Students wishing to be considered for financial aid should submit their completed applications by January 1 for the fall semester. The Application for Graduate Appointment should be submitted to the UPP Program Office as part of the application package.
Financial aid awards through the UPP Program are available to qualified full-time, domestic students who will not be employed when beginning their graduate study. International students must be financially self-sufficient in the first year of study, and may be considered for a graduate assistantship in their second year.
Financial aid is available to MUPP and PhD students through fellowship programs and research assistantships. Most fellowships include a tuition and service fee waiver, and pay stipends of up to $15,000 per year. Research assistantships include tuition and service fee waivers and pay salaries of $600 - $1600 per month, depending on the number of required hours of service. While there are a limited amount of research assistantships available through the UPP program, many students are successful in finding assistantships at other units within CUPPA or elsewhere on campus that provide them with tuition and service fee waivers.
Financial aid assistance can also be found through the UIC Office of Student Financial Aid (OSFA). Financial assistance administered by OSFA includes the Illinois Veterans Scholarship and the Stafford Loan Program. Download the required Certification of Finances (38KB, pdf).
PhD applicants should consider applying for the CUPPA Disginguished Graduate Scholar Award. Download details (22.5KB, doc) about the award, or contact Hazel Brown, Admissions and Records Officer at 312-996-6211 or memi@uic.edu for more information.
PhD students in UPP are also eligible to participate in two NSF-funded Integrative Graduate Education Research and Training (IGERT) grant programs, one in Landscape, Ecological and Anthropogenic Processes (LEAP) and the second in Computational Transportation Sciences (CST). Further information about the IGERT fellowships is available at the LEAP website and the CST website.