Should the scholarship that paid for your PhD student go on your resume? It should, on the student’s own line, where the hiring panel reads it. A panel reads Research Supervision for two things: how many PhD students you have supervised to completion as main supervisor, and whether a funder paid for them. An industry PhD scholarship, a competitive national award or a funded project each tells the panel that a funder trusted your supervision enough to pay for it.
Axe Builder, our resume builder for researchers, turns an ORCID iD into an academic resume with citations, h-index, journal quartiles and Crossref data already in place. Since 26 September it has recorded the funding behind each supervised student as a field of its own, and a line such as “Funded by an industry PhD scholarship, AUD 120,000” prints with the student it paid for, in Research Supervision, where the panel is already looking.
What hiring panels look for in research supervision
We know what panels look for because we sit on the other side of the table. When Axe Talent builds a shortlist for a professorship, the university’s bar is explicit: a published Taylor’s University job description, for instance, asks for at least three PhD students graduated as main supervisor at Professor level. The panel then reads each student’s line for the degree, the role, the stage and the funding. A supervision section that answers all four in order is read in a minute, and one that leaves the panel guessing is read with suspicion.
Does a PhD scholarship count as a grant?
It does not, and that is the second reason for a separate field. A scholarship pays a person, while a grant funds a project with you as principal investigator. Panels count the two separately, and a scholarship listed among external grants is the misfiling we correct most often in the grants tables candidates send us, because it costs a candidate credibility in the first five minutes of screening. Axe Builder keeps the two apart by design, with the scholarship printed under the student and the grants section reserved for grants.
For most professorial candidates the supervision record is one of the strongest parts of the application, which makes it the section to get right first. Axe Builder is free to start, and if your record clears a bar like the one above, tell us, because we are searching for researchers with exactly that record of PhD students now.