I’ve thought about writing this post for awhile because I want to share all of the scholarships I applied for as a Canadian international PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. My goal with this post is to illuminate funding opportunities, and to help other Canadian researchers and potential doctoral students alleviate the financial stress that comes with doing a (very expensive) degree overseas.

Below is the list of all of the scholarships I applied for, and of these – I am currently successful at getting four, with a few still waiting on results. That being said, there isn’t just one singular reason I wasn’t successful for the majority of these applications. I will get into some of the challenges I faced when applying for these, and further down I’ll share which scholarships and fundings I was actually successful at. But as you’ll see, failure outnumbers my success every time.

The scholarships and awards I applied for

Countless hours

I don’t even want to think about the sheer volume of hours I spent filling out these applications. But as we say in Canada, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Suffice to say, I missed a lot of shots. But, I was successful at several awards that truly helped me finance my doctoral journey. There were also scholarships I did not know I was eligible for (Looking at you SSHRC Doctoral Fellowships) that I only found out about later. The effort needed for finding, applying, and receiving research funding requires a level of motivation that is quickly lost in the face of so many rejections. The administrative work of filling out countless forms is so taxing, that it’s no wonder that most people give up.

Why I wasn’t successful

Although I didn’t receive any formal feedback on why my applications were not successful, when comparing my experience and approach with the awards I did receive – I found some key takeaways. The most significant “a-ha” moment really came down to my ability to articulate my research, which I found very difficult to do in my first year of studies. This didn’t help me at all because many awards are only available to first year applicants. So I lost out on many of those. Next were references – some scholarships required up to three references, and not just academic ones. For the Trudeau Foundation, some of the successful award winners literally had references from members of parliament. I mean, how does one compete with that? Another reason I was likely unsuccessful just comes down to the numbers: number of applicants versus qualified candidates. Awarding funding is a subjective process when faced with many qualified students, so there is the factor of appealing to the subject-matter that most appealed to the judging panel at the time.

Application for the Sir James Lougheed Award of Distinction

My whiteboard tracking my applications

The scholarships and awards I received

As depressing as it is to see all of the awards and scholarships I failed to get, not all was lost. Here are the awards I was successful in receiving.

In addition to these, there are still several applications I have “out there” where I am waiting on results.

Difficulty in applying

There are a couple of factors in how I rated whether a scholarship was easy or hard to complete.

If a scholarship or award only required an application form and a CV, I rated it as fairly easy. But when additional materials were required, such as an essay, transcripts, and multiple references, the process became far more complex. Collecting additional materials, especially reference, is incredibly time consuming. Sometimes references are unreliable, or a student may lack recent academic references especially if they’ve been out of school for several years. What delineated the hard from the extremely hard, is the requirement for more than two references, as well as the need to produce a full bibliography of your research.

What I haven’t included is how seamless an online application portal is, or if applicants also needed to send a physical copy. I also haven’t included if there are any fees involved, which also add to the complexity of an application especially when deciding wether it’s even worth applying for.

Considerations

The University of Edinburgh has put a focus on attracting more postgraduate students from the US and Canada in the coming years. However, there is a significant lack of information on their website about what scholarships are available for Canadians. While they do list general information on their award page like Canada Student Loans, I wanted to shore up a gap of knowledge on what funding is truly available. And by no means, is this an exhaustive list. These are simply the scholarships and grants that I applied for.

If you are a Canadian student considering a literature program at the University of Edinburgh, please share your funding journey in the comments below.

All of the scholarships I applied for as a Canadian creative writing researcher / Double spaced by Lexie Angelo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0