Fellowships

Fellowships are funded opportunities offered by organizations to help students further their education, acquire skills, and broaden their horizons both personally and professionally. Whatever your ambition, there’s a chance that you can find a fellowship to sponsor it. Our database contains opportunities for students on every path, from bioengineering to Renaissance history, from Chinese culture to studio art, from human rights advocacy to business entrepreneurship and more.

Fame Isn't Everything | Know a Fellowship When You See One |
Targeted Search vs. Open-Ended Exploration | Learn More

Fame Isn't Everything

Some awards—i.e., the Fulbright, the Marshall, the Luce—come with a mystique. Many people have heard of them. Many apply for them. The chances of winning are low.    

Other awards are less competitive. They will help you attain your goals, but they don’t necessarily come with the immediate recognition that surrounds the more famous names.  

At the GS Fellowships Office, we try to keep the focus on the experience you hope to have, not the brand of your sponsor. We encourage you to try for every fellowship that holds out the possibility of taking you where you want to go.

Know a Fellowship When You See One

At GS, we use word “fellowship” broadly, to mean any award (other than those administered by our own financial aid office) that will help you pursue your goals. Whether it will pay for you to study, travel, or work at an internship, we call it a “fellowship” if you have to prepare an application, compete with other students to win, and then carry out some specified project or course of study in exchange for the funding you receive.

Note: The term “scholarship” is reserved at GS for a grant administered directly by our Office of Educational Financing. In awarding a scholarship, the Office takes into account both the level of a student’s financial need and his or her academic distinction. To learn about GS scholarships, click here.

Targeted Search vs. Open-Ended Exploration

There are a number of ways to search for fellowship opportunities:

Use the alphabetical listing:

• If you know the name of a particular fellowship, and want to find out more about it.
• If you want to discover an unfamiliar fellowship program by using a key word such as “environment” or “music” (bearing in mind, however, that such searches may miss many pertinent awards that don’t have the selected term in their descriptors).

Use the thematic listing:

• If you want to explore all the possible fellowships in a given field or category.
• If you’re not sure what you want and would like to become better acquainted with the range of choices available to you.

Learn More

Take the time to learn all you can about the fellowship universe.

• Click through to the websites of the individual awards, and see the kinds of students who have won them in the past.
• Go over the sections on Fellowship Planning and Writing the Fellowship Essay on this web-site to get a sense of the strategy involved in winning an award.
• Come to a GS Fellowship Information Session in the fall or spring terms.   
• Make an appointment with the GS Fellowships Office for one-on-one fellowship counseling.