Faculty & Staff

Working with graduate Students

Support for Graduate Students

Graduate financial support is largely controlled and administered by academic departments and programs. The department decides who receives financial support, and at what level the graduate student will be supported. Departments use the Graduate Financial Support (GFS) system to deliver funds to students.

When support from the academic departments is insufficient or not available, graduate students can turn to the Financial Aid Office for federal student loans. When students are receiving both federal funding through the Financial Aid Office and support through their department as recorded in GFS, staff in the Financial Aid Office are charged with keeping the data in synch. Additional support entered in GFS can affect the student’s eligibility for federal student loans.

Special Funding Options

Please direct graduate students with unexpected, one-time expenses (e.g. medical/dental bills) to the Emergency Grant-In-Aid (PDF) application form. You can also refer students to the application form for the Graduate Student Aid Fund (PDF), which is available to help students who are experiencing difficulties paying required university fees. Completed application forms for both programs should be faxed to the Financial Aid Office at (650) 725-0540.

Checks for Students

If you receive a check from an outside organization (foundation, civic group, etc.) that is intended to benefit an individual student, please send the check to the Financial Aid Office for processing. Since these checks represent funding for individual students and not for the university as a whole, no infrastructure charges are applied to these checks. Checks should be delivered to:

Financial Aid Office
Montag Hall
355 Galvez Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6106

ID Mail Code: 6106

Federal Work-Study

A limited number of graduate students in the Schools of Engineering, Humanities & Sciences and Medicine (M.D.) may be eligible for research or teaching assistantships through the Federal Work-Study (FWS) program. Information on the FWS assistantship application process for graduate students in Engineering or Humanities & Sciences is available at Federal Work-Study Assistantships.

The FWS program requires an institutional matching component. For FWS research and teaching assistantships, schools and departments provide tuition allowance (TAL) as the institutional match.  The availability of Federal Work-Study funds for graduate students in various programs is established annually by the Financial Aid Offices in cooperation with the Schools. Funds are limited by the annual federal funds allocation from the U.S. Department of Education.

Graduate Student Services Forum

This half-day forum, for graduate student services professionals, is intended to help cultivate connections across campus, to celebrate the hard work and professional dedication of these staff members, and to help them develop new contacts and skills to take back to their Schools, Departments and Centers.

The date, time and place of the next Graduate Student Services Forum will be published here when available. Materials and minutes from past Forums can be accessed at the Graduate Student Services Forum web site. For questions, please contact Nancy Child, nchild@stanford.edu.

*PDF documents require the free downloadable Adobe Acrobat Reader software for viewing.