Are you a postgraduate student (PhD, Professional Doctorate, MPhil or Masters student) at the University of Northampton who is self-funded? Would you like a chance to win funding for fees, maintenance, travel, conference attendance and other research expenses? If so, you might be interested in the next few paragraphs!

The Alternative Guide to Postgraduate Funding Online is all about alternative sources of funding – charities, foundations and trusts – which can
make awards (fees, maintenance, research costs) to any PG student
regardless of subject, or nationality. The Alternative Guide Online contains a huge database of funding opportunities, comprehensive guidance, and numerous tools to help you prepare a winning grant application. The Graduate School has a subscription to The Alternative Guide to Funding, and you can find out more here. Read on for instructions on how to register and for a webinar recording which will explain how it works.

If you are a current postgraduate researcher and have a northampton.ac.uk email address, all you need to do is go to http://www.postgraduate-funding.com/gateway and enter your email address into the green box, section 1 (shown above). The system will then email a unique password to you and you can go back to the Alt Guide gateway page and login. This should give you full access to the database.

The Graduate School has recently held a workshop on identifying the appropriate alternative funding bodies for you and correctly applying to them. The workshop was delivered by Dr. Luke Blaxill, who won 45 separate grants from charities and trusts as a postgraduate student and whose story has been featured in several national newspapers and on TV, and was based on this resource. You can watch a recording of the workshop on NILE in RES003 Graduate School Resource Bank – it is located under the “Skills: Effective Researcher” tab.

To find out how best to use the Alternative Guide to Funding database there are guidelines once you have logged in. If you want to know more about how other students have successfully fund-raised for their postgraduate degrees using the Alternative Guide, take a look at the student stories section.

If you do gain funding via the Alternative Guide then please let Simone Apel know, so that we can monitor interest and usefulness of the resource. If you have any queries about the resource please get in touch with Simone.