 I appreciate that. All right, recording and projects. Thank you, Paul, for that introduction. I appreciate that very much. So good afternoon, everyone, and welcome. Looking forward to having you all join us here at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. It was 68 degrees yesterday as a high, so I can feel the fall starting to set in here, which always brings excitement for a new class of students. So my name is Adam Lucere, and I am the fellowships program manager here at Rackham Graduate School. I've been working with Student Financial Aid for about 12, 13 years now here in Michigan with a short stint on the West Coast at Stanford and Southern Oregon University. Leah's been working with students for about five years now and is very knowledgeable resource also when it comes to Rackham Fellowships and Student Funding, and she worked at the School of Information prior to this. Graduate School can be a great opportunity to continue your educational pursuits. Sometimes the funding can seem limited, but I hope to provide some information today to help make you more knowledgeable as you begin to pursue different avenues of funding. The key thing to take away today is that there are many tools and resources out there. Advocate for yourself, knock on doors, and ensure your funding is sufficient and able to support you throughout your degree time here at Michigan. So some common types of expenses that you need to think about when coming to the University of Michigan or any graduate school for that matter. Pretty basic tuition and fees. You've got your book expenses. You've got your living expenses, which is room, food, your social, your personal activities. You may have additional expenses that might not be the standard expenses that are included for all students, such as moving expenses. Are you moving from out of state? Do you have family obligations that you need to take care of? Obviously, you would know if you have childcare expenses that you need to take care of. We do have resources for parents with children, that we'll go over later on in the presentation. On the right, you'll see a little box here. This is what the University of Michigan has kind of set out as estimated expenses for graduate students. They use the same number for room and board, books, transportation, miscellaneous for all students, but as you can see, there's the difference there in the tuition and fees. These are just estimates, but this gives you an idea about how much it would cost for a year here at the University of Michigan. So the question is, how are you gonna pay for it? So if you're coming from undergraduate education, there are some big differences between graduate school and undergraduate funding. A lot of graduate school funding is gonna be dependent on external funding. A lot of students receive fellowships from external agencies, whether that's government, state, or private businesses, private industry. It's not as often determined by financial need like a lot of undergraduate aid is. The Office of Financial Aid on campus, which is different than our office, will still use the FAFSA and will still look at financial need for a lot of the aid that they offer through that office. Some funding is tied to work and research, administration, teaching. It tends to be a little bit more complex, especially since degrees can take five to seven years. And so I always encourage you to take a look at your offer letter. It's gonna be one of your best resources for taking a look to find out what is your five to seven year kind of model look like. Your graduate program should give you an outline of how your funding is gonna look over the time of your degree. It also varies by your field of study and also sometimes within individual graduate programs. Some graduate programs rely more on work opportunities for students. Some have more research opportunities. So it really varies by the graduate program. Common types of funding for graduate schools. So this is just work opportunities that you may be offered. So if you're not familiar with these acronyms, a graduate student instructor we refer to as a GSI. This is actually a teaching position. So this is where you're gonna be in a classroom, teaching labs, helping grading papers, examinations, things like that. A GSRA position is a research position. This is you're gonna be working on a research project. A lot of times students will derive their thesis or dissertation from this work. And then there's GSSA positions also on campus. A lot of these are administrative type positions. You're gonna be assisting with university, state, federal projects that are supported by grants in they're typically in an administrative type role. Your resource for these is gonna be the U of M career website. So we'll share this presentation so you can have that link. But if you go to Google and type in University of Michigan careers will come right up with that website. So there's two websites where you can find employment at Michigan. One is the U of M careers. I find that that's a great one for graduate student appointments. But there's also the student employment website. And the University of Michigan has more jobs that can be filled by our students. And so you can find those on the student employment website. And again, that's on the Office of Financial Aid website or you can just Google U-Mesh student employment. And you'll come up with that webpage. Great resource. There's a lot of great jobs out there that aren't