No sour GRAPES for grad students, postdocs around the world
For many lucky graduate students and postdoctoral scholars around the world, GRAPES have yielded much more than just a glass of outstanding Merlot. Think hard cash to ease the financial burden of pursuing graduate and postdoctoral studies.
GRAPES, which stands for
Graduate and Postdoctoral Extramural Support, is an invaluable database that was started by UCLA’s Graduate Division more than two decades ago to inform graduate students and postdoctoral fellows about opportunities to receive financial assistance.
GRAPES, a comprehensive database that was started by UCLA's Graduate Division more than two decades ago, helps graduate students and postdocs find private and publicly funded awards, fellowships and internships. Courtesy of UC Office of the President.
What used to be a photocopied handout that was published twice a year on flimsy, yellow paper is now a hefty online database that contains volumes of information on more than 500 extramural funding opportunities that students can apply to help them pay their way through school. It includes both private and publicly funded awards, fellowships and internships.
"It’s a really amazing system," said Eli Levy, the Graduate Division’s web development manager, "and a major achievement for the Graduate Division. It has linked the UCLA name to this amazing, free resource at a time of rising student fee rates." And, he said, it’s also grabbed the attention of funding agencies.
Started as a paper publication, GRAPES became one of the first fellowships databases to go online in the early ’90s when the database became hosted on the Internet by the UCLA Library through a server called ORION. Web browsers had yet to be invented.
At one point early in the life of GRAPES, Emeritus Dean Claudia Mitchell Kernan had to decide either to restrict it to campus users or open it up to the world. "She chose the latter, and word of its existence spread quickly," Levy recalled. Today, the database is once again maintained by Graduate Division staff and student workers.
Universities around the world as well as the U.S. Department of Education carry links to the site, now regarded as the "gold standard" among its peers. Among the institutional users of GRAPES is the Council of Graduate Schools, Northwestern University, Brown University, Texas A&M, Penn State and the University of Virginia. The
Wall Street Journal is among the financial media who have taken note of GRAPES’ existence.
Still, there are a number of graduate students who are unaware of its existence, pointed out UCLA graduate student Sara Brumfield, who counts herself lucky to have found out about GRAPES. "I only learned about it because I was proactive and sought out graduate student workshops on financial aid and fellowship resources," through a Graduate Division orientation session she attended and the Graduate Student Writing Center.
That’s when the scholar of Assyriology found out about the Dolores Liebmann Fellowship, which she applied for and won for 2010-11. It was renewed for 2011-12. "It is immensely helpful in maintaining degree progress, which has become more important since the major budget cuts in the UC system," she noted.
Now Brumfield is trying to spread the word and has put together a financial aid web page for Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, her department, that highlights many of the awards she found on GRAPES.
Other graduate students and postdocs around the world have already found it on the Web, according to statistics. The searchable database received 1.1 million hits from June 2010 through May of this year while the GRAPES RSS feed received close to 400,000 hits. More than 6,000 people currently subscribe to the Gradfellowships listserv.
"As funding opportunities are discovered and updated in the database, the system automatically produces listserv announcements and updates the RSS field," Levy explained.
"GRAPES has turned into a wonderful resource for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars here at UCLA and around the world," Levy said. "We now get contacted by organizations that both want to be listed in GRAPES or want to link to it."
A version of this story originally appeared in the Graduate Quarterly.
