How to apply

NYCEP is an umbrella structure that unifies the faculty and students across the participating institutions. All graduate students in physical anthropology at CUNY and NYU participate in NYCEP as well as selected students from the AMNH Richard Gilder Graduate School and Columbia University's graduate program in Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology.

If you intend to apply to the NYCEP program, you should:

  1. Review the core faculty at the participating doctoral degree-granting institutions (AMNH, Columbia, CUNY, NYU) and determine which institutions have faculty matching your research interests; contacting such faculty by email is a good way to determine how your interests might mesh. While all NYCEP students interact with faculty at all NYCEP institutions, your primary doctoral advisor must be a faculty member at the institution in which you actually enroll. Click on the Faculty tab above for a list of core faculty and check the Faculty Interests page to see their recently supervised dissertation projects.

  2. Prepare and submit an application for graduate study to one or more of the participating degree-granting institutions. Application information for these programs can be found by following these links:

  3. Submit the NYCEP Tracking Form to Dr. Scott Williams (sawilliams@nyu.edu), the NYCEP Steering Committee Co-Chair by January 8. This form serves to let us know who is applying to which institutions so we can track their applications; it is not itself an application (one does not apply to NYCEP directly).

  4. Each graduate program evaluates their applications independently, ranks candidates, and makes offers to students. Students whose applications are ranked highly may be invited to visit New York to meet with faculty and students, attend seminars or classes, and learn more about NYCEP and its constituents. All NYCEP institutions generally offer funding packages to accepted students. Some packages may include responsibilities for service in research or teaching, with funding from a combination of NSF and university sources. Each university has special fellowship support for minority students and/or unrestricted fellowships for entering students on a merit basis. Students are expected to apply (or be nominated) for these if eligible. Individual offers will usually be made in March.

We hope that NYCEP applicants will also have applied for a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, as well as other external awards for which they may be eligible. NYCEP students will be encouraged to apply for these external fellowships again during their graduate career. Teaching experience is a valuable component of a graduate career, and departmental positions as lab instructor or lecturer may be available, especially during the third or fourth year while dissertation proposals are being finalized. Some of these positions may be included as part of the original fellowship offer, while others may be paid adjunct positions.