I don't know that fellowships are very necessary, it's just a matter of
what you will be getting out of it, and how you will apply it to your
specific area of study.  Also it depends on your school's requisites for
graduating.  You know, fellowships and grants are not given out for free;
you have to apply and you have to qualify!  There's no free lunch even
here.  So what if I have a fellowship and I decide to drop out?  Maybe
economics had a hand in it; maybe I got married and pregnant and couldn't
keep it up; maybe it's nobody's business!  So I am being facetious but
truly, people should worry about their own concerns and expend less
resentment on other people's problems.  If you worked hard for your
award, don't let anybody give you a hard time about it.  That's life.
Live it.

O


Olivia S. Anastasiadis, Curator
Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace
18001 Yorba Linda Boulevard
Yorba Linda, CA  92886
(714) 993-5075 ext. 224; fax (714) 528-0544; e-mail:  [log in to unmask]

On Sun, 11 Apr 1999 21:38:18 -0400 Adrienne Deangelis
<[log in to unmask]> writes:
>Here's a question I've been wondering about.  Just how necessary are
>fellowships and grants for completing a college/university degree?  At
>my
>alma mater, only a small number of graduate students are given
>multi-year
>fellowships, now usually parceled out as 2-3 years of payment of
>tuition
>plus a stipend with no teaching or other responsibilities, and one
>more
>year as a t.a.  I have noticed that a great many students who received
>the
>most generous awards in fact have finished no more quickly than others
>who
>received very little.
>        When I arrived in 1991, having been given one of the lesser
>but
>still most appreciated multi-year awards, I found that there were many
>awardless students who were furious with resentment towards people
>like
>me, and they weren't reluctant to express themselves.  They claimed
>that
>students with awards frequently sloughed off and often left without
>completing their degrees.  Looking back now, I would have to say that
>there is something to their complaints.  I know people who've gotten
>very
>prestigious awards who are no farther along on their dissertations
>than
>those students who've had to work part or even fulltime in unrelated
>jobs
>(these are people in areas with a similar expectations in terms of
>research and writing)  I know of several students who claimed that
>they
>would stay in the program only long enough to use up their fellowships
>and
>would then leave--and they did.  I know others who lived in the
>despised
>grad dorm (1/2 regular cost of living for the area--and I still live
>there!) to make it on their reduced budgets, who had little "social
>life"
>that cost money, and so on.
>        I've been thinking about this lately and the impression I get
>from many of the posters here is that there are many people who
>put themselves through school with little help (like Indigo Nights),
>and
>that many of them are now educators.  Any opinions this late Sunday
>night/Monday morning?
>
>        Adrienne DeAngelis
>

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