Last verified: 17 August 2026
Your master’s application at the University of Groningen has to be complete before 1 December. That one date, sitting on the university’s ordinary admissions calendar rather than on any scholarship form, controls whether the Eric Bleumink Fellowship is even possible for you in a given year.
The reason is structural. Nominations for this fellowship are drawn only from applicants who already hold an admission decision before February, and the Admission Office needs those intervening weeks to process files. Submit your programme application in January and you have not missed a scholarship deadline, because there is no scholarship deadline. You have simply removed yourself from the pool the university selects from.
This guide walks through the route as it actually works, the money as the official pages actually describe it, and the parts where those pages leave a genuine gap you should plan around.
How this fellowship actually reaches a student:
Most scholarship articles start with a form. This one cannot, because no form exists.
The University of Groningen states it plainly: it is not possible to actively apply for an Eric Bleumink Fellowship. Suitable candidates are informed about a nomination. The Eric Bleumink Fund’s own page is equally direct, saying you cannot directly apply for the Talent Grant and that the Admissions Office and the Faculty Admission Boards nominate suitable candidates. The fund adds a request that people not contact them with applications.
So the mechanism runs like this:
- You apply for a master’s programme at the University of Groningen in the normal way, through the normal admissions route.
- The Admission Office, working with the Admission Boards of the individual faculties, reviews the pool of applicants who have been given provisional or unconditional admission.
- From that pool, the office decides who is nominated for an Eric Bleumink Fellowship.
- Nominated candidates are contacted. The fund states that notification arrives before 1 February, and that applicants who have not been contacted by that date were not selected.
Two practical consequences follow, and both change how you should spend your effort.
First, the quality of your master’s application is the entire scholarship application. There is no separate essay where you argue your financial case or your development impact. Everything the nomination committee sees, it sees inside the admissions file you already submitted.
Second, there is nobody to chase. The fund explicitly says it accepts no further correspondence about decisions. Emailing to ask about your nomination status is not persistence in this system, it is noise, and the fund has asked people not to do it.
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The calendar that decides everything
Because the route runs through admissions, the timeline is the part worth pinning to a wall.
- Complete your master’s programme application before 1 December.
- Receive provisional or unconditional admission before February.
- Learn about nomination before 1 February, if you are selected.
- Begin study in September, because grants are awarded for programmes starting in September only.
A gap in the published dates you should know about
The University of Groningen page states the 1 December deadline without attaching a year to it. That is worth saying out loud rather than glossing over, because the difference between one December and the next is a full academic year of your life.
The page was last modified on 11 August 2026, and the fellowship funds September starts, so the nearest meaningful reading is the 1 December falling before your intended September intake. That is a reasonable inference, not a published fact, and you should treat it as such.
There is a second wrinkle. The Eric Bleumink Fund’s own page at the Ubbo Emmius Foundation states that the registration period for the 2025 to 2026 academic year is closed, and that information about the procedure for 2026 to 2027 will be posted in the fourth quarter of 2026. Read literally in August 2026, that is inconsistent, because the 2026 to 2027 academic year begins within weeks. The two official pages do not line up cleanly on cycle years.
Do not build your plan on either page alone. Write to the University of Groningen Admission Office, name the specific September intake you are targeting, and ask them to confirm the exact date your application must be complete for that intake. One email removes the ambiguity entirely.
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What you need in place before the Admission Office looks at you
The university publishes eight conditions for candidates. Treat them as a checklist you work through in order, because several take months rather than days.
- Provisional or unconditional admission to a master’s programme before February. Only applicants who have this can be considered.
- Excellent academic performance, preferably confirmed by letters of recommendation.
- Excellent grades during your bachelor’s or undergraduate study.
- Excellent English language proficiency, meeting the admission requirements of the programme you have chosen.
- Availability for the whole period of the programme, and the ability to take part in the entire programme.
- Good health, so that health insurance in the Netherlands can be arranged.
- Nationality of a country on the eligible list.
- No other means of financing the study in question.
