Financial Assistance
Teaching or research assistantships may be available from the departments or research projects with which group faculty members are associated. You should contact individual departments (not to the Animal Behavior Graduate Group) at the same time as you apply to the Animal Behavior Graduate Group to receive an application for a teaching assistantship. Applicants with high grades in evolutionary biology are encouraged to apply to the section of Evolution and Ecology for a teaching assistantship in Introductory Biology (Biology 1B); for additional information, contact Stephanie Macey-Gallow, EVE TA Coordinator, (530) 752-1274, smaceygallow@ucdavis.edu. Teaching assistant positions may also be available in Animal Science, Neurology, Physiology and Behavior (NPB), Entomology, Wildlife, Fisheries and Conservation Biology, (WFCB), Environmental Science and Policy and Psychology.
Grants & Fellowships
Fellowship Application deadline: January 15
Both new and continuing students in the Animal Behavior Graduate Group have access to a number of sources of funding, including intramural and extramural grants and fellowships. Applicants to the ABGG are expected to apply for University fellowships and nonresident tuition fellowships, which are awarded on a competitive basis.
The DEADLINE for applications for grants and fellowships for both new and continuing students is January 15. This deadline for grants and fellowships is a result of Graduate Studies' policy requiring that applications for most intramural funding sources be evaluated and ranked by the committee members and submitted early in February.
Intramural Grants and Fellowships
New Students
New students are eligible for a variety of intramural fellowship funds, including funds to pay non-resident tuition. New students should consult the following website to determine whether they are eligible for specific fellowships: http://www.gradstudies.ucdavis.edu/ssupport/internal.html , and should contact Graduate Studies for additional information about these fellowships. They should note any specific fellowships for which they are eligible in their fellowship applications to the Animal Behavior Graduate Group. The admission and fellowship committee ranks students who are admitted into the program, and either offers funds to them from money allocated directly to the graduate program (the block grant) or nominates them for competitive fellowships administered by the University. The information in the standard application for new students (GPA, GRE scores, letters of recommendation, statement of purpose, is used to evaluate new students for fellowship support.
Continuing Students
Continuing students are eligible for both research funds and fellowship support, and the latter includes some special fellowships (e.g. dissertation year fellowships) that are not available to new students.
Continuing students seeking research or fellowship support must provide the following materials to the Animal Behavior Graduate Group by January 15:
- The campus fellowship application form
(http://gradstudies.ucdavis.edu/ssupport/internal.html)
- A research proposal. (text = 3 pages). Additional pages for budget, budget justification, references, tables and figures.
- A one-page summary of your research goals and interests
- Support history: a statement of your funding history for the last three years
- Potential support for 2008-09 (see below for instructions on updating after 1/15)
- Three letters of recommendation, one of which must be written by your major professor
Applications will receive full consideration by the fellowship committee only if they are complete by the deadline. Some things to watch out for:
Support history - Make sure that the information you provide about past and future funding sources is complete and accurate as of January 15th. In addition, during the period from January 15th to June 30th, make sure that the Graduate Group Coordinator is informed of any changes in potential support. For instance, if you learn in April that you have been awarded an extramural fellowship for the coming year, inform the Animal Behavior graduate group coordinator of this fact immediately. Offers of financial aid from the ABGG are predicated on the assumption that the information you have provided about your financial situation is accurate and up-to-date, and offers of support from the ABGG may be retracted if they were awarded on the basis of erroneous or out-of-date information.
ALL CONTINUING STUDENTS ARE STRONGLY ENCOURAGED TO APPLY FOR ALL FUNDS FOR WHICH THEY ARE ELIGIBLE. It is much better to apply for funds that you ultimately will not need than to assume that your financial needs for the coming year will be covered, and then run out of funding when anticipated funds fail to materialize. Check your eligibility for all of the funding sources noted on the combined application, and make sure you have checked all of the boxes that apply to you. Unfortunately, there won't be time for the Animal Behavior graduate group coordinator or the members of the fellowship committee to contact you, should you fail to apply for a source of funding for which you are eligible.
Timeline for preparing your grant/fellowship application
December 15. Write a first draft of your proposal and ask your major professor and other colleagues to critique it. If you lack experience at proposal-writing, you might need to begin writing your proposal earlier, so you have time to prepare several drafts before giving the final draft of your proposal to the faculty members who will be writing letters for you.
Students who have not yet decided on a specific research project should write a proposal that considers the sorts of problems that interest them, and that indicates their "taste in science". That is, a proposal from a first-year student might be similar to an NSF predoctoral fellowship proposal, in which the goal is to indicate that you have the potential to become a great scientist, rather than convincing someone to give you money to complete a specific project.
January 1. Submit a polished, finished draft of your proposal to your major professor, and to two other faculty members of the ABGG. Faculty are required to comment on the merits of the proposed research, so they won't be able to write a decent letter for you unless they have a final copy of the proposal in front of them. Keep in mind that faculty members should always be allowed a minimum of two weeks to write any letter of recommendation, and some faculty may be out of town at the beginning of December.
January 15. Submit completed application online in EMBARK.
Extramural Grants and Fellowships
Information about extramural grants and fellowships can be obtained from http://www.gradstudies.ucdavis.edu/ssupport/external.html. Graduate students in the ABGG are another good source for information about external grants and fellowships. In fact, we strongly urge students who have been successful in obtaining extramural funding to send information about their source of funding, plus a copy of their successful proposal, to the Animal Behavior graduate group coordinator. This will allow us to set up an archive that is likely to prove useful to other graduate students in the group.
Selection Criteria
Promise of scholarship, quality of previous work, ability in research, merit, overall quality of research proposal, and student's progress toward degree.
