Beinecke Scholarship Program

Are you interested in completing a graduate degree in the arts, humanities, or social sciences? Wesleyan can nominate one student each year to apply to the national competition for the Beinecke Scholarship. Those selected as Beinecke scholars receive $5,000 immediately prior to entering graduate school and an additional $30,000 while attending graduate school. Scholars are encouraged to begin graduate study as soon as possible following graduation from college, and must utilize all of the funding within five years of completion of undergraduate studies. 

To be eligible for a Beinecke Scholarship, a student must:

  • Demonstrate superior standards of intellectual ability, scholastic achievement, and personal promise during their undergraduate career.
  • Be a college junior pursuing a bachelor’s degree during the 2023-2024 academic year. “Junior” means a student who plans to continue full-time undergraduate study and who expects to receive a baccalaureate degree between December 2024 and August 2025.
  • Plan to enter a research- or creative-focused master’s or doctoral program in the arts, humanities, or social sciences. NOTE: Students in the social sciences who plan to pursue graduate study in neuroscience or clinical psychology should not apply for a Beinecke Scholarship.
  • Be a U.S. citizen or U.S. national from American Samoa or the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.
  • Have a documented history of being eligible to receive need-based financial aid during their undergraduate years, with a slight preference for Pell Grant recipients. Other evidence of meeting this criterion is a student’s history of receiving need-based institutional, state, or federal grants-in-aid.

The program seeks to encourage and enable highly motivated students to pursue opportunities available to them and to be courageous in the selection of a graduate course of study (there are no geographic restrictions on the use of the scholarship and recipients are allowed to supplement the award with other scholarships, assistantships and research grants). 

Because Wesleyan can nominate only one Beinecke applicant per year, nominations are competitive.

Read more about the Beinecke Scholarship and Wesleyan’s campus process for nominating students to the national competition at the link, and if you’d like to apply contact fellowships@wesleyan.edu by January 11, 2024 at the latest.