Yes quota awards are guarenteed - the unis select who they want for their quota of places.

Just to update things, I won the quota award at Essex. Well pleased!

I'm a sociologist. Well I hope to be, officially

By the way shani I'm going the nomination route, so the open competition isn't an option for me! You're only allowed to go one way or the other right?

The other thing that worries me is you said your department has two nominations for 20 new students... is it this competitive everywhere?!

masters: The Wellcome trust seems mainly to be for natural sciences?

Thanks very much for all that info shani, very useful :)

I'm glad to hear that it's more or less down to the unis who gets the funding. This means that applying to quite a few as I am (about 4-5) means that you have a greater chance, because if it was the ESRC who decided you would apply to different unis, they would all more or less accept you, then you would have to go with *one* uni.

Just to clarify, I do have this right don't I? As you said:

"you can apply for quota places/open competition nominations to as many universities as you want. however, you can accept only ONE nomination (either for a quota place or the open competition). only one of your applications can go forward to the ESRC."

But with quota it isn't an issue only being able to accept one nomination, because that is the only hurdle to winning the funding?

Go with a less prestigious uni, more chance of getting a place but if you do the uni isn't as good. How do you decide such things?

Also, if anyone has any other knowledge about ESRC quota funding I'd love to hear it! I'm applying for a +3 award if that makes a difference. What things decide who is most likely to win. UG grade, references, proposal, fit between supervisor/topic?

Many thanks

Dan

There's a few things I just can't work out about these despite looking through all the literature on the ESRC website. The thing I'm unclear about is who actually selects who wins funding. As I understand it unis nominate students and then the ESRC chooses who will win funding from these nominations. But how many students do the unis nominate for each award? As many as are offered a PG place? And wouldn't unis decide themselves internally who they want to win funding then simply nominate 1 person for the award available, then they are guarenteed, right? This way the uni has the power to chose over the ESRC.

Supposing that a number of unis are willing to nominate you. How best to decide who to go with? Surely this depends on how many nominees the uni is putting forward for each award. Is there any way of finding out this information, even asking them? Else it would be a gamble: go with the more prestigious uni, risk not getting a place becaues there's likely to be many nominees the uni puts forward.