Notice how much of that list is not about the fellowship at all. Grades, references and English proficiency are admissions requirements you would face anyway. The fellowship simply skims from the top of a pool already filtered by those standards.
The last two conditions are the ones that catch people. Nationality is binary and you either qualify or you do not. The financing condition is worded softly and applied strictly, and it is the condition applicants most often assume will not be examined closely.
The health condition is worth reading carefully too. It is phrased around insurance being arrangeable in the Netherlands, not around being free of any condition, which is a narrower requirement than it first appears.
What the fellowship pays for, and where the published numbers disagree
The University of Groningen lists coverage as tuition fee, costs of international travel, subsistence, books, and health insurance. That is a comprehensive list. Tuition, flights, living costs, study materials and insurance together represent essentially the full cost of moving to the Netherlands for a degree, and the grant runs for one year or two year master’s programmes.
Here is the part you should not skip.
The Eric Bleumink Fund states on its own page that each year a select group of students receives an individual grant of 15,000 euros. The university’s scholarship page names no euro figure at all, describing coverage by category instead. These are two different ways of describing the same award, and the pages do not reconcile them for you.
That matters because 15,000 euros is a real number with real limits. International master’s tuition at a Dutch research university, plus twelve months of living costs in Groningen, plus an intercontinental flight, is not obviously a 15,000 euro package. It is entirely possible that the university contributes a tuition waiver alongside the fund’s cash grant, and that the categories on the university page describe the combined result. It is also possible that the figures apply differently to different candidates or programmes.
What you should do about it is simple and specific. If you are nominated, ask for the award in writing, broken into components: tuition covered in full or in part, the exact annual stipend, whether travel is paid or reimbursed, whether the second year of a two year programme is funded at the same rate, and what insurance premium is included. Do not accept a nomination and book a flight on the strength of the word “covered” appearing on a web page. Get the breakdown.
This is not scepticism about the fellowship, which is a serious and long running award. It is ordinary care with a decision that involves moving countries.
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Which nationalities appear on the eligible list
The fellowship is aimed at students from developing and least developed countries, with the stated purpose of building academic capacity in the applicant’s home country. The published list of eligible countries of origin is long:
Afghanistan, Angola, Bangladesh, Benin, Bhutan, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Chad, Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Haiti, Kiribati, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nepal, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Somalia, Tanzania, Togo, Tuvalu, Uganda, Vanuatu, Yemen, Timor Leste, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Zambia, Bolivia, Cape Verde, Congo, Ghana, Honduras, India, Korea (Dem. Rep.), Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Morocco, Nigeria, Vietnam, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Algeria, Cameroon, Congo (Dem Rep.), Egypt, Iran, Ivory Coast, Jordan, Kenya, Micronesia, Nicaragua, Niger, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Samoa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tajikistan, Tokelau, Tunisia, Zimbabwe, Lao People’s Democratic Republic.
Country lists on scholarship pages get revised, sometimes quietly. Before you commit months to an application, open the official page and confirm your own country still appears there rather than trusting any republished list, including this one.
How competitive this is, in the university’s own words
Scholarship posts tend to be vague about odds. Both official sources here are unusually blunt, so there is no need to guess.
The University of Groningen states that a considerable number of students apply for this scholarship each year, whereas the university can issue only a limited number of grants. The Eric Bleumink Fund puts numbers around it: the fund receives hundreds of applications annually, and only a few can be awarded a scholarship. Since its establishment in 2000, following Eric Bleumink’s retirement as chair of the university’s Board of Directors, the fund reports supporting 100 students from 30 countries.
Do the arithmetic on that last figure across the years since 2000 and you get a small annual cohort. Hundreds of hopefuls, a handful of awards.
That should change your plan in one specific way. Because the fellowship has no separate application, applying for admission at Groningen costs you nothing extra in scholarship effort, which is genuinely rare. But it also means you cannot treat a Groningen admission as a funding plan. Apply, be considered, and in parallel pursue funding routes that you can actually apply to directly.
