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Just got off the waitlist from last year!!! I was number 6 on the waitlist.

I agree with the previous poster. I am "diverse" by various metrics and am close to a few people with lifelong diabetes. Chronic diabetes is a serious issue that you have needed to manage. The goal of diversity-based fellowships is to reward you for overcoming a significant adversity and to somewhat ease the unfair burden on you of having to navigate the ablist, sexist, racist, etc., academy. So I'd say you definitely qualify for general diversity-based fellowships or fellowships specifically geared towards disabled students.

I’m on an internal fellowship too, which is paid via direct deposit in monthly installments. If I end up getting SSHRC, the university HR would deposit a smaller amount each month and I’d keep the SSHRC money. If I were you, I would ask around discretely about the ramifications of not declaring an award. Maybe ask trustworthy graduate students from your department who are no longer at the institution? I personally don’t see a huge problem with not giving more money to private institutions with endowments many times larger than the GDP of most countries. I wouldn’t do it because I study difference and punishment and know that I can’t afford to take those kinds of risks. Plus, my school has a record of being litigious against students.

You can still put on your CV that you were an alternate and declined to be considered for the award.

At my very rich, private institution, we have to inform the department and the graduate school when we win awards. There’s a cap on how much we can earn per year (1.xx times our regular stipend amount). The school lets us keep the award, but reduces the stipend amount so that we don’t go over the max amount.

I’m a direct applicant from the US. When I asked SSHRC whether I was on a waitlist because I was 6 spots away from the last awardee, a staff member emailed me the following. “SSHRC has offered all of the awards associated with this year’s competition to those recommended for funding by this year’s merit review committee. While selection committees often recommend a pool of candidates to whom funding cannot be offered due to program success rates*, we regret that we cannot predict if or when alternate offers can be made. Unforeseen circumstances may occasionally allow SSHRC to offer awards to meritorious candidates who indicated interest but who were not offered an award at the time of the release of results. Please rest assured that we work with these award holders to ensure that late offers can be held. Should we be in a position to offer an award before the end of the calendar year, we will contact you by email.” So if you’re in the “recommended but not offered” group, there is a chance you may get the award before January 1, 2023. Please correct me if I’m misinterpreting the email. *The phrase “program success rates” led to this link: https://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/results-resultats/stats-statistiques/index-eng.aspx

I love workshops! They generally focus on a specific topic, especially emerging topics of interest (e.g.: the relationship between property and racialization across the world), and are generally interdisciplinary. Participants are asked to read carefully and comment constructively and collegially on each other’s works, so the feedback is usually good. Everybody gives tons of reading recommendations so it’s a great way to understand the state of the field. More importantly, because everybody works on related topics that are usually niche or new, people have an incentive to build an intellectual community during and beyond the workshop. Your comments about conferences make a lot of sense. Because I’m in the middle years of my PhD program, I stopped finding medium to large conferences helpful. From what my advisors tell me, they will be helpful again in the next couple of years, at least for networking.

I find this talk of conferences fascinating! I’m in sociology in the US and have presented at 10+ international and national conferences and workshops, including a very prestigious dissertation workshop. I think of conference presentations as a way to demonstrate that I’m involved in the disciplinary community and/or that I’m working on a manuscript. Most professors and grad students in my program present at conferences, almost as an annual ritual. Can somebody tell me why conference participation signals merit? Is it a discipline-specific thing? (I partly want to know because I truly hate huge conferences—they generally involve vague feedback and are costly to participate in—and much prefer workshops.)

This is my reading of SSHRC and Canadian awards in general. They really do seem to prefer if the applicant expands their MA research during doctoral studies. Possibly the adjudicators think that the applicant has a better grounding in the topic and is more likely to finish the PhD/project if they focused on the same during their MA. In my experience, the US awards evaluators don’t focus on this dimension because most PhD programs are direct entry. Not sure what would counteract this, except publishing more, or pointing out that you received a distinction in your exams and are building on that base, or asking your recommenders to comment that you are one of the most knowledgable students they have met.

People do move up waitlists and get awards as others ahead of them decline. If you read the previous years’ threads on the SSHRC doctoral fellowship, you'll see upward movement like that. People get other large, multi-year awards like Vanier, Trudeau, and US-based ones or decide to go to international universities. I have acquaintances who have declined an award or become an awardee at a late stage. It's a highly contingent process that plays out over months, so it's probably best to not dwell on it, if possible. (Saying this as a fellow waitlister.) Also, your worries about an evaluating professor holding a grudge are the stuff of my worst nightmare. I changed countries and disciplines to get away from a political science professor with Napoleonic complex, who shall remain unnamed. On the plus side, your grudge-holding prof will probably not judge your application next year.

I’m going to email them at the end of next week asking if the process has changed from waitlist to offered/not offered. Will keep you all posted. (But truly, this information should already be available somewhere.)

Scored a 8.81 from committee 752-3A. Ranked 77 and last offer was made to 71 (9.03). Pretty happy with this, considering how terrible my application was!

Did anyone else’s application disappear in the portal? Mine did. I can only see my web CV now and, under applications, there is nothing. Is this the normal process?

Hi @Day.C, I’m so sorry this happened to you. It sounds super stressful and disheartening. Why don’t you reach out to the SSHRC administrators? I have emailed them before and they do respond in a week or two. Good luck!

Congrats to the awardees! I had three reviewers and got mostly good to excellent ratings. It was really instructive to compare my comments with comments given to a couple of awardees who are acquaintances and also in social science disciplines.