General Information

GRADUATE STUDENT FUNDING ALERT!
By Dr. Jason DeFay, Research Affairs Officer

OGS provides a wealth of web-based resources for graduate students to identify, apply for, and obtain fellowships and academic awards. OGS's recently reorganized Funding and Academic Award Opportunities webpage has links to comprehensive funding databases, grant writing guides and selected funding opportunities available only to UCSD graduate students.

If you're new to the world of research funding, the first step is to familiarize yourself with the funding opportunities available on UCSD's website. No matter what your research area is, UCSD's funding website is the place to start. Once you've gotten familiar with the “intramural” funding opportunities UCSD offers, you can then begin learning about the thousands of funding opportunities available via searchable funding databases.

OGS's Funding & Academic Award Resources page contains links to over a dozen different electronic funding databases. The most important databases you'll want to learn include our newly developed SURF database and the Community of Science (COS).

The SURF database, short for Search for University Research Funding, is administered by OGS for the benefit of UCSD graduate students, postdocs, faculty and staff. This publicly searchable database is where we enter all the new funding announcements we receive each week at UCSD. As of today, SURF contains more than 500 individual funding opportunities! You can do simple and complex searches with SURF and, over the next few months we're planning a series of upgrades to the search engine.

COS is a subscription-based service that UCSD provides to the campus community free of charge. Using an internet enabled computer with a UCSD IP address, you can browse COS 's extensive library of more than 400,000 funding opportunities. Among the most useful features COS has to offer are (1) the ability to create an online searchable online curriculum vitae , (2) an automatic “BioSketch” feature that generates the PHS 398 form required any time you apply to the National Institutes of Health, and (3) the ability to create custom funding alerts that will send you an e-mail any time a new funding opportunity becomes available.

Once you've found an appropriate funding opportunity using these different resources, the next step is to write a winning grant application. Many graduate students find this part of the funding process to be time-consuming, difficult, quirky and downright mysterious. In reality, grant writing is all these and more.

Learning how to write successful grant applications is like learning any new skill. You'll need to invest some time studying, you'll need to practice, and most important you'll want to enlist the help of a successful grant-writer in your field.

When I was in graduate school, I dutifully applied for fellowships each year, but wasn't very successful. It wasn't until I started studying grant writing guides that I wrote my first successful BIG grant application. Now, thanks to the Internet, everyone at UCSD has access to these same grant-writing guides.

To learn all the inside tips and tricks used by grant writing pros, all you need to do is click the Grant Writers Toolbox link on our Funding & Academic Resources page. Once there, you'll find links to:

•  An internet based proposal writing short-course offered by the non-profit Foundation Center of New York

•  A Grant Writing for Success PowerPoint presentation

•  A downloadable career guide for recent PhD's and new faculty

And much much more…

There's a wealth of funding and grant writing information on our website and I encourage everyone to take a few moments out of your busy schedule to learn more about what we can offer you. Novice and seasoned grant writers alike will benefit from the tips, tricks and insider secrets you'll find on our site.

So, if you haven't already, do us all a favor and take advantage of these free money-making resources. And, as always, if you have any suggestions, corrections or additions you'd like to see on our web-site, please click the link at the bottom of the OGS web-page and send us an e-mail. We'll be making continuous improvements to this site so we can serve you better!