OfS Scholarships for MSc Data Science

Eligibility criteria

To be eligible you must be a home fee payer and meet the nationality and residency criteria for the UK Postgraduate Masters Loan. The other eligibility criteria for the Postgraduate Masters Loan do not apply, so students who already have a masters degree can be eligible for this scholarship even though they would not be eligible for the loan.

You also need to be a member of at least one of the under-represented groups mentioned below:

• Female students
• Black students
• Students registered disabled
• Students from a low socioeconomic background, for example quintiles 1 and 2 of the Index of Multiple Disadvantage [1]
• Care experienced students [2]
• Estranged students [3]
• Gypsy, Roma, Traveller students
• Refugees
• Children from military families, veterans and partners of military personnel

[1] Index of Multiple Disadvantage is used as a measure of disadvantage. The 20% of areas with the most disadvantage are designated as "Quintile 1" (Q1), the least 20% are "Quintile 5" (Q5), and so on. For more information of the measure of Index of Multiple Disadvantage, see the English indices of deprivation tool.

[2] A 'Care Experience Student' is a student who has been, or is currently, in care, or from a looked-after background, at any stage in their life, no matter how short, including adopted children who were previously looked-after. This care may have been provided in a one of many different settings such as in residential care, foster care, kinship care, or through being looked-after at home with a supervision requirement.

[3] The UK Office for Students defines 'estranged students' as students between the age of 18 to 24 who are not communicating with either of their parents. Consequently these students lack the support of a wider family. They may be estranged before entering higher education but can also be at risk of estrangement or becoming estranged during their studies.

To be eligible for scholarship funding students must meet the nationality or residency status criteria to qualify for the postgraduate masters' loan.

The OfS Scholarship is available for full-time and part-time study starting in September 2024 on Data Science MSc.

We also strongly encourage students from non-STEM backgrounds to apply. We will offer a bespoke delivery of support including a ‘boot camp' for those changing subject disciplines: introducing students to baseline programming, statistics, and data modelling before they start the course in September.

When to apply

Applications close at 23.30 on Sunday 21 April 2024.

The Scholarship Panel will convene soon after the scholarship application deadline, to consider eligible scholarship applications.

If you are successful in your OfS scholarship application, you will receive a formal offer of a scholarship on or soon after the panel meets.