The Top 10 Best Websites for Finding PhD Scholarships

There’s a particular frustration in the early weeks of looking for a funded PhD, and it isn’t the one you’d expect. The money is out there, considerably more of it than most people imagine, but very little of it is advertised anywhere you would naturally think to look. Search engines circle the same handful of famous names, university pages assume you’ve already found the opening, and the real listings sit quietly on portals you’ve never heard of.

I will keep posting individual scholarships on this blog, with their deadlines and their details. But your field, your nationality and your timing belong to you alone, and no list of mine quite reaches them, which is why this post is about the where instead. Ten websites, counting down, that between them carried almost everything I applied to: what each one covers, who it tends to suit, where it disappoints. By the end, two or three of them should feel like yours, and the rest can be quietly set aside.

One thing worth I would like you to understand before talking about the list, because it shapes the whole search. PhD funding comes in two quite different forms. Across much of Europe, a PhD is treated as a job, the university employs you, you sign a contract, and you’re paid a salary with the usual pension and holiday entitlements. In other parts of the world, and in some European programmes too, a PhD is a course of study that you fund with a scholarship applied for alongside your admission. The two are advertised in completely different places, which is why working out which one you’re chasing saves so much time.

So, here are my top 10 preferable sites to search for the scholarships.

10. Scholars4dev 

This is good for scholarships for students from developing countries, covering bachelor’s, master’s and PhD. Small, but properly curated, which is rare in that corner of the internet. But one main thing to mention here that you have to search deeper in order to find your preferable scholarships.

 

9. ProFellow

This website is basically a named fellowships that fund you rather than a position: Fulbright, Gates, Knight-Hennessy, Wellcome. Two things are worth knowing before you go. The database only opens once you’ve made a free account, and most of what’s listed suits US applicants best. Even so, far fewer people search here than on the big portals, which is precisely what makes the sign-up worthwhile.

8. ScholarshipPortal and PhDportal 

Between them these hold well over a thousand scholarships, mostly across Europe. What makes them more reliable than the average aggregator is that the European Commission links to them from its own study-in-Europe pages, which isn’t something it does casually. ScholarshipPortal runs from bachelor’s through to PhD, while PhDportal is the doctoral-only version of the same thing.

7. DAAD 

Germany’s official database. It carries DAAD’s own programmes and gathers offers from other German funding organisations alongside them, so it reaches further than a first glance suggests. The doctoral rate currently sits at around €1,400 a month with a travel allowance on top. It’s aimed mainly at master’s level and above, so undergraduates will find less here.

6. AcademicTransfer 

This is the shared job board of Dutch academia. You can find many oppertunities regarding Phd and postdocs scholarship when writing your desired program in search bar.

5. Nature Careers 

I personally like this site a lot, because it’s very clear and easy to search. It is Lower volume, higher profile and Heavily STEM, with a lot of German, Nordic and Chinese institutional listings.

4. Academic Positions 

This covers universities right across Europe, with employers posting directly rather than through a middleman. Its most useful habit is putting salary figures on the listing itself. That sounds minor until you’ve spent an afternoon opening one position after another trying to work out which are actually funded.

3. jobs.ac.uk 

If a position exists in UK academia, it is almost certainly here but you can also find other countries scholarships easily. The site advertises on behalf of more than 7,000 organisations. The good thing about this site is that it keeps a section dedicated to PhD studentships (which is Masters plus PhD) , and they will email you new listings every day at no cost.

2. FindAPhD 

This built specifically around doctoral study. Strongest for the UK and Ireland, with reasonable coverage of Europe, Canada and Australia as well. One important thing here is the keywords search because the filter that separates fully funded studentships from self-funded projects probably saves more time than any other feature on this list, because the two can look almost identical until you reach the details. So be specific and choose the right keywords for your preferable positions. They also have guidance articles too.

1. EURAXESS 

This is the European Union’s own research jobs portal, and it’s the one I’d keep if I had to give up every other link in this post. At any given moment it holds well over a thousand open doctoral positions, spread across more than 30 countries and updated daily, and it’s also where MSCA-funded positions are officially advertised. It’s free, there are no ads, and employers post directly, so nothing sits between you and the listing.

Two last things worth adding.

Subject-specific sites deserve as much attention as the general ones, and sometimes more.For instance, I work in mathematical physics, so a good deal of my own searching happens on MathJobs.org and iMechanica rather than on any of the ten above. For mathematics and for mechanics those two are simply the better platforms positions get posted to the community that cares about them and often go no further, never reaching the general portals at all.

The same pattern holds in almost every subject. Somewhere in your field there’s a society mailing list, a departmental page or a community site quietly carrying openings, and it tends to be a shorter and far more relevant list than anything a general aggregator will hand you. An hour spent finding yours is usually time well spent.

That’s something I’ll be working on over the coming months looking into the subject-specific sites for other fields and sharing what I find here. So if your area isn’t mathematics or mechanics, that part is on the way.

That’s the list as it stands. If something better turns up, it’ll be added here but for anyone applying this season, these ten are more than enough to be getting on with. Meanwhile you can tell me your specific subjects in comments and I will try to find the best sites for you in the future blogs.