The ES Department offers students financial support in the form of graduate assistantships. Both teaching and research assistantships (TA's and RA's, respectively) are available. To be considered for one, the appropriate application form must be submitted to the Graduate School. This can either be downloaded from http://gradschool.utoledo.edu or submitted on-line. A graduate assistantship includes a waiver of all tuition fees plus a stipend (salary) for the nine-month academic year of $12,000 for MS/MSE students and $16,000 for PhD students. Some special teaching fellowships with an annual stipend of $30,000 are also available (see below). Students are still responsible, however, for paying the University's general fee. A half-time summer TA with a $3000 stipend is guaranteed to all MS/MSE students during their first summer provided they are in good academic standing and lack an externally funded RA. Additional TA support for a second summer will be treated like any other assistantship extension: it is granted only if the student is making good progress on his/her thesis research and other degree requirements. Assistantship support is normally limited to four semesters for MS/MSE students and eight semesters for PhD students (summers not included), and these limits apply to both teaching and research assistantships. An additional one (MS students) or two (PhD) semesters of assistantship may be granted by the Graduate Affairs Committee upon the recommendation of a student’s research advisory committee, and provided the student is in good academic standing and performing his/her assistantship duties in an acceptable manner. In exceptional cases the above limits may be extended.
TA's will work up to 20 hours per week teaching laboratory courses, helping professors with grading, exam protoring or performing other course-related activities. RA's work up to 20 hours per week on research projects and seldom have teaching responsibilities. RA awards are contingent upon continued funding from extramural sources and are usually given only to advanced students, although exceptions may be made for highly-qualified applicants.
Assistantships beginning in the Fall semester are awarded the previous Spring semester in March and April. For Fall applications, all requests for financial assistance should therefore be received by February 1st in order to receive full consideration.
Special Teaching Fellowships
The National Science Foundation has awarded the Department of Environmental Sciences (with Drs. Carol Stepien, Daryl Moorhead, Thomas Bridgeman and Timothy Fisher as the co-principal investigators) with a five-year grant to support ‘graduate teaching fellows’ in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) high school education. The grant runs from June 2008 through May 2013. Each year it will support five Ecology PhD students and one Geology MS student, who will spend 10 hours per week in area high schools where they will partner with the teachers to promote the STEM disciplines. Only US citizens are eligible. The annual stipend is $30,000 with an additional $10,000 per year provided for university tuition and fees. These fellowships will normally be given only to second-year geology MS and senior ecology PhD students with these students supported in their first year(s) by the regular teaching or research assistantships as described above.