Scholarships and Financial Aid

Funding for Taught Courses (MSc/Dip)

Collaborative Training Account (CTA) Studentships are available for UK/EU students studying for the MSc in Informatics whose primary specialism is one of:

• Intelligent Robotics
• Learning from Data
  

Please indicate when you apply that you wish to be considered for sponsorship.

What the studentship covers:

• UK Students: tuition fee, research costs and subsistence
• EU Students: tuition fee and research costs.

CTAs are funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and are designed to provide a single, flexible mechanism for fundingwhich link postgraduate training with the workplace. Masters Training Packages, Engineering Doctorate, Knowledge Transfer Partnerships, Research Assistants into Industry and Industrial CASE are all now funded through Collaborative Training Accounts.

Also see other sources of funding below.

Funding for Research Degrees (MSc by Research/MPhil/PhD)

Around 50 research scholarships are available each year to new PhD students. Many of these are full scholarships, paying tuition fees, research costs, and a stipend to cover living expenses (£12,940 per year in 2008/2009, rising in subsequent years). The rest are partial scholarships, paying tuition fees and research costs and/or a contribution towards living expenses. Because the scholarships cover fees at UK/EU rate, overseas students should also apply for an Overseas Research Student Award to cover the remainder of the fee.

These scholarships include:

• The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) prize Studentships
• 5 full scholarships for students in the Schools of Informatics and Engineering & Electronics funded by Wolfson Microelectronics plc;
• a maximum of 12 full "1+3" scholarships for students who are interested in the links between Informatics and Neuroscience, from our Neuroinformatics Doctoral Training Centre;
• a number of project studentships associated with research grants from EPSRC and other funding agencies;
• a number of full scholarships (for UK students) and partial scholarships (for EU students) funded by EPSRC, MRC and ESRC;
• a scholarship under the Microsoft Research European PhD Scholarships scheme in the Machine Learning area
• grants from the School of Informatics, the College of Science and Engineering, and Research Institutes in Informatics;
• 1-2 full scholarships for PhD students from India, China, Hong Kong, Brazil, South Africa, Russia and the developing world, funded by the DHPA scheme.

In addition to the above we nominate two of our most promising second-year PhD students for IBM PhD fellowships. Students cannot apply for these directly.

Principal's Scholarships are prestigious prizes which are awarded to a few of our most promising new PhD students each year. They provide an extra £6000 for living costs on top of any other funding that is offered, paid at the rate of £2000 per year for three years.

Finally, PhD students are encouraged to make contributions to teaching, for example by leading undergraduate tutorial groups, and for this you can expect to earn an additional £500-1000 per year.

For information about all of these funding opportunities, please consult our PhD funding FAQ.

Other Sources of Funding

The University offers all alumni a 10% discount of the self-funded element of the postgraduate tuition fee. Further information.

The University of Edinburgh Scholarships Office provides extensive information on various sources of funding. A few of these sources are highlighted below:

• Overseas Research Student (ORS) Awards
  (Application forms are avaialble from the Graduate School Administrative Secretary)
  
• The University of Edinburgh ORS Linked Scholarships
• Student Awards Agency for Scotland (SAAS)
• UKeIG Student Bursaries
• The British Council
• The British Council Scotland
• Commonwealth (Association of Commonwealth Universities)

International Students

The Scholarships Office provides information on funding for international students.

There may well be sources of funding for study abroad from your government. In many cases these grants are actually easier to obtain than funding via the sources that we control, so please do apply!