Information for CS majors about graduate fellowships and applying to graduate schools

Here is a very brief summary of some information about the graduate fellowship and graduate school application process. The main function of this site is to provide links to sites that contain further information.

Some graduate fellowships available to computer science students.

Many of these fellowships are restricted to U.S. citizens. The last three emphasize diversity, i.e. they especially encourage applications from women, minorities, or both, although not all of them disallow applications from other students.

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Deadline November 2, 2009.
NDSEG Fellowship Jan. 4, 2010 . Deadline January 4, 2010.
Hertz Foundation Fellowship . Deadline October 30, 2009.
DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship . Application will be online in late October. (Possibly subsumed by the DOE Office of Science Graduate Fellowship, see below.)
DOE Office of Science Graduate Fellowship . Deadline November 30, 2009.
National Physical Science Consortium Fellowship . Deadline November 5, 2009.
Emphasizes awards to female and minority students, but 8 percent of awardees have not belonged to either of these categories.
Ford Foundation Diversity Fellowship . Deadline November 2, 2009.
All U.S. citizens and nationals invited to apply regardless of race, national origin, religion, gender, age, disability, or sexual orientation. However, the awards are only given to applicants who “are well prepared to use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students.&rdquo
GEM Fellowship . Deadline November 15, 2009.
The GEM Consortium awards “fellowships with paid internships to highly qualified under-represented students who wish to pursue graduate studies in engineering or science.”

A little bit of information about applying to CS graduate programs.

Most CS graduate programs have application deadlines in the first half of December. Consult the websites of the relevant universities for more specific deadlines.

An excellent document entitled Applying to Ph.D. Programs in Computer Science was written by Prof. Mor Harchol-Balter of Carnegie Mellon.