I Need Postgraduate Funding, Can the Alternative Guide Help?
The challenge: paying for postgraduate study
Postgraduate study in the UK is expensive. Very expensive. Fees for a full-time home student start from £11,000, and more than double that if you're an international student or on many taught Masters programmes. Independent maintenance — housing, food, utilities and study expenses — will be at least £14,000 a year. Universities do sometimes have funding of their own, especially to support PhDs. However, scholarships are rare birds indeed, and fewer than one postgraduate in fourteen manages to obtain one.
The UK does have a postgraduate loans system (for UK or EU-settled status students) but it is just over £13,000 for Masters students and £30,000 for PhD students — only about half of what you actually need (at best). And that's assuming you want to get into still more debt.
An alternative source of funding
The Alternative Guide to Postgraduate Funding is designed to tackle this problem by helping current and prospective postgraduates think outside the box about funding. The Guide is all about 'alternative funding' from the voluntary sector: the thousands of charities out there which make grants to students. Charities are all around us, helping good causes where they find them. One of them might be your postgraduate study!
Charities are sometimes a bit unusual: obscure, hard to find, sometimes funded by ‘old money’. But there will be dozens which will consider sponsoring you — whatever your course, university, nationality or background, and whether you need money for fees, maintenance, research costs, travel, or conferences.
Finding charities — and making your case
Because charities are so different from ‘conventional’ funding sources, they require a specialised approach to unlock. That's where we can help. We'll take you through identifying suitable charities, finding them, and applying strongly and correctly. The Alternative Guide Online contains a searchable database of over 1,200 sources of funding, with more added each month.
But really, the Alternative Guide is a methodology just as much as it is a search engine. It teaches you how to identify charities, apply to them strongly, and then hold on to your awards in subsequent years.
Built from first-hand experience, not theory
This Guide was written by real students who faced and overcame the challenge of unfunded postgraduate study — not by paid researchers who did not. The Alternative Guide is the real deal — which is why 100 UK universities use it. Whether you need £1,000 to cover the cost of a research trip, or funding for full fees or maintenance for a whole PhD or Masters, the Alternative Guide can help!
The Alternative Guide — as its name suggests — is a bit unusual, and a bit unconventional. But if you're creative and determined, you've got a good chance of joining the hundreds of students who have taken the often overlooked alternative path to fund their studies!
If you want to know more about how other students have successfully fundraised their postgraduate degrees using the Alternative Guide, please have a look at our student stories.
We also have an annual Prize Draw — with a first prize of £500 — for students who have won at least one award from an alternative funding source.
