Graduate Fellowship - Student Center Transition

SGPS is nearing the completion of transitioning Graduate Fellowship payments from the My Human Resources service to Student Center. This transition process will be completed effective January 1, 2025.

Why Are We Doing This?

At Western, the principal concerning funds provided to graduate students is that any employment income (T4) should be paid through Human Resources  MyHR service while any scholarship/awards/fellowships (T4A) should be paid through the Student Center.

In 2019, after a detailed review of the tax regulations and the approach taken by other research-intensive universities, Western concluded that the income then known as Graduate Research Assistantships is more consistent with a “fellowship” to support student participation in their graduate program.  Western University changed the name “Graduate Research Assistantship (GRA)” to “Graduate Fellowship” in support of this reporting change. This change also helps clarify the difference between graduate student fellowship/scholarship funding and employment. The income is still reported on a T4A but in box 105, which generally will not be considered taxable income to a full-time graduate student.

In the summer of 2021, the Faculty of Engineering began paying all Graduate Fellowship funds through Student Center.   Each program in Engineering would use a single account to assign all fellowship transactions to students via a single source and later resolve these payments by journalling funds from individual research accounts. 

What Will Change?

SGPS has worked with The Office of the Registrar, Western Information Systems Group, Financial Services, Research Finance and Western Human Resources to deliver these changes to the graduate community. The project includes several changes:

  • An automated process in the Student Center that identifies eligible fund 2 research projects in Western Financials and creates a corresponding Item Type (Student Center’s unit of accounting) to provide funds for graduate fellowship payments.
  • An update to the existing Self-Service Award Nomination process in Student Center to allow graduate administrators to award graduate fellowship based on available item types associated with the student's supervisor(s). For the first time, administrators will be able to see any fund 2 research project associated with each faculty members for the purposes of supporting fellowship payments.
  • A mechanism in Student Center that will receive and process a batch upload file containing speed codes, student numbers and amounts to facilitate large amounts of Graduate Fellowship transactions

Key Benefits

Paying Graduate Fellowship through the Student Center will:

For Students:
  • Make incoming fellowship funds immediately visible to students in their Student Center Statement of Account with all other T4A funding
  • Reduce the financial ‘out of pocket’ burden by providing the full amount of the fellowship at the start of the term.
For Program Administrators:
  • Allow administrators to nominate a graduate fellowship once term activation has completed (normally a month before the term starts)
  • Allow administrators to use one system to nominate and report all T4A income (scholarship/awards/fellowships for a graduate student)
  • Give Western greater options in recovering payments, if necessary
Relevant Administrative Details
These funds will cover tuition and fees automatically and no longer require the student to resubmit the money they receive from HR to Western to cover those costs. 

Funds are paid out each Tuesday. If a graduate program applies the funds on a Thursday for example, the payment process runs the following Tuesday, and the funds will be in the student’s bank account three days later. 

Training/Documentation 

Documentation on how this new process nominates graduate fellowships is available here:  
Graduate Fellowship Nomination Process - Student Center.docx

A video demo of how graduate fellowship can be nominated in Student Center will be available later this week.

Questions?

For any immediate questions or concerns, please contact Matt Dumouchel, Manager, Information Systems in the School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies.