Sixth-Year Funding

Ph.D. students who will take a sixth year to complete their dissertations should plan well in advance to secure an additional year of funding. Many fellowships, both internal and external to Penn, are available exclusively to students entering their final year of dissertation writing. Students will apply for these in their fifth year. Other fellowships are available to students at earlier stages of their graduate careers, and students may apply for them prior to their fifth year. The School of Arts and Sciences permits Ph.D. students to “bank” a year of their regular fellowship funding if another yearlong fellowship is awarded prior to Year 6, which effectively gives the student a sixth year of funding when they use their banked year. We highly recommend that Ph.D. students seek out these opportunities earlier in the program as well as in the fifth year.

While sixth-year funding is not provided by SAS, the English Department has traditionally been successful in assisting students to obtain a sixth year of funding through a combination of SAS-sponsored, external fellowships, and departmental support. On average, six to seven graduate students enter the sixth year with SAS or external fellowships. While English graduate students have been extraordinarily competitive for SAS and external fellowships, not every deserving applicant will receive one, and so the department works to fund the remaining students. The fellowship credits to support these students derive from the Graduate Office’s careful management of its budget of fellowship credits for incoming students. For at least the last 4 years, the Graduate Office has seen all students funded in their sixth year.

The success of this system rests on the cooperation of the graduate students, who must apply for as many fellowships as possible throughout their funded years, coupled with that of each year’s faculty admissions committee, who must adhere to limits on the incoming class size. The English Graduate Office does not have adequate fellowship credits to fund an entire 6th-year class ourselves, so it is important that all graduate students apply widely for other opportunities to reduce the number of credits needed.

Incoming students are given until April 15th to accept an offer for admission, and we are committed to funding students who accept our offer. The varying deadlines for responses to fellowship applications, along with the April 15th deadline for admissions decisions, mean that 5th-year students may not have a definite answer on sixth-year funding until May. We regret that there is so much uncertainty in this process, but the steps we take are calculated to give us the best chance of funding everyone. Applying for competitive fellowships is a path to the security of guaranteed funding and is a way of creating opportunity for your fellow 6th-years.

These applications also provide excellent training in persuasive grant writing, a valuable skill in both academic and non-academic careers. To support students as they acquire that skill, we have developed and continue to refine our departmental resources, including a panel on identifying fellowships, grant writing workshops, where students share materials and receive constructive feedback from their peers and faculty, a Fellowship Deadlines Google Calendar, and a monthly Funding Digest, a newsletter that provides educational content on grant writing and list of upcoming application deadlines.

We also strongly encourage Ph.D. students to apply for relevant research funding in the form of short-term fellowships, usually offered by libraries or external endowments. Not only do these short-term fellowships provide students with opportunities to undertake exciting archival research, but they tend to increase students’ chances of receiving future fellowships and funding.