Fellowships & Grants

Each year, a number of Whittier College students compete in the annual Rhodes, Jack Kent Cooke, and Marshall Scholars programs, as well as the Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowship.

Additionally, in 2007, Whittier College established its own endowed fellowhip program, the Richard M. Nixon Fellowship, open exculsively to Whittier students for pursuit of an internship, scholarship opportunity, or research project that echoes Nixon's successful legacy in domestic and foreign policy.

An online collection of other national fellowship and grant opportunities can be found within the Office of Career Services website; please click here to visit these pages.

ABOUT THE FELLOWSHIP PROGRAMS

 

  • With the support ot the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Whittier College has established the Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, dedicated to increasing faculty diversity in institutions of higher learning.

    The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program is administered at 38 colleges and universities nationwide, a consortium of 39 member institutions of the United Negro College Fund, and three leading universities in South Africa. Whittier will be joining Stanford, Caltech, USC, UC Berkeley, and UCLA as California participants in the program.

    Open to students of all races and ethnicities, the program's fundamental objective is to increase the number of promising, underrepresented students who will enter the professoriate in core arts-and-sciences fields, ultimately equalizing the ethnic and racial composition of faculties in higher education and addressing the attendant educational consequences of these disparities.

    Annually, five Whittier College students will be selected as Mellon Fellows, and will explore their interest in college teaching in disciplines of special interest to the Foundation. Students will receive tuition assistance, summer research opportunities, and academic-year support through faculty mentors at Whittier, and will engage with other Fellows at Mellon-sponsored events.

    For more information click here.

  • The Rhodes Scholarships were created by the will of Cecil J. Rhodes, a British colonial pioneer and statesman. Open to graduating seniors, these scholarships provide for two years of study at the University of Oxford, with the possibility of renewal for a third year. The Rhodes Trustees pay the Scholar all educational costs, maintenance, and travel expenses.

    Cecil Rhodes wished to advance international understanding and peace by bringing together talented young men and women in an environment highly congenial to personal and intellectual development.

    Rhodes specified that the persons chosen as Scholars should have demonstrated literary and scholastic attainments; truthfulness, courage, devotion to duty, sympathy for and protection of the weak, kindness, unselfishness, and fellowship, exhibition of moral force of character and of instincts to lead and to take an interest in one's contemporaries; and physical vigor, as shown by fondness for and success in sports.

    Committees of Selection meet in each American state in early December. District Committees meet three days later to decide which of the candidates nominated at the state level will receive scholarships. A candidate must be a citizen of the United States, at least 18 years of age, and no more than 24 years of age. He or she must be a college senior, sure to graduate by October of the year of matriculation at Oxford.

  • Marshall Scholarships finance young Americans of high ability to study for a degree in the United Kingdom. At least 40 Scholars are selected each year to study either at graduate or occasionally undergraduate level at an UK institution in any field of study. Each scholarship is held for two years.

    As future leaders, with a lasting understanding of British society, Marshall Scholars strengthen the enduring relationship between the British and American peoples, their governments and their institutions. Marshall Scholars are talented, independent and wide-ranging, and their time as Scholars enhances their intellectual and personal growth. Their direct engagement with Britain through its best academic programmes contributes to their ultimate personal success.

    Open only to United States citizens who (at the time they take up their Scholarship) hold a first degree from an accredited four-year college or university in the United States with a minimum GPA of 3.7. Applications for Marshall Scholarships must be submitted to and endorsed by an accredited US University.