover the costs of PhD study, which are
clearly set out in advance, from your own resources. For whatever
reason - probably just too much competition for our finite resources -
we were not able to offer funding, and you accepted that decision.
Our decision is not subject to revision so there is no point in asking
again.
That said, there are a few sources of funding for which existing
students are eligible: IBM PhD fellowships
(second-year students only),
ORS awards
(first-year non-EU students only),
Google Europe Anita Borg Memorial Scholarships.
You may supplement your income by undertaking
tutoring and demonstrating
but this can only make a minor contribution to your overall budget.
Are loans available to support postgraduate research study?US applicants may apply to the Federal Family Education Loan Program. Canadian applicants may apply to the Canada Student Loans Program.
You may supplement your income by undertaking
tutoring and demonstrating,
and some of these jobs are called teaching assistantships,
but such jobs do not suffice on their own to finance PhD study.
See here.
No, sorry.
In the UK, PhD applications are traditionally submitted much later than in some other countries including the US. Funding application deadlines are correspondingly later and some critical information about levels of funding for allocation to applicants is not available until late Spring. But see the next question.
We are sometimes able to make early offers to exceptional candidates, particularly those who have received an offer from elsewhere and need to respond before our offer is due. Please contact us if you are in that position. Expect us to take a few days to come to a decision.
Most funding sources require candidates to have already received a formal offer of admission. Therefore, we often accept a candidate for admission long before it is clear how funding will be handled. This should not be interpreted as a decision not to offer funding unless the offer makes it clear that no funding is available.
Most funding decisions are made in May, and offers are sent as soon as possible. See above for specific exceptions. Some positive and negative funding decisions are made earlier. There is a small informal waiting list of candidates who can only be funded if other candidates decide not to accept our funding offers, for which funding decisions are made in June or July.
Study hard, get good grades, give the people who are writing your references reasons to be impressed with your abilities, devote serious thought to your research proposal, and submit your application before the last minute.
No, please don't. We will of course try to be polite and will reply to reasonable questions. We will contact you by email when we need information from you.
Scholarship allocation is a complex optimisation problem subject to many real-world constraints. For instance: many funding sources have nationality restrictions; some supervisors have already reached their supervision capacity; some research areas benefit from targeted funding. We attempt to allocate funding to the best candidates, taking these constraints into account.
Don't worry - the Informatics Graduate School handles the job of
matching candidates to funding sources so in most cases there is
nothing you need to keep track of.
Submit your application for admission, check if the questions marked
with the icon
apply to you and follow the instructions if so, and then wait for the result.
The cost has several components:
Current fee levels and an estimate of the cost of living in Edinburgh are here.
The minimum stipend for UK research council scholarships is as follows:
This is called the minimum stipend because the DTA scheme permits us to grant larger stipends, however we have never done so because the demand for places exceeds the number of scholarships we have to allocate. We take this amount as our standard stipend when awarding other grants from internal funding sources. Some external funding sources may award stipends at a higher or slightly lower level than this.
In recent years, EPSRC has added an significant stipend enhancement to DTA awards in certain subjects including Informatics, which are passed on to scholarship holders. This enhancement is not taken into account in setting the amount of our standard stipend. Note that we do not know the amount of this enhancement when funding offers are made.
The answer depends on the funding source. For EPSRC DTA awards, the rules are the same as those that determine nationality for the sake of fees - namely, country of residence for the past three years. That's not the full story; for details, look here.
Tuition fees for students from the UK and European Union (EU) are heavily subsidised by the government at all UK universities. Non-EU countries are referred to as "overseas", and these students are charged a higher tuition fee.
Different funding schemes use different words - another one is "fellowship" - but there is no practical difference at least as far as PhD study in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh is concerned. (Wikipedia suggests that things might be different elsewhere.)
Feel free to contact us.
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