The document provides insights on obtaining fellowships and scholarships for Ph.D. students in computer science, emphasizing the importance of timely applications, genuine essays, and relevant research experience. It lists various fellowships and scholarships available, including those from major tech companies, and discusses strategies to enhance application success, such as networking and marketing oneself online. The message reinforces that persistence in applying for opportunities can lead to significant academic and professional advancements.

1. Fellowship/Scholarships
Mona Jalal
Grad Initiation Course Presentation
CS Ph.D. Fellow in Computer Vision
Advised by Professor Margrit Betke
This talk is very subjective! You might disagree with many parts! It is designed to help you best :)

2. Fellowships
● Usually provided by big companies that pays all or part of your tuition,
conference grants and travel grants up to ~5k$ as well as monthly wage.
● Will be helpful if you don’t have a funding in a particular year.
● Will be helpful even if you have Chair’s/Dean’s fellowship (more prestigious).
● Top companies fellowships are usually won by top 5 schools.
● BUT don’t lose hope! Your research statements and your recommendation
letters matter a lot.
● Some specific to first and second year PhDs and some for PhD candidates.
● Example: Snap(chat), Google, Facebook, Microsoft, NVidia, IBM.
● Don’t miss the deadlines.

3. Scholarships
● Awards in terms of a conference grant, a ticket to a tech event or travel grant.
● Some scholarships are under the name of intensive summer schools.
● Usually if you have a paper, you can apply for scholarship to attend the
conference which reimburses the conference ticket as well as travel grants.
● Sometimes when you don’t have a paper, you can apply for merit-based or
diversity-based scholarship for attending a conference.
● (You can also apply for being a volunteer in a conference).

4. What matters for the applications?
● Usually essays matter a lot (or sometimes they are the only key item).
● Try to write your essays as genuine as possible while using the professional
writing style.
● You do need to show yourself passionate for the grant/award you are applying.
● Being fake in your essays gives away itself!
● For the ones that require recommendation letters, they matter A LOT!
● Marketing yourself online boosts your chances a plenty!
● Having relevant research for the fellowship you are applying is important.
● High GPA usually matters for the fellowships.
● Having mentored women or minorities in the field who otherwise might not have
had the chance to find a great research path is a booster.
● Reviewing papers for leading conferences (ask your adviser for so) is a plus.

5. Why do I need honors & awards?
● More awards leads to more awards!
● They show the fact that you are proactive!
● Being proactive in academia/research is important!
● You get to know people in your field by attending various scholar/fellow events.
● They matter most importantly if you are applying for academic roles/postdocs.
● They matter if you will apply for a National Interest Waiver for Green Card.
● They will give you a chance to think more out of the box by attending the
conferences that are not >85% tied with your current focus of research.
● Thinking out of the box will further improve your research and bring novelty.
● Some of these opportunities will land you guaranteed internship/full-time job.

6. Some examples of fellowships
● Microsoft fellowship (international ok)
● Facebook fellowship (international ok)
● Google PhD fellowship (international ok)
● Snap(chat) fellowship (international ok)
● Fellowships within the BU (or your current institute) (some international ok)
● Data residency fellowships (usually 2 weeks to 3 months) (international ok)
● Adobe research fellowship (international ok)
● Hertz fellowship (permanent residents or US citizens only)
● NSF graduate research fellowship (GRFP)
● Ford Foundation fellowship (citizens and nationals of US)
● GEM graduate fellowship (US citizens or US permanent residents)
● SMART fellowship (US citizens)

7. Important Note!
Some fellowships will be given only to citizens, Middle-Eastern (or non-Middle-
Eastern), Indian, Chinese, Hispanic, or a group of limited universities. So it’s
important to read the terms and guidelines and don’t waste time!

8. Some good search keywords
● Fellowship + CS PhD
● Fellowship+cs phd+ international students
● Fellowship+computer vision
● Fellowship+deep learning
● inurl:cs-people.bu.edu fellowship inurl:pdf
● Scholarship + cs grad

9. Some examples of scholarship
● GHC scholarship (for women)
● Dockercon (for unrepresented people in the community)
● ChefCon (Diversity Scholarship)
● Google Travel Grant North America (Women+Minority+Veterans+Disabled)
● ACM SIGCHI (for students who have an HCI paper but not the money)
● VLDB/CVPR (for students who have a paper but need grant)
● SIGGRAPH student volunteer (for giving you a free ticket for SIGGRAPH)
● Google I/O ticket (for women who accomplish the Google Code Jam)
● ODSC (Open Data Science Conference) - Merit/essay based
● FAT* (Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency) - Merit/essay based

