THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

• Home
• About
• For Staff
• Funding
• Entering Award Data

Entering Award Data

Entering award data

The following are staff guides containing general funding information. For more information, or if you have a question not answered from the below, please email TGS Student Funding staff.

SmartPages in SES/CAESAR

• Graduate Student Funding General Information
• Training Quick Guide

Graduate student Permission to Work request form

Graduate students are expected to be full-time students conducting their studies and research. On occasion, another funding opportunity may arise. When that situation occurs, permission to receive additional remuneration must be requested. The full policy can be found here.

TGS approval is required ONLY if any one of these thresholds are exceeded:

Access the form.

TGS research grant cost share guidelines

Cost share parameters

• Voluntary cost share is not encouraged by the University or the Office for Research.
• Voluntary cost sharing is optional, not an entitlement. TGS may decline to provide cost sharing or may provide cost sharing at a level below the requested amount.
• TGS will review the requests in a fiscally responsible manner and ensure that the support is vital to the success of the proposal and that sufficient resources are available to meet the commitments.
• Proposals requesting cost share should have sponsor budgets with at least $5M remaining at the University.
• The standard level of support is 4 quarters per $1M of sponsor budget remaining at Northwestern. Generally this support comes from each school’s TGS allocation.  Therefore both the Associate Dean from the school(s) and TGS need to approve the request.
• Graduate student cost share quarters are paid out as actual expense, including stipend and tuition expense. They should not be considered waivers, or assumed to be pre-budgeted/existing expenses.
• For students funded on TGS cost share funds, TGS stipulates that preference be given to diverse candidate for this additional slot. This group includes underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, program-specific gender and sexual disparities, those with disabilities, veterans, socioeconomically disadvantaged groups and those that are first generation in higher education.
• Preference should also be given to students in their 3^rd -5^th year of study, if possible.

 Existing institutional support

• For institutional support letters Northwestern already provides significant standard support. TGS is happy to help calculate the full value of this support.
  • TGS already provides support to research grants in the form of Research Assistant Scholarships (RAS). This scholarship covers the portion of tuition not charged directly to the grant (“PI share”).
  • Full time PhD students receive a 100% subsidy of the Northwestern health insurance plan premium.

 Submitting a request to TGS

• Tuition scholarship support for students paid directly on training grants does not follow this process. Instead PIs should work directly with the TGS Training Grant Support Office during the proposal submission process.
• If a PI intends to request graduate student quarters on a research grant a strong justification should be submitted to tgs-fit@northwestern.edu at least 2 weeks before the submission deadline in order to allow for review by TGS.  Pre-submitting the requests speeds up our ability to approve them.
  • Indicate if the submission is new or a renewal
  • Include a detailed justification indicating why the voluntary cost share request is vital to the proposal. This is critical for our review.
  • Indicate if the request is for mandatory or voluntary cost sharing
• Budget details should be sent to TGS as soon as possible, including:
  • Total project budget remaining at Northwestern
  • Number of grad students funded directly on the project
  • Detail of cost share support requested from TGS (number of quarters/year).
• TGS works with the school Associate Deans for final review and approval upon receipt of the OSR-EZ

Additional information related to grad student cost shares can be found in the Office for Research cost-share guidelines.