The first award I'm applying for is the SSHRC (Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada) doctoral fellowship. I'm quite used to be rejected by them, as I've applied the past two years to know avail. But it's worth a ton of money, so I keep on trying. Having to pay international tuition fees is a great incentive to put yourself and your work out there and see what you can come up with. One thing that's in my favour (and in all international students' favour) when applying to SSHRC is that because we're at international universities, our own school and department doesn't rank our applications and decide which ones to send to SSHRC. I apply directly to SSHRC, and therefore can know that my application will be read by at least one person affiliated with the research council. There's a number of Canadian students here applying for the awards (there's many, many doctoral awards up for grabs), and we're lucky to have a Grad Studies prof who not only is Canadian, but won two awards from SSHRC, and he is running a weekly prep course to help us get our applications together.
The part I hate most about applying for these awards is putting together my 'Program of Study' or 'Statement of Purpose'. No matter how hard I try to write in my own style (which is fairly clear and concise), they always seem to end up all flowery and authoritative, full of historiography, insisting upon the project's validity and potential. It's really not my style to go on about my own research and why its exciting and worth funding, but that's what you have to do. They can be so particular about what they want to see (and completely random about the length requirements -- anywhere from 150 words to two pages single-spaced). Usually they want to know the research topic, university, supervisors, why you've chosen that topic and university and supervisor, what sources you're going to be looking at and how you're going to use them, what's new/different/exciting about your project and what you hope to accomplish/find/answer. This is quite difficult at any stage in the research, because you don't have the answers, but that's expected. If you had the answers, there'd be no need to study it,
I also don't like asking profs for letters of reference. It's always a bit awkward, asking professors to write a page saying that you're a good student and that the project's a good idea, that it can get done in time, will contribute to the field of knowledge and is being written in the right place following a sensible timeline and methodology. But we're always being reminded that writing these letters is part of a supervisor's job (something else for me to look forward to :) ), and none have ever seemed to mind. Of course, I'm always sure to send out thank you notes and emails with the results. An interesting fact about reference letters is that apparently North American profs write very different style letters than British profs. The British profs are much more reserved and factual in their comments, while American profs use enthusiastic and flattering language to describe the student and their work. So that's something else to keep in mind when applying to a North American award with letters from British profs.
So that's how I'll be spending the next two weeks: applying and marking. There will be one or two more scholarships to apply for in the winter months, too (again ones that I'm annually turned down for :) ). The whole process is a bit like an audition, I suppose. You can practice and rehearse and spend ages preparing for a dozen auditions and get rejected from every one, and then you find out about another at the last minute, throw something together all rushed and haphazard, and somehow get the part. I wonder what goes on behind the closed doors of these financial award committee meetings...
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