Open Philanthropy Scholarship Award Program: Notification Policy for Grant Modifications

Educational Scholarship Guidelines

This policy applies to individuals who are awarded a grant for graduate study. For our policy on other funding under our Career Development and Transition program see “Research Scholarship Guidelines” below.

As part of receiving this grant, we ask that you let us know about any of the following changes in your funding circumstances:

• Changes to your enrollment status: finishing or discontinuing your degree early, temporarily withdrawing from your degree, or changing your enrollment status to part-time, if we’ve funded you for full-time study. We’ll generally default to handling such changes according to the policies outlined below, though we may make exceptions for individual cases:
  • If you finish or discontinue your degree before the grant period is over, our default policy is to ask that you return a portion of your funding to us proportional to the amount of time left in the grant period, to the extent that your university allows for this.
  • If you temporarily withdraw from your degree, our default policy is to effectively “pause” your grant, i.e. delay or extend your grant period by the duration of the withdrawal (without increasing the funding provided), with the expectation that you will push back the end of your degree and continue with the remaining duration of your grant after you return to your studies.
    • If extending your degree would require additional funding from us (rather than just an extension of the grant period), you should let us know — we’ll consider that as a separate grant request, which we may or may not approve.
  • If you change your enrollment status to part-time, our default policy is also to extend your grant period (with the expectation that you are pushing back the end date for your degree). 
    • Depending on the timing, we may also spread out any remaining stipend payments over the extended period (so that there are more, smaller payments, but the total remains the same).
  • If you change your enrollment status but don’t intend to push back the end date for your degree, our default policy is to ask that you return a portion of your funding for tuition and living expenses to us proportional to the decrease in tuition charged and hours enrolled, respectively.
  • By default, we’ll delay or extend your grant period for up to 6 months, cumulatively, but we may grant longer extensions in exceptional cases.
• What to do if you receive another award covering tuition and/or living expenses over the period that this grant is providing funding for, including via an RA or TA position: 
  • Please let us know about any other awards exceeding $1,000 received covering these expenses; we will handle those on a case-by-case basis. 
  • By default, we don’t allow grantees to receive simultaneous awards covering the same expenses. But we may make exceptions in certain cases where the other funder explicitly intends to provide supplementary funding to our grant.

Research Scholarship Guidelines

This policy applies to individuals who are awarded a grant for unpaid internships, independent study, career transition and exploration periods, and/or other activities relevant to building career capital. For our policy on graduate study under our Career Development and Transition program, see “Education Scholarship Guidelines” above.

As part of receiving this grant, we ask that you let us know if you plan to take a job opportunity, do a paid program, receive another grant, or accept any other funding paying for your time before the end of this grant period. We’ll default to handling the situation according to the policies outlined below, though we may make exceptions for individual cases.

• If you take a full-time position or otherwise discontinue the activities covered by this grant before your grant period is over, our default policy is to ask that you return a portion of your funding to us proportional to the amount of time left in the grant period.
• If you do a paid program (e.g. a bootcamp or research mentorship program), receive a grant with a different purpose, or take some other temporary paid opportunity (including a part-time job) before your grant period is over, our default policy is to effectively “pause” your grant, i.e. delay or extend your grant period by the duration of the other opportunity (without increasing the funding provided), with the expectation that you will finish the remaining duration of your grant after the opportunity is over. If you would instead like to shorten the overall duration of your grant period, we’ll ask that you return a proportional amount of your grant funding, as specified in our policy above. By default, we’ll delay or extend your grant period for up to 6 months, cumulatively, but we may grant longer extensions in exceptional cases.
  • In the case of a part-time opportunity (where you continue your grant work in your other hours), our default policy is to extend your grant period by a week for every 40 hours of other paid work you take on (again, without increasing your total grant funding), i.e. we’ll fund you proportionally to how many hours you spend on your grant work every week.
    • If you take a part-time opportunity and don’t intend to extend your overall grant period (i.e. you intend to spend fewer total hours on the grant than originally planned), we expect you to return a portion of your funding to us proportional to the number of hours left in the grant period.  
    • For example, if you received a $30,000 grant covering 6 months of full-time self-study, then decided to take a part-time job for 20 hours per week over the last 2 months of the grant, we would default to extending your $30,000 grant to go for 7 months total, to give you time to “make up” the relevant grant hours missed. If you didn’t plan on continuing the grant activities past the original 6 months, we would expect that you return $5,000 of the grant to us, corresponding to the originally planned hours you would no longer be spending on the grant.

• By default, we don’t allow grantees to receive funding overlapping with our grant period that’s intended for the same purpose from another funder;  if you receive such funding, we’ll ask that you return the funding we recommended corresponding to the overlapping period. We will make exceptions in cases where the other funder explicitly intends to provide supplementary funding to our grant, in which case we’ll ask that you provide direct confirmation of this intention from the funder.