positions like this. You see positions that pay pretty well also. Great jobs at the Arboretum or at the Botanical Gardens or working with Dean's offices and things like that. So definitely take a look at both of those resources if you're interested in work opportunities. So there's funding at different stages of the graduate education that could look different. There's the funding for masters and PhD is very different. Here at Michigan PhD students are guaranteed funding for five years and that's gonna be broken down in your offer letter from your academic program. And then throughout those stages of your PhD program there's gonna be aid for recently admitted students. There's different aid for pre-candidate, candidate and then writing a thesis or dissertation. You're gonna find throughout our presentation that we're gonna point you towards your graduate coordinator within your academic program. Masters and PhD students have someone in their program with a title called graduate coordinator. They are gonna be your internal resource and they are gonna know the most about finding aid that is specific to your academic program, work opportunities that are specific to your program, research opportunities. They're really gonna be your best resource on campus. So what can funding cover? Of course, there's aid for tuition and fees. There's stipend and salary aid. This year the established stipend level is 12,629. We equal that to whatever a 0.5 GSI appointment is. Actually, I'm sorry, that's a GSRAA appointment. And so that's equal to a 0.5 GSRAA appointment. And there's also aid for insurance, health and dental. There is vision insurance here at the University of Michigan, but keep an eye, typically it's not covered by the health insurance. So you just wanna make sure that your vision is being either covered by yourself or it's being added by your program if that's something that they offer. RACM has conference and travel grants. And a lot of times your program has conference travel grants also. So sometimes we'll see students that might have a conference travel that might cost them like $4,000. And they'll find money, they'll kind of piece mail money together from their program, some from us, maybe some from another resource until they have enough to cover the full trip. We have aid for emergency situations, same with a lot of programs and even some other offices on campus like CEW, which is the Center for Education for Women, but they will assist any student here at the University of Michigan regardless of your gender, undergraduate and graduate students. We also have additional aid for costs associated with completion of the degree, research expenses through the research grant program. And there's a lot of professional development opportunities that have been growing here at RACM recently also, especially through our RACM internship program. So where to find funding information? There's search engines online, but I usually tell students be careful with those search engines online. We find that a lot of students do a lot of work with like just those like general ones like fast web and stuff like that, sending in essays and letters and things like that. And they don't sometimes hear back which can be kind of frustrating. So one website that I've linked here that I think is pretty helpful and Leah shake your head if you can see that. No. Nope, it did fall up. All right, let me move it over to this screen. Here we go. Yes? Yes. All right, so this website here is organized by the library on campus. And if we click here on graduate students, this kind of I think is a really great all-encompassing place where you can find information across the University of Michigan. It's a big place. And so it's nice when you can find things that kind of consolidated in the one spot for you. So here's CEW like at the top what I was talking about earlier. They have aid for UFM graduate students including fellowships and emergency grants. There's the social ISR. There's the Institute for Humanities at UFM. M Compass is a place where you can basically see everything for kind of international learning experiences. So studying abroad, going abroad, things like that. Services for students with disabilities, SSD are veterans and military services at UFM. So this is a great place where you can kind of get a lot of links here. And we also have UFM school specific graduate funding. And so if you're in education, this will take you right to the education or actually that link is broken. That's bringing you to my webpage. So we'll have to get that fixed. But great resource down here. You've got dissertation fellowships from foundations. They have a search for external funding. And so there's this tool called pivot where you can look for a lot of grants opportunities including government resources, foundations, professional associations. There is a link for international students on here international student resources that has a lot of great information and resources for international students. So I think this is one of the best links here at the University of Michigan for finding the great funding information that's all consolidated into one spot. We also have students that find a lot of aid through private sector government such as NSF, the National Science Foundation, NIH, National Institute of Health, employers. We've had some, you know, I've seen engineering students find aid through, you know, Ford, GM, you know, things like that, technology companies that have