Let’s not mince words: For all that UC Berkeley is billed up to be the best public school in the country with all of its top graduate programs (including MSE), it is disappointing that not only is the graduate stipend often times insufficient to cover basic needs, but there are additional costs associated with the PhD that can definitely creep up on you. 🙄 Luckily, there are many grants available for free money, but it requires knowing where to look or who to talk to (to tell you where to look). Here are three funding opportunities that I encountered and obtained this school year. 🤑

Conference Travel Grant

This is probably the most relevant one to you as you’ll likely be traveling to conferences during the course of your PhD; I’ve already received quite a few questions about this grant. While conferences are great networking and dissemination opportunities, they can also be quite expensive! There’s a bunch of costs, including registration, transportation, hotel, food, etc. which adds up to be ~$1000. 💸 This is a relatively small amount compared to the size of a research grant, but maybe funding happens to be tight or you’re self-funded (like me), so there isn’t an applicable pot of money. Also doesn’t hurt to save your advisor some money!

The details

Fortunately, the Graduate Division sponsors the Conference Travel Grant which can be a great subsidy. The application is really easy and Mark has never heard of a student not getting one if they applied. The stipulations are:

  • You can only receive two in the course of your PhD.
  • You must have an accepted Poster or Presentation; you can’t just go for professional development. (although this is important too!)
  • $600 for a conference in CA; $900 for a conference in US; $1500 for an international conference.
  • You cannot be in your final semester (on filing fee).

As you can see, there are basically no reasons not to apply.

Berkeley Research Impact Initiative

This is another situation that might come up in your PhD. For all the talk about open science and all the publicity of the UC Library’s transformative open access (OA) agreements, it is still fairly difficult and expensive to publish in OA journals. 🙃 Not only are the policies convoluted (who’s going to read all that text and click all those links??), but once again it appears that self-funded students are being penalized because we have to scrape together our own funding source. I got super lucky to have my first paper accepted in npj Computational Materials, a fully OA journal, but this also meant I was hit with a $2,990 bill. 😱 While Mark offered to use his discretionary funds to pay for it, I still felt pretty bad about it.

The details

Fortunately, the UC Berkeley Library has an established (though little-known) Berkely Research Impact Initiative (BRII) to help defray open access publishing costs of up to $2500. Honestly in the world of OA publishing these days, that amount won’t be enough for most journals, but it certainly goes a long ways. The eligibility criteria are summarized as follows:

  • You can only apply if your article is accepted in a fully OA journal. That is, the journal only publishes OA articles and not that you’re simply choosing to publish OA (“hybrid”).
  • Your article must be accepted by the journal, after peer review but before publication.
  • You can apply once every [fiscal] year.
  • The publisher/journal must not yet be incorporated in one of the aforementioned OA agreements. Those journals have their own process that you must follow.

The BRII is a pretty sweet deal, particularly if you’re self-funded! (having the GRFP/NDSEG/CSGF makes for a compelling justification why you should receive this funding)

Course Improvement Grant

If you’re super stoked about teaching like I am (and a few other MSE students!), you may have an idea for a mini-project that you’d like to implement to improve a course that you’re the Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) for. This semester I was the GSI for MSE 104L: Materials Characterization Laboratory with Prof. Andy Minor and we wanted to host an in-person poster session for the students. Pedagogically, this was a great idea and a welcome break from lab reports; logistically, however, it was tricky to coordinate space reservations, scheduling, and of course, poster printing which easily runs >$50 per poster.

The details

Surprisingly, the GSI Teaching and Resource Center offers Course Improvement Grants (CIG) that can help fund these projects. I will note that the application is quite involved and I was fortunate to have Alex Bruefach’s already-drafted CIG application from when she was the GSI for this course (but couldn’t execute the poster session because COVID hit, rip). For what it’s worth though, thinking through the details really does help make the project more successful and meaningful to you.

Some additional thoughts:

  • A $300 cap really isn’t that much money. Our entire poster order was $900, and a Course Improvement Grant that I applied for to develop a coursereader at Stanford was $1200 (and I used it to directly pay me).
  • Speaking of which, one of the annoying restrictions is that you cannot use the money for salary/compensation.
  • The fact that you have to be a GSI to apply for this grant is also irksome. For example, when I wrote that coursereader, I did it purely as a hobby project to support future undergraduates and it was only at Aaron’s insistence did I apply for the grant. 💚

Nevertheless, if you have your own idea for something to try, I encourage you to apply for a CIG!

Hopefully you will find some of this information useful! There are probably even more funding opportunities that I’m not aware of, but because I had good success with these three all in the same year, I thought I’d just share my experience. Note that applying for (and securing) grants is also a great item to list on your CV, especially because a lot of graduate students don’t have opportunities to do so.