University-Wide Fellowships?

[2017 Applicant]

Does anyone know anything about the selection process for university-wide fellowships, or has anyone been selected for one and had some light shed on how they were chosen? I read a paper on the use of the GRE in this process (found here) and I'm mostly interested in this quotation: "To tell the truth, it is basically a GRE competition." (Referring to the final selection of fellows by a grad school committee.)

How true is this in general? I know selection will vary from school to school (the study above was only conducted across 9 schools), but I wonder if the GRE plays more of a role in the outcome than a lot of schools care to admit.

P.S. - Sorry for the spam in this forum resulting from yesterday's "blackout."

 

[TakeruK]

This varies completely from school to school and program to program. Yes, for some competitions, the GRE could play a larger role in this selection process than it would in the admissions process. But you will rarely know how a school conducts this. Note that the paper you linked is from the "ETS Report Series", i.e. a publication run by the company who conducts (and profits from) the GRE. Hmmmm.....

By the way, sometimes these aren't really University-wide competitions. "University-wide fellowships" are generally a pot of money that the University has and there is some procedure in which the money is allocated. One possible way to allocate these is to just have every admitted student compete across the entire school. This is probably very rarely done because it's not going to be a very good way. How do you compare a English PhD candidate and a Engineering PhD candidate? (ETS' answer would be the GRE score of course, but does that really help the department get the best candidate?) What about bias towards familiarity of the field for the evaluators? etc. 

What is much more common for any University-wide pot of money is that departments or groups of departments are given quotas. So maybe e.g. the Physics department is going to get 3 students funded on this fellowship. The department then nominates 3 names for this award and the University approves it and voila, the money is granted. But it's up to the Physics department to determine how to decide which candidates to nominate. Unless there are specific instructions from the University, they are going to be free to use whatever decision method they want. For example, they might nominate the students who are good but their POIs don't have any grant funding. Or, maybe they offer them to the top candidates as a way to entice them to accept. 

Yet another method is that these fellowships are just a lump sum of money paid to the department for the purpose of supporting grad students. This gives the department the flexibility to use the money to top off student offers where the PI funding is lacking or for whatever other reason. This is how one of my previous schools did it. They got some amount of money and then every student had some of their funding (it might be $1000 or $5000 or $7000 etc.) come from "[University Name] Fellowship" and the amount depending on what was needed based on whatever other funding was available. 

If you are asking this because you want to know how to maximize your chances for such a fellowship, I don't think you are going to be able to find useful answers since the process differs so much. Instead, I would focus on just making your application as strong as possible which will help you get into schools and it's the top candidates that will get these offers. So no extra effort is needed or should be used, in my opinion. 

[2017 Applicant]

21 minutes ago, TakeruK said:

Note that the paper you linked is from the "ETS Report Series", i.e. a publication run by the company who conducts (and profits from) the GRE. Hmmmm.....

Yes, I did realize this when I found it. However, I read the entire thing and I don't think this is really problematic. For example, they mention that most of the responses they got about the analytic writing section were neutral or negative - that it was way too subjective (in terms of graders looking for very specific things, instead of considering the essays holistically) to be of any use. This was a qualitative study and I don't believe they made any attempt to falsify the information they obtained in interviews. That's why I think it's ok to take the quote I mentioned at face value, and assume there is at least one faculty member out there that has this impression of his school's contest.

21 minutes ago, TakeruK said:

What is much more common for any University-wide pot of money is that departments or groups of departments are given quotas. So maybe e.g. the Physics department is going to get 3 students funded on this fellowship. The department then nominates 3 names for this award and the University approves it and voila, the money is granted. But it's up to the Physics department to determine how to decide which candidates to nominate. Unless there are specific instructions from the University, they are going to be free to use whatever decision method they want. For example, they might nominate the students who are good but their POIs don't have any grant funding. Or, maybe they offer them to the top candidates as a way to entice them to accept. 

Yet another method is that these fellowships are just a lump sum of money paid to the department for the purpose of supporting grad students. This gives the department the flexibility to use the money to top off student offers where the PI funding is lacking or for whatever other reason. This is how one of my previous schools did it. They got some amount of money and then every student had some of their funding (it might be $1000 or $5000 or $7000 etc.) come from "[University Name] Fellowship" and the amount depending on what was needed based on whatever other funding was available. 

