Council of Graduate Students
at The Ohio State University

Tips for a Complete & Competitive RTA Application

Tips for a complete application:

  • Occassionally, applicants who directly work on their service record and written statements within the RTA portal forget to save their work. Rarely, our portal has erased entire sections of RTA applications. Thus, to avoid potentially losing hours of work on application components, it's recommended to work on an RTA application in a separate Word document or other application and then copy service record components & written statements into our portal when finished. 
  • ~20% of recommender responses are not submitted either in the RTA portal or received via email by the application deadline. Without the recommender responses, an application is considered incomplete and not judged. Communicate proactively with your recommender and request that they forward their responses to the RTA committee chair once complete to ensure your application is considered complete.

Tips & information for a competitive application:

  • The strongest RTA applications:
    • Demonstrate consistent and broad service, or describe a compelling and unique situation that has inhibited participation in service, while in graduate school at OSU 
    • Construct a research statement that can be read by a research trainee independent of field
    • Describe all components of the intended conference 
    • Reflect on professional goals, in the short- and long-term, and how conference attendance advances those goals
  • On average, the acceptance rate for an RTA is ~30% independent of funding period.
  • More applications are submitted for late spring/early summer travel (FP4, April 1 - June 30) and fewer applications are submitted for late fall/early winter travel (FP2, October 1 - December 31).

A note on RTA judges: All judges are graduate students representing all colleges at OSU, at main and regional campuses, in both master's and Ph.D. programs. Some judges are in their 1st semester of graduate school at OSU while others are 6th year students that have judged hundreds of RTA applications. Given the diversity of RTA applications and graduate students at OSU, each RTA application is randomly assigned to and scored by three different judges.

Any graduate student can serve as an RTA judge after a ~45-60 minute training session. Time commitment for RTA judging is ~4 hours, and it's an excellent opportunity to experience the judging process for those interested in applying at a future date. If interested, please contact RTA Committee Chair Jon Fritz at fritz.288@buckeyemail.osu.edu.