The trials of summer funding

While sources are plenty, information about them is decentralized and non-standardized. Often, details and requirements for various grants, awards and opportunities are only spread by word of mouth. Other times they are unclear, not completely transparent or vary greatly across departments.

Under the current system, some students receive handsome sums of money, perhaps even being double or triple funded, while many are left without funding altogether, even though some of the funding resources remain untapped. This system needs uniformity and clarity to be both an easier and a fairer way to help student endeavors.

Some well-advertised awards are quite easy to spot. The Lewis Center for the Arts alone offers $13,000 in undergraduate grants relatively early in the spring semester. The Office of International Programs holds a list of 19 organizations that are willing to fund different summer opportunities. These programs usually offer multiple grants for internships, community service and research. This information is all available on the program websites.

But other opportunities are much harder to find. Departments will rarely list deadlines for funding applications, and it is very hard to find out about listings from departments of which students are not a part.

These funds are especially useful for students who wish to pursue projects outside of their declared academic concentrations. Trying to expand your horizons into other academic areas through some project work that requires funding (which would be rare, arguably) is not very easy if you’re looking for Princeton to pay for it.

Dealing with academic departments is a whole different ball game. Funding is rarely advertised and is usually student-initiated. Thesis research is usually a separate system. For other sorts of projects, departments seem much more likely to fund their own concentrators than those of other departments, which is reasonable, but while some will fund related work by non-concentrators, other departments will quite plainly say they have no funds for non-concentrators.

So in some ways, you must be lucky with your interests. It’s easier to find funding for creative work, but what you do, where to apply and how you do so is very confusing.

At the moment there is no centralized information source for summer funding. Deadlines for applications vary, and in cases where students must initiate an application process themselves, deadlines may not be advertised at all. It becomes even more complicated if you choose to apply to a number of departments to increase chances, but each department has a separate list of expectations, protocols and deadlines.

Obtaining a faculty advisor may be helpful. In some cases, they may provide funds themselves as a channel to the department; in other cases, they may inform students of funding opportunities. Having a faculty advisor may just help an application that a student would submit themselves, but how much this affects a funding decision is, again, rather unclear.

The Editorial Board recently suggested a system of rolling deadlines for department funding, which might help alleviate the problem of having to determine summer plans by February. But the problem of unequal, nonuniform information remains, and it is unfair that only students whose interests align with the departments that are willing to provide funding or students who have figured out how to “work the system” should receive funding.

One suggestion is the creation of a centralized database or website for summer funds. But if you look at this problem more closely you begin to realize why the conscious decision to keep funds under wraps may be practiced. A centralized fund would likely make applications for funding more competitive, and the application process could take on a nature similar to the now-defunct application to the Wilson School: one that leaves behind many truly interested individuals for people that might be doing it for the competition. In other cases, departments may have reasonable cause to not want to advertise exact amounts of funds, for fear of being earmarked for the next budget cut. Aside from annual awards and grants, there usually aren’t any quotas for funds anyway, and programs may not wish to advertise an exact amount of money. But either way, it would be useful to at least have a list of opportunities that students can pursue, even if they aren’t for a set amount or from a defined pool.

But getting information in one place isn’t the entire solution either. It would also be helpful for administrators to coordinate to see how projects have been funded. Perhaps a Projects Board-like central system to enter in a summer project might help solve that issue.

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But overall, the problem is information, its nonuniformity, its inaccessibility and its simple inexistence. We need to look critically at how the University gives money to students and how students can begin to look for it.

Zeerak Ahmed is a sophomore from Lahore, Pakistan. He can be reached at zahmed@princeton.edu.