Fellowships and Financial Aid

GSAS

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences offers a comprehensive program of student financial aid, including awards, loans, and student employment. The GSAS Financial Aid Tookkit gives detailed information about graduate funding and financial aid.

Ph.D. students in good standing receive five years of full funding (tuition, fees, stipend, and summer support). This typically includes three years as a Teaching Assistant or Teaching Fellow. Students whose dissertation work extends beyond the five funded years often apply for competitive dissertation-writing fellowships from other sources (see opportunities below) and for competitive teaching positions in Columbia's Core Curriculum and the Undergraduate Writing Program and for the GSAS Teaching Scholars program.

GSAS administers additional fellowships that eligible students may apply for.

GSAS provides very limited fellowship support for students in the Freestanding M.A. programs. These grants, which offset only a portion of the total cost of attendance, are awarded competitively to the strongest candidate(s) in the applicant pool. M.A. students are also eligible to serve as graders in courses that require such assistance; compensation includes a small amount of tuition remission and a modest cash payment.

MA Access Program in Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures covers tuition and provides a cost-of-living stipend to qualified students who have been admitted to a Master of Arts degree program in a participating department.
 

The Harriman Institute

The Harriman Institute awards a variety of student fellowships every year. The Institute's Fellowship Committee makes all fellowship decisions.

  • Harriman Junior Fellowship 
  • Summer Language Fellowship
  • Pepsico Junior Fellowship

  • Pepsico Travel Fellowship

Departmental Support 

The Slavic Department provides supplemental summer funding for doctoral students to facilitate concrete progress toward the degree or scholarly contributions to the field. These funds may be used for research travel, language study, sustained work toward the completion of degree requirements, or the publication of scholarly work. The Rose Raskin Fund is awarded at the Department's discretion for study either here or abraod. The Elena T. Mogilat-John P. Mihaly fellowship is awarded annually for summer travel to Russia. Departmental funding opportunities are normally announced - along with submission guidelines - by departmental email.

The Department offers each of its graduate students (through their 7th year) a career allowance of $1,200 total for conference participation. Eligible students are encouraged to apply for GSAS for travel grants for conference participation; these require matching funds from the department (The department's matching contribution will come from the $1,200 allowance.) 

Emergency Loans

Emergency loans are available to students who, for one reason or another, do not receive paychecks or fellowship stipends on time. A loan must be repaid (either in a lump sum or in installments) during the semester in which it was received. Note that the loan process must be initiated either with the Chair or the Director of Graduate Studies.

Other Sources of Funding

Several scholarly societies track funding opportunities for students of Slavic languages and literatures.