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diversity_scholarship_application_tips.md

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Tips for Diversity Scholarship Applicants

  • Check whether the funder has a policy on awarding scholarships to people that attended under a scholarship previously, or who have had another scholarship in the past year.

    • If there is a clear exclusion and this applies to you, please sit this one out, and allow someone else to have an opportunity for assistance.
    • Otherwise, disclose any scholarships as requested, but don't let previous success hold you back from applying.

  • Be as specific as possible - don't make the reviewers guess or infer things. For example:

    • Don't just put that your organization is XYZ Computing, give your job title too.
    • Are you an intern? A full-time employee?

  • Break down costs as much as possible.

    • When looking for airfare, look for the cost for coach.
    • Don't leave any costs out. Let the committee decide if the cost is reasonable and can be covered by the scholarship.

  • Evidence your technical competence. Provide links to an online portfolio of work. For an R conference, reviewers will be looking to establish a base level of R competence and evidence that you are developing your R skills. Your portfolio might include:

    • Coursework showing individual work.
    • Analysis scripts.
    • Articles/blog posts that show your code.
    • Presentations or tutorials with code that you have written.
    • A Shiny app.
    • Contributions you have made to publicly available packages.

  • Evidence of your commitment to the field/community. Demonstrate that this is a real interest and that you are in it for the long term, for example, for an R conference you might mention

    • R courses you have taken.
    • How you use R in your work.
    • Articles/blog posts where you have used R.
    • Involvement in R-ladies, an R User Group or other R-related initiative.

  • Explain how you will pay it forwards. How will you share what you have learned? Let the committee know how their investment in you will have a wider impact. For example, for an R conference you might

    • Commit to writing a blog post. Evidence of previously blogging about R would be an advantage.
    • Commit to live tweeting to share conference highlights with the R community. Evidence of doing this for previous conferences, or using your Twitter account to share insights about R would be an advantage.
    • Commit to presenting a talk or workshop at your workplace/R user group. Prior experience of giving such presentations would be an advantage.
    • Discuss how you hope to integrate new R developments into your courses.
    • Describe your existing mentoring roles and discuss how up-to-date knowledge of R would be beneficial in these roles.
    • Discuss how a specific conference tutorial will facilitate work in progress that will be shared with the community.

  • Make your application stand out by adding in some flavour about your personal journey in R. Without making your application too lengthy, paint the reader a picture of who you are, and why you deserve funding.

    • How did you get to this point?
    • What is your motivation for applying?