Hi,

Has anyone ever negotiated extra funding from the University? I am currently on the same rate studentship as everyone else, but mine comes out of a large EPSRC funded programme. I was wondering whether it would be wise to negotiate for a rise or funding for commuting costs or other specific items? Does anyone have any experience of doing that?

Thanks!

It's unlikely that the university would do this. Why do you think that you should get paid more than everyone else? It's pretty normal for PhD students to be part of bigger grants, so it's not as if that status is out of the ordinary. The programme budget will have been set anyway with your studentship at standard rates if that's what they offered.

You should get a rise at the start of each year in line with other students but apart from that I don't there is any case for a raise as Bewildered has said the budget has already been set out. If there is spare cash leftover you could try to sound out your supervisor to see if they are willing to part with it but I think it might have to relate to research costs as opposed to fund cost of living expenses.

As the others have said, I think this is pretty unlikely. I had a small rise after second year, in line with what everyone else was receiving, but apart from that I don't think there's much room for manoeuvre. The only thing that I have benefited from is leftover funds from other projects that my sup is in charge of- she used leftover cash at the end of a project for funding a conference trip to the US for me last year and is paying for transcriptions of interviews for another of her PhD students out of that money as well. I'm not sure whether this is dodgy practice or whether it's acceptable to use leftover cash for something else, but I wasn't going to enquire when I has a trip to the states planned! Best, KB