Additional funding opportunities | College of Arts

Additional funding opportunities

Conference travel funding

The Department has some funds it can use to support students travelling to give talks at professional conferences. The process has two steps: you apply first to the College then after you have received their decision you apply to the Department for any additional funding that you need.

  1. Apply to the College of Arts Graduate Travel, Research and Creation Fund. This fund has two rounds of applications per year, with overlapping windows of eligibility. It is your responsibility to check that the date of your travel falls within the window of the round of applications in which you are applying.
    • It may be the case that you are giving talks at more than one conference in a given application window. In that case, please apply for funding for all the trips. The College currently funds only one trip per application round. However, we do want our students to apply for however many activities they want funding for. There are several reasons for this. One is that it keeps things uniform, so that what we look at in the department is all properly prepared, as for the College application. Another is that it helps make the College aware of the degree to which our students are (a) active at conferences and (b) in need of support. That is an important consideration for the department, even if for an individual student it doesn’t mean anything. Finally, another reason to have all applications go to the College first is that our department deadline is tied to when the College gives its decisions: two weeks from that date. If applications are dribbling in all year long, not tied to the College result date, then the department has no idea what’s going to come in and we can’t allocate the funding fairly.)
  2. If the College's funding is less than you requested then you can apply to the Department for supplemental funding. Within two weeks of receiving the College's decision on your application to them, you attach a printout of that email to the application you submitted to them, and submit it to our Administrative Assistant, Pam Armitage. No additional paperwork needs to be prepared.

The Department will decide, with all such applications in hand, how much of the outstanding amounts we can fund. (Maximum for domestic travel is $600 and for international, $1,200.)

Reimbursement will be handled by the department—remember to give Pam all receipts, including boarding passes, within two weeks of your return from your conference trip.

Please note the importance of complying with the departmental timeline! If you delay your application to the department, we may very well have allocated all available funding for that round of applications, on the basis of the applications we had in hand at the end of the 2 week period.

University awards and financial assistance

Please see the “Awards from the University of Guelph” section of the Graduate Calendar. There are opportunities for funding specifically for conference travel and child care, among other things.

The Office of Graduate Studies has put together a form "to assist you if you are experiencing financial difficulty". It's called "Request for Financial Assistance" and is linked on their Forms & Documents page.

External awards

For information on external awards—this does not include University awards—please contact the department's Graduate Awards Officer, whose role is to supervise our graduate students' applications. Currently this is Professor Monique Deveaux.

Ontario Graduate Scholarships ("OGS")

The Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS) program encourages excellence in graduate studies at the master's and doctoral levels. An Ontario Graduate Scholarship is awarded for one academic year, which may consist of two or three consecutive terms. The value of the OGS is $5,000 per term. Thus, you may receive $10,000 for two consecutive terms or $15,000 for three consecutive terms. One-term awards are not granted. The province of Ontario contributes two-thirds of this amount and the university provides one-third. See The Office of Graduate Studies page on OGS.

Canada Graduate Scholarships Program: Master's Scholarships ("CGS Master's")

From NSERC's website re CGS Master's : "The J.-Armand Bombardier CGS Master's program offers one-time non-renewable twelve-month awards, valued at $17,500, and tenable only at recognized Canadian universities, to applicants who will be registered as full-time students in a master's program and in a discipline supported by SSHRC." See The Office of Graduate Studies page on SSHRC and CGS awards.

Canada Graduate Scholarships Program: Doctoral Scholarships ("CGS Doctoral")

From SSHRC's CGS Doctoral Awards website : "J.-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarships are valued at $35,000 per annum for 36 months." See The Office of Graduate Studies page on SSHRC and CGS awards.

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowships ("SSHRCs")

From SSHRC's Doctoral Fellowships website : "SSHRC Doctoral Fellowships are valued at $20,000 per annum for 12, 24, 36 or 48 months. SSHRC determines the value and duration of an award based on the number of months of full time study (or equivalent) the applicant will have completed at the proposed start date of the award." See The Office of Graduate Studies page on SSHRC and CGS awards.