Eligibility Requirements

Yes! Many of our applicants apply to the PD Soros Fellowship at the same time that they are applying for graduate school. You should be planning to be enrolled in a graduate program in the 2025-2026 academic year.  

No, in order to be eligible, applicants must be applying to graduate school or applicants must not have started or passed the third year of the graduate program that they are seeking funding for in the 2025-26 academic year as of October 31, 2024. 

You should list the four schools/programs you are most likely going to attend in the spaces available. You can then upload a full list of your programs and schools as an exhibit. 

Yes. In most cases your transcript will show the courses that you are enrolled in and it will also validate your attendance.  

Only graduate programs that are US institutions and based in the United States are eligible. 

Please select “other” at the end of the dropdown list options. A box will appear asking you to type in your school’s name. Our list of schools is not complete, and several schools are not on the list.

That would depend on your program. Many applicants are in PhD programs in which the first two years are spent completing a master’s degree, then after a qualifying exam, they continue into a PhD program. In that case, the master’s and PhD are considered one program, so year one of the PhD would be year three of their graduate program, assuming that the master’s degree was two years long. If your PhD and master’s programs are not related, and you had to complete an entire application process for both separately, then the programs might be considered separate and eligible. If the programs are separate but you transferred credits from your master’s to help fulfill the second degree, then you would not be eligible.

If you are in the second year of your master’s by the October 31, 2024 application deadline, then you’d be eligible for the PD Soros Fellowship in this selection round in either case. 

PD Soros does not limit the number of awards a student can receive simultaneously. Many of our Fellows also receive awards like NSF, NDSEG and NIH while receiving the PD Soros fellowship. We work with other awards to try and get Fellows the maximum benefit from all their sources of funding, and will work within the limits of other awards. The only limitations the PD Soros award has are the following:

1. The first year of the Fellowship cannot be deferred. If you’re applying in 2024, then you must be planning to be enrolled full-time in a graduate program for the entire 2025-26 academic year. Year two of the funding may be deferred up to one calendar year.
2. PD Soros pays 50% of tuition and fees, not including health and housing fees, up to $10,000 per semester, or $6,667 per quarter. If a Fellow is receiving other funding for tuition, or if 50% of tuition is less than the maximum amount, the Fellow will not receive the maximum amount of tuition funding for the semester. PD Soros cannot exceed the tuition and fees cost, and tuition funds cannot be reallocated as stipend.
3. The maximum PD Soros stipend is $25,000 per year, capping all stipend awards at $50,000 per year. This means that a Fellow can receive up to $25,000 in stipend per year from sources other than the Fellowship. If the Fellow receives over $25,000 in stipend from other sources, then PD Soros will reduce their stipend payment to fall within the $50,000 cap.

Yes, but you should provide some context on why you are including the exhibit and what your contribution was to the project.  

You can submit an abstract or summary of your research papers, or an excerpt of your work, the whole paper, or a link to the paper.

It is sometimes helpful to include a sentence or two about why you are including an exhibit, and what it shows about you. If it is obvious why you included it, this may not be necessary. You can upload the brief descriptions as a separate document, or on each exhibit.