What a Supervisor's Funding Promise Should Include Before You Accept a Grad Offer

Ask for the number, not the impression

A supervisor telling you "you'll be funded" is not a funding offer. Universities that guarantee doctoral funding put a dollar figure and a term length in writing, usually in your admission letter or a separate funding letter from the graduate program office. Before you accept a spot in a lab, ask both your prospective supervisor and the graduate program to confirm the same details in writing, and treat any figure you only heard in conversation as unconfirmed until it appears on paper.

What the funding letter should state

Compare any verbal promise against a written letter that answers each of these points.

• The annual amount in Canadian dollars, and whether it is a guaranteed minimum or a one-time estimate that can drop in later years.

• Whether that amount is stated before or after your tuition and mandatory fees are deducted. A 30,000 dollar package before a 10,000 dollar tuition bill leaves you with far less than a 30,000 dollar package on top of a tuition waiver.

• The source breakdown: how much comes from teaching assistantship hours, research assistantship hours, an internal graduate scholarship, and the supervisor's own research grant.

• The number of years the package is guaranteed for, and whether that matches your program's typical time to completion.

• Renewal conditions, such as a minimum GPA, an annual progress report, or a supervisory committee meeting you need to pass.

• Whether the funding covers summer months or only the fall and winter terms.

• What happens if you win an external award such as the Canada Graduate Research Scholarship. Some programs top up your total package when you win one. Others reduce the internal funding by the same amount, leaving your total unchanged.

How guaranteed funding is structured at some Canadian schools

Every university sets its own funding floor, and the structure varies by school and even by department within the same school. The University of Alberta endorses a minimum guaranteed funding package of 100,000 Canadian dollars over four years for eligible PhD students. The University of Guelph guarantees a minimum of 17,500 Canadian dollars per year for the first four years of a PhD.

Those two numbers are not directly comparable without doing the math yourself: one is a four-year total, the other an annual figure. Ask your specific department for its current guaranteed minimum rather than assuming a university-wide policy applies to your program, since science, engineering and humanities departments often set different floors even at the same school.

Questions to ask before you accept

1. Is this guarantee written into my offer letter, or only mentioned by email or in conversation?

2. Does the guarantee cover my entire expected program length, or only the first year?

3. Who confirms funding if my supervisor's grant runs out early: the department, or only the supervisor personally?

4. Does my total change if I move from a research assistantship to a teaching assistantship in a later year?

5. What is the university's process if my supervisor leaves or takes a leave of absence?

If the verbal promise and the written offer differ

Email the supervisor and the graduate program coordinator together, and ask them to confirm the figure in one written reply before you accept. Keep that reply. If a program cannot put a specific number in writing before you commit, treat that as information about how the funding will be administered later, not as an oversight.

Red flags

Watch for a supervisor who will not put a number in writing, a funding letter that names a total but skips the annual breakdown, or a promise that depends on a grant application the supervisor has not submitted yet. Ask the graduate program coordinator to confirm any promise made only by the supervisor, since the department administers the funding, not the individual professor.