How will you pay for graduate school?

Graduate school can be expensive, and the expense can seem extreme when you consider the fact that (unlike medicine and law) the careers that follow tend not to pay well enough to make loans easy to repay. For this reason, many graduate programs provide funding and fellowships (based on merit) to make graduate school in the humanities easier to afford. Funding varies: some graduate students get "tuition waivers," which cover the full cost of tuition; some get additional "stipends," which cover basic living expenses; and sometimes, funding comes as pay for teaching (after the second year, but sometimes right away). It might be wise to go to graduate school in English only if you have some such funding, or if you have other sources of money that would make loans unnecessary. These other sources might include personal wealth and the kinds of fellowships described below.

Numerous fellowship opportunities are available to students who wish to pursue English literature graduate studies in North American and British institutions. Do a little research and you may be surprised at what you find; the major and most prestigious ones, as well as some local ones, are listed below.

Graduate Fellowships

Britain and Ireland
Rhodes Scholarship(for study at Oxford) http://www.rhodesscholar.org/
Marshall Scholarship http://wwwmarshallscholarship.org/
Fulbright Fellowship http://www.iie.org/Fulbright
Mitchell Scholarship http://www.us-irelandalliance.org
Gates Cambridge Scholarship://www.gates.scholarships.cam.ac.uk/

United States
Mellon Fellowship
Beinecke Scholarship
Ohio Board of Regents Graduate Scholarship
Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Graduate Scholarship Program
Ford Diversity Pre-Doctoral Fellowships (for minority students)
American Graduate Fellowships

Recent English Department Recipients of Mellon Fellowships
Rebecca Miller (1994)
Sarah Heidt (1997)
Jennifer Sampson (1992)
Laura Weber (1997)
Molly Westerman (1999)
Kate Bennett (2000)

Recent English Department Recipients of Fulbright Fellowships
Monica Cure (2001)
Sharon Lipovsky (2003)