10. Ways to improve your chances
● Marketing yourself! Can’t emphasize enough on this gem!
● Applying to the scholarships/fellowships that are most relevant to your
research or will bring the most value to you even if not completely aligned.
● Doing voluntarily work related to CS awareness for women and minorities and
stating them in your essay (or other possible (un)related voluntarily work).
● Leadership tasks mather a lot like taking lead of a CS related reading group or
conference or co-organizing a workshop with your adviser.
● Reading essays from previous years if publicly available or at least reading
profiles of previous years awardees to get a sense.
● Not applying the last minute (though I was awarded a few awards by applying
last minute). Just don’t go through the unnecessary stress!
● NOT MISSING THE DEADLINES (use Todoist/Google Calendar/Google Keeps)!

11. Todoist it!
Organize your lists!

12. How many awards is considered enough?
● Don’t assume because you already have received 10 awards you shouldn’t
apply for anymore.
● Some of these awards/fellowships can be a true life-changer providing you
with new research skills, opportunities and the chance to attend conferences
you couldn’t attend otherwise on a normal PhD fellow budget!
● The less outstanding scholarships eventually build up to more outstanding
ones! Always keep applying!
● Success rate for these opportunities is really way lower than PhD admission
rate at top schools! Regardless, keep pushing! You’ll make it at the end!
● So to put it in a nutshell, the answer is infinity!

13. How to market yourself?
● Create a Twitter account and occasionally talk about the interesting finds in
your research/classes/academia/the talks you attend.
● Try to keep your Twitter/LinkedIn very professional.
● Don’t use your native tongue in your professional Twitter/LinkedIn unless it is
English.
● Try to increase your network of related researchers.
● Try to pinpoint who are the pioneers in your field of research and follow them.
● BE INTERESTING even if it happens to be hard or at least read interesting stuff.
● Polish your Website from time to time.
● When going to a talk have a small chat and if you see someone is doing your
research add them on LinkedIn (it’s ok if they don’t add you back!)

14. Always be searching
● Find some role models for yourself and try to follow some of their success path
that you find most exciting to you.
● Always keep yourself updated about them.
● Go to their talks, watch their talks, and check their latest Google Scholar
publications by activating the alert button on the page.
● Keep yourself current with their thoughtsets via LinkedIn/Twitter/YouTube
Channels (ex. Two Minute Papers/Siraj Raval/ DeepLearning.ai/OpenAI/NVidia
Research/ Google Research/ MSR/ etc).

16. Some examples of successful PhD students
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cbfinn/_files/cv.pdf

17. Some examples of successful PhD students
http://cs-people.bu.edu/sameki/resume.pdf

18. Some examples of successful PhD students
http://cs-people.bu.edu/sbargal/SarahAdelBargal_CV.pdf

19. If you are a women...
Please, please, please subscribe to the following mailing lists:
https://anitab.org/systers/
https://cra.org/cra-w/resources/mailing-lists/
Additionally, these Facebook groups do wonder:
Ladies Storm Hackathon:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/LadiesStormHackathons/
CRA-W: https://www.facebook.com/groups/58020017457/

20. Check these links later
https://www.bu.edu/provost/awards-publications/award-opportunities/clare-boothe-
luce-scholarships/graduate-fellowships/ (for women)
https://www.womentechmakers.com/scholars (for women)
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/academic-program/dissertation-grant/
(dissertation grant)
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/academic-program/phd-fellowship-
program/ (should be nominated by the department)
https://research.fb.com/programs/fellowship/

21. Some extra links
https://github.com/Diksha-Rathi/Women-In-Computing-Scholarships
https://github.com/Ladies-Storm-Hackathons/GHC-Scholarships
https://github.com/svaksha/diversity-index/blob/master/di-awards.md
https://gist.github.com/anikalindtner/9524950
https://www.cs.princeton.edu/grad/current-student-resources
https://www.bu.edu/hic/people-2/fellows/gsf-pd-fellows/gsf-program/
https://edu.google.com/scholarships/google-sva-scholarship/ (veterans)

22. Read Jill’s story whose life has been enourmously impacted after receiving a
SWISS scholarship https://cra.org/cra-w/swsis-scholarships-now-featured-scholar-
jill-jermyn/
Thank you :)