helped support fellowships for those students. Other great resources is gonna be your graduate school, the graduate library, the Office of Financial Aid. And then one of your best resources as mentioned earlier is always gonna be your department in your graduate program. Faculty members and the staff, the graduate coordinator are really gonna know a lot of specific opportunities that students that have come before you have taken advantage of in your academic program. So understanding the terms of an award, this is very important for graduate students because versus undergraduate aid, there are sometimes, you know, terms that you're gonna have to follow and conditions that you wanna make sure you meet. Sometimes with undergraduate aid, it's just making sure you're getting good grades, you're active, you're showing up to class, things like that. But with graduate aid fellowships, sometimes there is a minimum number of credits that you need to be registered for. Sometimes there's work obligations. For instance, it may have the work obligation while you're in school, such as research or working for your program, or there could even be work obligations after the award. So we have an award call of the KCP, King Shavez Parks, which is a great award for master students. It's $20,000 award. But it does require that the person be a, working like a faculty position for three to five years after they graduate. And then if you don't meet that obligation, then that grant that the state of Michigan provided you turns into a loan. So you wanna make sure that to keep an eye on any work obligations that you're gonna need to meet. Some awards have annual reports on activities or expenditures like NSF is a good example of that. Some of our awards that come directly from donors, we may ask that you send a thank you letter to the donor. And some have participation in special programs. We have something called the GEM Foundation that requires participation in certain programs as part of the GEM program. So understanding other terms of the award, does it have any kind of limitations? One limitation that we always encourage students to keep an eye on is additional work. So for instance, NSF has a cost sharing portion with the University of Michigan. The amount of work is limited to 0.25, which a 0.25 appointment is equal to 10 hours. And so you're not allowed to work more than 10 hours per week. And that's true with a lot of the RACM fellowships also. So RMF, PreDoc, our international fellowship, all have that same work requirement, which is no more than 0.25 hours per week. Is there supplemental funding available? So some awards have additional supplements that you can add onto those awards. And will you need future funding? Sometimes the award may only be one year versus five years. So make sure that you are fulfilling your entire five years of your award working with your graduate coordinator. Excuse me. Can the award be deferred or saved until later? So some awards you may be awarded it and you have to use it right now. And so you need to work with your graduate coordinator to see if you can defer other awards. So maybe you have another award like NSF and you can push that two years down the road and you can take fellowships, maybe a full bright that you need to use right now. Can it be combined with other awards or are there renewal options? And a lot of awards are topped up. And what does that mean? Well, you may look at a fellowship and you're like, wow, that only provides with $18,000. Well, if you work with your academic program, they'll work with Rackham. And we'll ensure that you're topped up, meaning that you're brought up to what is a full funding package for your year. So you may only get $18,000 from Dow, let's say, and then your program is gonna chip in some and Rackham's gonna chip in, all of that to make sure that you're at a full funding package. So we'll always work with your program and use some times to make sure that you're topped up, which is a full 0.5 stipend 12629 per term this year, plus healthcare plus tuition is a full package for a PhD student. So it's always important to think about how additional aid can impact your existing aid package. So this is really for students that are applying for financial aid through the office of financial aid. And this includes the childcare subsidy, which is a great program through the office of financial aid that provides money for childcare. You wanna make sure that you contact them, reach out to them, let them know, hey, I'm getting this additional aid that you guys don't know about. How is that gonna impact my package? If you don't say anything and they just package your aid accordingly without knowing about anything else that you're getting, you could be in a situation where they have to reduce a federal loan or they have to reduce your childcare subsidy, which sometimes means you're gonna owe money back on your account that you've received. So always just keep in close contact with the office of financial aid if you have federal loans for grad students, that's a federal plus loan, federal unsubsidized loan or the childcare subsidy. They are available through chat, phone, email. Sometimes students have difficulty getting through the email. I know that they receive, at this time of the year, they're getting about 12 to 1400 emails per day. So sometimes giving them a phone call or doing the live chat can sometimes get you a faster answer than email. So here at Rackham, what do we do at