ApplyWeb "Major Scholarships" - Which to list?

[solomonski]

Hi all.

I have a few programs that use ApplyWeb in order to manage their applications. These tend to have a question which says something like: " List the major scholarships and fellowships for which you have applied during your undergraduate or previous graduate study. Include scholarships and fellowships such as NSF Graduate Fellowship, Gates Millennium Scholars (GMS), Mellon Fellowship, Graduate Engineering for Minorities Fellowship, or others. "

I'm curious what exactly it means by "or others." I have a ton of scholarships/fellowships I received during undergrad, but they're all university-level stuff, none of them mentioned in that above list. Should I list those here? Or is that appropriate for another part of the application? I'm not sure what is meant by "major scholarships."

[TakeruK]

This might depend more on the field, but if I was answering this question, I would only provide awards that are on a similar level to those listed. For this specific question, it looks like they are looking for awards that will fund graduate level work. That is, awards that you can take to their school should you get a spot in their PhD program, rather than awards already granted for undergraduate work.

But sometimes they do want to know that information too. In that case, some criteria you could use to determine whether it's a "major award" like this are:

1. Awards which you had to apply and compete for, not those that are granted to the top X% of the class by the University.

2. Awards which were granted based on submitting a research proposal (this may be field dependent) and/or granted so that you can do research work. (The criteria for granting the award may still be coursework based though, especially for undergraduate research awards).

3. Monetary value---in my field, I'd say awards that are the equivalent of $10,000/year or more (so if it's a 3-month summer research award, then it should be valued at least at $2,500). But this is just an arbitrary number based on the norms in my field.

[Eigen]

To the above, I would also add things that are competitive on a state/regional/national level, rather than something internal to a school. Given the examples they have, I'd say only things that are competitive on a national level, really.

[StyLeD]

Another word for "major scholarships" would be "nationally competitive scholarships." I would also include state-wide competitive scholarships which offer significant funding or education. I would not include competitive school scholarships; that can go on your resume.