Assistantships
Thank you for your interest in The University of Georgia’s Plant Breeding, Genetics & Genomics (IPBGG) graduate degree program!
We invite applications for admission into our M.S. and Ph.D. programs. Final acceptance depends on a variety of factors, chief of which is funding, i.e., the availability of an assistantship. We do not accept full-time students unless there is an assistantship available for them, or they have funding from their home institution or an appropriate funding agency.
Our assistantships are competitive with those of most major schools and come with out-of-state tuition waivers and in-state fee reductions. Please visit the Office of Student Financial Aid for current tuition and fees.
In addition, all graduate students on graduate assistantships are required to enroll in a mandatory health insurance program that is partially subsidized by the University. Additional information on health insurance can be found at the Human Resources Web page.
Assistantships for MS students are approximately 93% of those for PhD students. Assistantships are part-time jobs that help defray the cost of attending graduate school, and thus obligate recipients to working at least 16h per week, though many professors allow students to use those hours for their thesis or dissertation research.
Assistantships are mostly provided by individual faculty members, so the biggest obstacle for many applicants is to find a faculty member who has an assistantship available. We get many more applications than we have graduate assistantships, so many qualified applicants may not be admitted. Thus we encourage all applicants to first identify and contact those faculty members for whom they would like to study under and ask them if they have an assistantship available and would consider accepting you into their program. Note that it is unlikely that any faculty member would make a commitment without first reviewing your application materials.
Since there is a limited number of assistantships and the decisions on assistantship awards are made separately from the decisions on admission, it is possible to be accepted for graduate study but not be admitted due to lack of an available assistantship.
For additional questions or assistance, please contact:
Graduate Coordinator
Esther van der Knaap