the fellowship's office? We administer a lot of the fellowship programs that I'm gonna go over in just a minute and show you this big screen of all the different fellowship programs that we administer. We also manage grant programs like the travel and conference grant, emergency grants and research grants to name a few, but check out our funding page. We have a lot of opportunities. You can click on it. You can see if it meets the criteria. A lot of our awards are program nominated and you'll see that on the screen, meaning your program has to nominate you for the award. That's not true with our grants like the travel grants, emergency grants, research grants, you apply for those on your own. But some of the larger fellowships, especially things that last multi years or full year fellowship, those are gonna require your program to nominate you. So you're gonna wanna work with your graduate coordinator and they will let you know how that process works within your academic program. We also serve as the liaison for NSF. And so if you hear the term CO, if you're a NSF fellow, we are the coordinating official. So you'll be at the office that kind of answers any policy questions or assist you with setting up time here or things like that. So just let us know if you have any questions throughout that process. We also work with academic programs to set up cost sharing. And this is what I was talking about when I was saying top up. Another term for that is cost sharing. We're gonna work with your program to share the costs to bring you up to a full funding package. We also provide direct funding to departments for graduate students. And so we provide funding to programs which they then provide directly to students and they can use many different ways to I guess use that funding. They can use it to help support GSI appointments in your program. They may have direct fellowships. They may have emergency grants, travel grants. Some of that money comes from generous Rackham donors and some of it comes directly from Rackham's budget and goes to your academic program. We strongly encourage direct deposit. So make sure that you set up direct deposit. It's really easy. It'll take you maybe about 10 to 15 minutes at most. But once it's set up, it's set up for good for your whole time here at Michigan. You can of course change it at any time. But having direct deposit ensures that the checks are not being sent to random places. If you move somewhere in Ann Arbor, you move to a different house, checks aren't being sent to your own house. Direct deposit also makes sure that you get your money faster. Usually about three to four days faster than if anything is mail-by-check. So again, I'm gonna point to Google. If you just type in umish, direct deposit, you'll come up with the direct deposit page. It's easy to set up. There's a link on there with a phone number also if you have questions about it. But basically you just need your routing number and your bank account number and then you can set it up right in Wolverine Access. So some other funding from Rackham Graduate School that we haven't, or we have kind of gone over, but I'll go over it a little bit more here, travel, research, bird and sea. We have competitions that you'll see on our website such as the predoctoral competition. We talked about those allocations that are going right to your department so that they can kind of distribute more funds to the students in your program. We have two different ways that our funding is student initiated. Those are the ones that you're gonna apply for directly on your own. Emergency grants, travel grants, research grants. We have a child with travel grant. So if you have to travel and you have a child, check out our travel with child grant. We also have the program nominated awards that I was speaking about earlier. Talk to your program. Some of those are gonna be very limited in the amount of students that they can nominate from your program. So some may only be limited to two or three students. And so a lot of programs will have internal processes is how those students are selected to be moved forward. So here's all of the awards that we administer through RACM for PhD students. And these are listed on the RACM funding page. Usually about we're working with over two dozen different awards. They really vary greatly in the award amounts, types, the eligibility. We have awards ranging from the small travel grants up to full year fellowships. Four basic categories really of our funding. I say direct funding, things that are for specific things. We have the competitions and then we have the allocations that go to your program. And then we have general funds that are also kind of distributed to the graduate level programs. So all of the awards listed are open to PhD students that you see here. Some of them you may have to be a candidate for some of them. So make sure you just read the eligibility. There'll be usually like a two to three sentence eligibility section that tells you how you can qualify for these awards. So check those out on our website. For master students, here are some of the opportunities that we have for master students. Just like PhD students, master students can get our travel grants, our emergency grants. We have international research awards. So check those out. The RMA, which is the Rackham Masters Award, that's for entering students only. So that is not available to students once you're here. It's used as a recruiting award. So you would have been recruited with the Rackham Masters Award if you were chosen for that prior to your admission or actually once you were admitted. The Shapiro Malik Awards are great. That's if you have any kind of student loans and interest is accruing, which interest is gonna be accruing here very soon. So if you have loans from undergrad, we don't get a ton of applicants for that. So take a look at the Shapiro Malik Award. We'd like to award as many students with funding as we can for that award. The King Chavez Parks, if you're from the state of Michigan, this is a great opportunity. So you can take a look at that. That's $20,000 for master students. If you're interested in going into any kind of work in public service, you can qualify for the public service requirement. So that's really it. I do ask if you have questions, let's try to keep them general. If you have specific account questions or specific questions about a fellowship you're on, send us an email at rackhamff at umich.edu and we'd be happy to look into your situation, because I don't want anybody to kind of have to put out any financial information or anything about yourself. So just ask general questions, but we are more than happy to answer any questions that you guys have that have come up. The disbursement calendar is another resource I just thought of after I had done the presentation. One of the most helpful things, and I think a question that comes up for PhD students that have fellowship funding is, how and when am I gonna get paid? Well, how is your gonna get paid into your direct deposit, hopefully, that you have set up? And then the when is gonna be on the Rackham Disbursement Calendar. So that's on the Rackham website or, again, Google Rackham Disbursement Calendar. It'll be the first link that comes up. That'll give you a breakdown of how the disbursements work and what days they're on. All of the Rackham fellowships are dispersed in five payments over the four months of each term. So four months in fall, you're gonna get five payments. The four months in winter term, you're gonna get five payments. And then with NSF, that's the only one that we administer during the fall and the winter where you get four payments. And that's because that's per the federal agreement with NSF that we have to do it in four versus five. A lot of the programs do it with four or five and they'll let you know. So work with your program if you're getting a, I don't know, a dentistry fellowship. Make sure you talk to dentistry and say, hey, am I getting this over four payments or five payments? Most likely they've already told you in your opera letter and things like that, but they will be able to let you know how those payments will break down. So with that, are there any questions? Come on, there was always some questions last year. We had like 20 minutes worth of questions. Not a question, Adam, but I'll add that in terms of when students are looking for funding opportunities to not discount the Rackham newsletter. I know you mentioned it, but there are links sometimes to things that might not be on the student employment site and there are opportunities sometimes for us like we have something called the King Talks, which is like basically you get paid to do a TED talk and that advertising will come through the student newsletter. You won't find that on the career site. So newsletters, whether it's the Rackham one or even departmental ones are also kind of a good way to find different funding opportunities as well. I agree. I love this section at the bottom that says like fellowship deadlines and grant deadlines because like Paul mentioned, it's not just ours but sometimes you'll see other fellowship deadlines for national organizations and things like that. So the newsletter is an awesome resource for sure. Do hours in GSI, GSRA correspond to how much tuition is covered? Typically with those positions, it is a full tuition waiver. So I'm not aware of any of those positions that do anything less than a full tuition waiver. So it does depend on your appointment. Anything over a 0.25 appointment will be a full tuition waiver and anything less than that will be a partial tuition waiver. Yeah, I believe it's on the HR website. Thank you, Leah. And then sometimes students are confused about like what a full funding package is for PhD students. That's gonna be in your offer letter but when we talk about a full funding package, it's your grad care which is your dental and your just regular health insurance. It's a stipend that equals a 0.5 level kind of appointment on campus which is 12,629 this year and then full tuition. The stipend for PhD students, I don't think it goes up exactly by inflation. A lot of times it's tied to the contractual agreements for graduate students and the university. And so right now the established stipend level is equal to a 0.5 GSRA. But if that's increased, I would say that there's probably a good chance that the stipend from Rackham would be increased also. So that's what I've seen in the past. So historically it is always equal to a 0.5 and that does inch up here and there each year based on contractual agreements. So let's see somebody. Yeah, as far as links go, I really think that the library link and then the Rackham funding link are gonna be your best resources. That library link that I sent earlier that we went to, it also has a lot of links for not just University of Michigan. So I've seen like Michigan State linked on their UCLA, some other large universities that they link to also on there. So I think that those are your best resources. I agree, I think that just the general search engines will get you turned around. You'll end up doing a lot of work and sometimes it's frustrating you don't hear back and you find out that some car company is using your advertising idea that you put in your essay to sell the new truck or something. Besides the childcare subsidy and travel with children grants, are there other funding for parents? Paul, I may see if those are the two best resources I know on campus. Do you know of other resources for children with parents? Those are the good ones. I mean, they're all good. CEW Plus might be another place to look. And then, I mean, we never want you to have to use it but the Rackham Emergency Fund is also a place depending if you have emergency childcare needs or any need really, it's not just childcare. We're doing a program on that tomorrow. But, you know, anytime you have, if you have an emergency financial situation, Rackham will give you up to $2,500 to help cover that. And so childcare is one of those categories. Yeah, if you find yourself an emergency situation that is a great fund. We do have two for PhD students so you're allowed to have two emergency funds, each up to $2,500 during your career here at Michigan. For master students, it's one emergency fund for $2,500 during your career here. Work positions are not limited to just PhD students. So I have seen master students working in those opportunities. I would check out the career webpage but also check the student employment page also just to see if you find opportunities on there. If you're a master student, sometimes the graduate coordinators have a lot of students and so you may need to like maybe set up an advising appointment or something like that to really let them know your interest in certain work positions or research opportunities. You know, I always tell students, especially master students, the graduate coordinators have a lot of students and so sometimes just getting your face in front of them and getting them to know you will help, you know, when they see an opportunity pop up, they may be able to reach out to you and let you know that something has come up that meets your interests. Franklin, I am not sure about that. We don't do any hiring in my department. So we just do fellowships in the grants. I would encourage you to speak with your graduate coordinator or just someone in your academic program to find out any kind of requirements and work requirements that you might have as an international student. Good question though. Yes, Chris Berry put out a great resource called the Maison Blue Cupboard. So Maison Blue Cupboard is a place that if you find yourself in a situation where you're in need of food, it's a really great stocked pantry and you can go there and pick up food for free. And it's one of those that you don't have to be in an emergency situation. You can walk right in and they're gonna help you out and provide you with food options. And Evan, the link will be in the presentation that Paul will share with everyone. Owen, great question. And again, I'm really sorry. I am not an expert in the field of hiring here on campus. I don't wanna give any bad information. I feel like there wouldn't be any conflict but I would talk to your department or whoever's thinking about hiring you. So typically if you're gonna be going into any kind of GSI or GSRA that's gonna be an academic program. And each program should have like an HR person there and they would be able to answer any kind of answers or questions about conflict with the university guidelines. All right, they're rolling in now. Do you get another GSI question? How can I apply for a GSI as a master's student? Again, I'm sorry, talk to your graduate program. We do not do any hiring of GSIs or GSRAs here at RACM. That's all done at the academic program level. Okay, I think we've gotten all the questions. All right, all people might be typing in our final question. Danielle is going to put an evaluation to today's session in the box in a moment. Please fill it out, give us your input on this session. What else do you need to know? So we can create and craft sessions that will meet your needs down the road. There it is, it's in the chat. And we will stick around for a few extra minutes, extra questions even after the recording stops. We have one here, as we hope so. Yeah, and please email RACMFF at umich.edu. If you have any questions that you think of after the presentation, and we typically try to get back to people within one to two days or less. And Franklin, the questions on the application fee waiver, are you referring to the admissions application? I would email the RACM admissions office, but I believe that if you've already paid for it, I don't think that they would issue refunds at this point. All right, looks like we are gonna, time we will stick around a little bit after the recording stops, if you have additional questions. But thanks everyone for coming out today. A reminder, we have a session tomorrow at this very same time on the emergency fund and some other conflict resolution resources that you should come and check out as well to help sort of round out your experience here at RACM and get you some more essential tools. So thank you everyone for coming. This recording will be posted in grad school 101 in a later date, check the portal for when that happens. Thank you so much. Thank you.