If you are asking this because you want to know how to maximize your chances for such a fellowship, I don't think you are going to be able to find useful answers since the process differs so much. Instead, I would focus on just making your application as strong as possible which will help you get into schools and it's the top candidates that will get these offers. So no extra effort is needed or should be used, in my opinion. 

I could have been more descriptive in my first email. The kind of university-wide fellowships I'm thinking about (and which this article seems to examine exclusively) are ones in which there are no department quotas and it is not the choice of individual graduate program directors who gets the awards. From what I've read, it is fairly common to have university-wide fellowships where 1) departments nominate "top" candidates to a central graduate school committee and 2) the graduate school committee uses some criteria to select a few winners from all of the nominees. So there is no guarantee that any given department will have a student who gets an award.

I'm asking because I was nominated for one, and got curious about how candidates from different disciplines would be compared if not for a standardized test. And I don't doubt that the GRE is not the sole criterion for such contests, but I would not be surprised to find out that it truly was one of the most important factors.

[hopefulPhD2017]

9 hours ago, 2017 Applicant said:

Yes, I did realize this when I found it. However, I read the entire thing and I don't think this is really problematic. For example, they mention that most of the responses they got about the analytic writing section were neutral or negative - that it was way too subjective (in terms of graders looking for very specific things, instead of considering the essays holistically) to be of any use. This was a qualitative study and I don't believe they made any attempt to falsify the information they obtained in interviews. That's why I think it's ok to take the quote I mentioned at face value, and assume there is at least one faculty member out there that has this impression of his school's contest.

I could have been more descriptive in my first email. The kind of university-wide fellowships I'm thinking about (and which this article seems to examine exclusively) are ones in which there are no department quotas and it is not the choice of individual graduate program directors who gets the awards. From what I've read, it is fairly common to have university-wide fellowships where 1) departments nominate "top" candidates to a central graduate school committee and 2) the graduate school committee uses some criteria to select a few winners from all of the nominees. So there is no guarantee that any given department will have a student who gets an award.

I'm asking because I was nominated for one, and got curious about how candidates from different disciplines would be compared if not for a standardized test. And I don't doubt that the GRE is not the sole criterion for such contests, but I would not be surprised to find out that it truly was one of the most important factors.

I'm curious about this too and am in a similar position. For my uni I found a document detailing how many fellowships each department received in previous years. Seems like about half of nominated fellowships were accepted, but I wondered whether that was due to top applicants ultimately choosing another school. 

[mdivgirl]

I just received word that I received an additional university-wide fellowship.  I know it was something the department must have nominated me for based on previous communication.  They didn't give me any indication of why I got it, but I did end up with a pretty high GRE (99% Verbal which is the relevant score for my field, 5.5 writing, and in the 70+% range for math which is high for a humanities student) so I suspect it did have something to do with it.  It does seem like something easy to compare across disciples.  (This is for what I guess would be considered a second tier school, if that helps.)  But these things don't strike me as anything you can do anything about other than, as was mentioned earlier, initially submitting the strongest application possible.

[jmillar]

I've received a few of these at different schools (MS at one school, PhD at another). My GRE is sub-par (V 68%, Q 70%, W 55%).

At the first school, there was a university wide fellowship for full tuition and it was based off your Statement of Purpose, CV, GPA, and GRE. At the school I'm attending in the fall, I received a RMF which is selected based on the following criteria: http://www.rackham.umich.edu/downloads/fellowships/rmf/rmfGuide.pdf

Basically, this is completely dependent on which university you will be attending. And yes, there was nothing extra I could do other than submit a strong application.

[2017 Applicant]

Thanks everyone. I received the fellowships!

[jmillar]

4 hours ago, 2017 Applicant said:

Thanks everyone. I received the fellowships!

Congratulations!

[aj17]

On 08/03/2017 at 10:26 PM, jmillar said:

I've received a few of these at different schools (MS at one school, PhD at another). My GRE is sub-par (V 68%, Q 70%, W 55%).

At the first school, there was a university wide fellowship for full tuition and it was based off your Statement of Purpose, CV, GPA, and GRE. At the school I'm attending in the fall, I received a RMF which is selected based on the following criteria: http://www.rackham.umich.edu/downloads/fellowships/rmf/rmfGuide.pdf

Basically, this is completely dependent on which university you will be attending. And yes, there was nothing extra I could do other than submit a strong application.

I know your program is completely different...but at the moment i am trying to understand how the rackham school is. I have applied for the design science program. If you have absolutely any idea about it, it would be of great help to me! Thanks in advance