THE PROCESS

Provost Ralph J. Hexter and Graduate Studies Dean Jeffery Gibeling outlined their plan for awarding the fellowships:

A portion of the fellowship fund will go directly to eligible programs, each of which will offer first-year fellowships to the program’s top candidates.

“We encourage programs to combine these new fellowships with existing funding to offer multiyear packages,” Hexter and Gibeling wrote in their e-mail. “Recognizing that competition for the best students is often very challenging, we expect to make more offers than will be accepted.”

First-year fellowships that are not accepted will be combined with the balance of the fellowship funds to create a pool of dissertation-year fellowships. These will be awarded later in the year to doctoral students (already enrolled) on a competitive basis across programs, in a process to be organized by the Office of Graduate Studies.

“In this way, programs that are not successful in their offers of first-year fellowships will have an additional opportunity in the competition for dissertation-year fellowships.”

The college and division deans will organize faculty committees in the participating disciplines to review the nominations for dissertation- year fellowships.

Additional information regarding both fellowship opportunities will be provided directly to the participating graduate programs.

Campus offers grants up to $1 million for interdisciplinary teamwork

By Dateline staff

The campus administration this week rolled out a new fellowship program for graduate students in the arts, humanities and social sciences.

The fellowships will be available for the first time in 2012-13, Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Ralph J. Hexter and Graduate Studies Dean Jeffery Gibeling said in a Jan. 23 e-mail to graduate program chairs.

The program, officially called the Provost’s Fellowships in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, will fund a combination of first-year and dissertation-year fellowships, 50 in all annually — with stipends of $25,000 and remission of fees and tuition.

Hexter and Gibeling said the program’s annual budget is $2 million, of which $1.4 million is new money and $600,000 is from an existing allocation to the same disciplines.

Making UC Davis more competitive

“Providing additional support for the arts, humanities and social sciences is an important step toward making UC Davis more competitive for the best graduate students by reducing our significant shortage of fellowship funding compared to peer institutions,” Hexter and Gibeling said.

“In addition, these fellowships will help to ensure that students complete their degrees in a timely manner and at high rates of success in disciplines that are often overly dependent on teaching assistantships for graduate student support.”

Hexter and Gibeling labeled the new program “an important first step,” while expressing hope “that before long we can raise significant new monies that could make it possible for us to provide much more robust and appropriately competitive support for graduate students at UC Davis.”

The campus administration developed the fellowship program in collaboration with Deans Ron Mangun (Division of Social Sciences), Jessie Ann Owens (Division of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies) and Neal Van Alfen (College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences).