Professional Master's Fellowship
This fellowship is for recruiting new graduate students. Nominations must come directly from a department/faculty. Students may not apply for this award.
Department Heads and staff of eligible degree programs have been sent an email from the Dean of the Graduate School indicating the purpose of this fellowship and how many awards their program has been allocated to them to use when recruiting top prospective students. The fellowship is for top masters prospective students who do not intend to complete a thesis and are not receiving other funding such as a GTA or GRA appointment, nor those who may be receiving tuition rates as a WRGP.
Each fellowship comes with a 6-credit tuition waiver to be used in the first two semesters after the student’s matriculation into a masters degree program. These waivers will be either resident or non-resident depending on the recipient’s residency status and provide a 20% discount for a 30-credit masters degree. The fellowships are allocated to departments proportionally to the current enrollment.
Instructions for Awarding Fellowship
- The Department is required to put the specifics of the Professional Offer into the Department Specific Notes upon admitting a person in the CollegeNET application system (see suggested text below*).
- In addition to the offer letter in CollegeNet, the Department may offer this fellowship to a graduate degree program applicant verbally or via email. Departments will also be responsible for other communications to the recruits such as explaining how the award works to the student(s).
- Upon processing the offer of admission, the G.S. Admissions team will ‘tag’ the application in CollegeNet to indicate that they person is receiving the fellowship.
- If the program learns that the person originally offered isn’t attending, they can
offer a new one to a person of their choice by both:
- Emailing the student the funding information and cc'ing the Graduate School (gradschool@montana.edu)
- Uploading a copy of the email directly into the new recipient's application in CollegeNET under Additional Uploads (so the information will be retained in the students record).
- The Grad School will create egaafs for tuition waivers each semester.
- Recipients of this fellowship will receive 50% of their 6-credit tuition waiver for
each of the first two semesters of their degree program regardless of when they matriculate
(i.e. Fall and Spring, Spring and Fall, or Summer and Fall).
Note: Students who matriculate in Spring and will be registering in Summer may email gradschool@montana.edu to request Spring and Summer (instead of Spring and Fall).
* Suggested text for Department Specific Notes in recipient's CollegeNet application:
Congratulations, you have been awarded a Professional Master’s Fellowship. This comes
with a 6‐credit tuition waiver to be used in the first two semesters after being admitted
to the program. The estimated value of this fellowship will be the cost of six credits
of either resident or non-resident tuition depending on your residency status. (For
academic year 2022-23, these values were $1,747.08 for resident tuition and $ 7,156.38
for non-resident tuition)
This fellowship only covers a total of 6 credits of your tuition and does not include
university fees. This tuition waiver will only be applied to your student account
if there is no other funding from the university and will be superseded if you receive
a Graduate Teaching Assistantship or Graduate Research Assistantship from the Department.
Please know that the tuition waivers will be typically be applied to your student
account by the first day of classes each semester. Please email gradfinances@montana.edu if you do not see the credit on your student account by the 15th day of classes.