Tips for Grad Students: Grants

Hi there!

Entering Grad school or just begun your studies? Perhaps you are almost done and finishing the final leg of your journey? Well, I've finished and moved on to working as a consultant archaeologist. The debt from school is large and the regret of how I should have handled my schooling also looms just as large. In consideration of the time I spent as a graduate student I created this blog to list some tips that I wish I had known when first starting my degree.

Today's tip is to make a list of all your expenses and continually update it! During my three-week wait for my defense I thought it prudent to go over all my receipts that I would soon submit to the various grants that I was awarded. To my horror I realized I had not updated my list of receipts in TWO YEARS! Some of the receipts I had listed on the spreadsheet were gone. Receipts from other expenses that I had not listed, but remembered, were also gone. Further, some of the receipts I kept could not be submitted because they were for 'capital' expenses, which my grants would not reimburse me for.

So the tip for new graduate students, or really any post-secondary student, is to:

1. Make a list of EVERY expenditure during your school years. You never know what may or may not turn out to be covered by a grant. This includes flights, conference receipts, materials for research, tuition receipts, rent receipts.... ANYTHING!

2. Keep these receipts in place you will remember where they are. Try to label them and organized according to date. Keep like receipts together too (food receipts, flight receipts, etc).

3. Make a spreadsheet of all of these receipts. Organize this spreadsheet by what grant might cover these expenses, and separate them out by type. List the total amount, what it was for, and company (where you bought it).

4. If you are really motivated, scan the receipts. Save a copy of these scans on your hard-drive so that you will always have a copy of the receipts just in case you do lose some over the years.

This list may appear long, but in reality it would only require maybe an hour of your time every week. Considering that Lost is no longer on TV, you can replace that time with going over your weekly receipts.

Until next time, keep your nose to the books and your lips to the beer!
~archaeomatt