Most graduate students are fully funded as Teaching Assistants (TAs) during their time in the program.  Funding is offered for five years conditional on satisfactory progress in the program.  These funding packages allow students to develop as classroom teachers and support themselves without the need for outside employment.  In order to request consideration for a funding line, please see our application instructions.  While in the program, many students apply for additional opportunties for department support, including summer teaching and summer research funding.  In addition, the program maintains a database of additional funding opportunities available to students:

• Many students apply for PS summer awards to support their research and professional development.  The department offers many such opportunities, which can be found here.

• Graduate School fellowships offer opportunities for incoming and continuing students.  See here for a list of opportunities.

• Graduate Student Congress Awards support student research and professional development and can be found here.

• Recently, students have won funding to attend conferences and workshops such as  the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models (EITM), and New Directions in Analyzing Text as Data, and received prestigious awards such as the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant.

• The University provides excellent, convenient, and relatively inexpensive housing. Additional information is available at their website.

The Department places a strong emphasis on supporting graduate student research, and our selective program means students have ample access to work closely with faculty.  Graduate students have recently published work in outlets such as the Journal of Conflict Resolution; International Studies Quarterly; Comparative Political Studies; Political Research Quarterly; Conflict Management and Peace Science; Governance; Presidential Studies Quarterly; Politics, Groups and Identities; Congress and the Presidency; Social Science Quarterly; Michigan State Law Review; and Elon Law Review.  Not only are these publications often co-authored with faculty, but our recently established investment plan provides incentives to promote further collaboration. A number of other resources also offer opportunity for students to build their research programs:

• Advice on most statistical questions can be handled in the Department, but for many out of the ordinary problems, the Applied Statistics Lab (ASL) is a free service run by the staff in the Dr. Bing Zhang Department of Statistics. ASL staff also offer software feestival workshops in R and SAS.

• The Department and the University provide excellent computing facilities. The new Ulmer lab offers graduate students computing resources and a dedicated meeting space. In addition, the Computing Center at the University of Kentucky provides computing facilities for the faculty and students 

• The department hosts a regular research colloquium during the academic year, giving students and faculty the opportunity to receive feedback on ongoing projects.  Graduate students are strongly encouraged to take part in order to ready their work for publication.  

• The University of Kentucky is a member institution of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. As a member institution any faculty member or student may request data from the data archives located at the Consortium headquarters at the University of Michigan.

• The Peace Studies program benefits students by enhancing their understanding of personal, social, political, cultural and economic issues that reduce or promote prospects for peace.  While the program is geared towards undergraduates, it also benefits our graduate students by bringing in leading IR scholars for talks and mentoring opportunities.

• The University of Kentucky Libraries contain over 2.6 million volumes, over 5.7 microfilm units, over 26,000 periodicals and serials, and over 23,000 maps. The social sciences, humanities, and life sciences collections at UK are housed at the William T. Young Library, a state-of-the-art facility that opened in 1998.

• To enrich the intellectual life of our department, we regularly bring in leading scholars to present their research and meet with students.  Some of the recent scholars we have brought in include: Brandon Bartels (George Washington), Carew Boulding (Colorado), Amber Boydstun (UC-Davis), Steven Brooke (Louisville), Songying Fang (Rice), Matt Gabel (WashU), Jeff Gill (American), Marc Hetherington (UNC), Andy Kydd (Wisconsin), Cyanne Loyle (Indiana), Jennifer Merolla (UC-Riverside), Amanda Murdie (Georgia), John Patty (Emory), Brandon Prins (Tennessee), Maya Sen (Harvard), John Sides (George Washington), and Scott Wolford (Texas).

UK PS has a strong culture of graduate student teaching. Our primary funding comes in the form of Teaching Assistantships, and students often begin by serving as teaching assistants under the guidance of a professor before having the opportunity to teach their own courses.  Students will develop a breadth of teaching experience across the major subfields.  Our students have won numerous teaching awards, recently including the Provost Teaching Award, which is awarded to only a handful of the University’s TAs each year.  In addition, graduate students have many other opportunities to develop as teachers:

• Grad TAs receive mentorship and feedback to develop as teachers. Each semester, TAs are provided a faculty teaching member who serves as a resource to help in their development.
• The Department's Head TA is an advanced graduate student with a distinguished record of teaching.  The Head TA serves as a resource and mentor for other graduate student TAs.
• The Head TA organizes teacher training, which is required each semester for TAs.
• Additionally, the Center for the Enhancement of Learning & Teaching (CELT) offers resources and ongoing events to help prepare students to be excellent teachers.
• Many graduate students enroll in the Graduate Certificate in College Teaching & Learning while in the program. The Certificate builds on the highly successful Preparing Future Faculty Program and sets students up for a career as successful teachers.

Through new mentorship programs, we offer students multiple forms of support in the program. Our peer advising committee is composed of graduate students in their second year and beyond, who offer perspectives and experience to incoming cohorts.  Incoming students are also assigned a substantive advisor during their first three semesters in the program. These are faculty members from their area who offer professionalization and advice. Students receive teaching support in the department from the Head TA and a teaching mentor.  In addition, the department housing other groups, such as the Political Science Graduate Student Advisory Committee (PSGSA) and Women in Political Science (WIPS).