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University Fellowship

We anticipate announcing 2025 recruitment fellowship recipients on March 15th.

Due to recent decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, an applicant’s race/ethnicity is not visible in Slate until after a student has been accepted for admission. Slate and Banner should update within 48 hours of an acceptance. Programs are encouraged to start their admissions decisions promptly in order to determine who is eligible to be nominated for our recruitment fellowships. Programs are encouraged to nominate an eligible individual for the both the Access and the University Fellowship, if eligible.

New for the 2025 competition:

*Stipend levels have been raised to $33,000

*The Graduate College will no longer offer summer "top-offs" for the recruitment fellowship

*To encourage our strong underrepresented students to stay at UIC for their graduate studies, for the Spring 2025 competition, we would like half of the fellows to be UIC students/alumni.

*Each graduate program is limited to TWO nominations regardless of program size.

University Fellowships seek to recruit outstanding students newly admitted to terminal master’s (see list below) and PhD programs under the auspices of the Graduate College at the University of Illinois Chicago. Students previously admitted to the UIC Graduate College program may be eligible for recruitment competitions IF it can be demonstrated that the nominee is completing a terminal master’s degree in Spring-Summer 2024 and transitioning to a PhD program. Thus, for example, a student completing a terminal MA, MAT, MFA, or MPH and accepted into the program’s own PhD program could be nominated for this fellowship. (The list of eligible degrees is not exhaustive.) This change takes effect for the Spring 2024 competition and demonstrates a desire to recruit top students. In their nominating letter, the Director of Graduate Studies should detail the recruitment plan/rationale for a master’s-to-doctorate nomination.(Programs with questions about this eligibility change should contact Benn Williams.)

Students should direct questions about eligibility to their Director of Graduate Studies after reading the entire webpage. Applicants will be reviewed by the Graduate Awards Committee and evaluated for academic excellence on the basis of post-secondary record, letters of recommendation, personal statement, and other criteria as deemed appropriate by the committee, including the recommendation from the nominating program/department.

All applicants must be nominated by their departments, which collect and submit each nomination as a PDF to Box.

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DEADLINE: 4pm, FEBRUARY 3, 2025

Benn Williams  |  Fellowships and Awards Coordinator