Making your admission application the kind a faculty board nominates
Since your admissions file is the only document the committee sees, the useful question is what makes a file stand out to people looking specifically for capacity building potential.
- Make the link between your degree and your home country explicit. The fund’s stated purpose is increasing the academic capability of the country in question. If your motivation letter explains what you intend to do with the degree back home, in concrete terms, you are answering the question the committee is actually asking. Vague ambition to work internationally does the opposite.
- Choose referees who can speak to research capability, not just attendance. The criteria ask for excellent academic performance preferably confirmed by letters of recommendation. A letter that describes a specific project you handled well is worth more than a letter from a senior name who taught you once.
- Give your English test time it needs. Sitting the test in mid November for a 1 December deadline leaves no room for a retake or a slow result. Book it in the summer.
- Get your transcripts and degree documents early. Universities in many eligible countries take weeks to issue official transcripts, and this is the step that most often pushes a December deadline into January.
- Apply to a programme you are genuinely well matched to. Nomination flows through the Faculty Admission Boards, so being an obviously strong fit for that specific department matters more than picking whichever programme seems easiest to enter.
- Write the motivation letter yourself, in your own voice. Committees read thousands of these and generic text is easy to spot.
The rules that quietly disqualify people
A few things in the source material function as hard stops, and they are easy to read past.
- September starts only. The grant is awarded for master’s programmes starting in September. A February intake is outside the scheme.
- Admission must land before February. Late admission decisions, however good, arrive after the nomination window.
- No other means of financing. If your file suggests the degree is affordable to you without help, the fellowship is not aimed at you.
- Full participation. You must be available for the whole period of the programme, which rules out plans that involve long absences or part time attendance.
One more warning that comes from outside the official pages but belongs here anyway. Nobody can sell you a nomination for this fellowship. Because there is no application to submit, there is nothing for an agent or consultant to submit on your behalf, which makes this award an attractive target for anyone offering guaranteed scholarships for a fee. If someone claims they can secure you an Eric Bleumink Fellowship, they are describing something that does not exist. Pay for translation, courier and test fees if you need to. Pay nobody for access.
If February passes and no message arrives
Plan for this outcome, because statistically it is the likely one.
Not being nominated says very little about you. It says the university had a limited number of grants and a large pool of strong candidates. Your admission offer, if you received one, remains valid on its own terms, and it is a real asset. Some applicants use it to approach funders at home, since a confirmed place at a European university is far more persuasive to a national scholarship board or an employer sponsor than an intention to study abroad.
Keep the documents you assembled. Transcripts, references, English test results and a motivation letter that has already survived an admissions review are most of the work for the next application you make anywhere.
The Eric Bleumink Fellowship is one of the few genuinely worthwhile awards you can be considered for without filling in a single extra form. That is its great advantage and also its trap, because an opportunity with no application is easy to assume you have covered when you have not.
The action item is small and specific. Decide on your master’s programme at the University of Groningen, then work backwards from a complete application before 1 December, giving yourself buffer for the English test and the transcripts. Email the Admission Office now to confirm the exact date for your intended September intake, since the published pages do not attach a year to it. Then submit early, apply for other funding in parallel, and let the nomination happen or not.
Verify every figure here against the official page before you act on it: University of Groningen, Eric Bleumink Fellowship
Frequently Asked Questions
Does money from family or personal savings count as having other means of financing the study?
The official pages set the condition but do not define it, so there is no published threshold to measure yourself against. The sensible reading is that the fund is looking for candidates who could not undertake the degree without support, rather than candidates who would find it inconvenient. Do not misrepresent your circumstances in either direction on your admissions file, since financial statements are usually verifiable and a discrepancy discovered later is far more damaging than an honest disclosure made early.
Can you be considered again in a later year if you were not nominated?
Nomination is tied to a specific admissions cycle rather than to a permanent record, so applying for a later September intake puts you back into the pool that the Admission Office selects from that year. There is no published appeal or review route for a decision already made, and no mechanism described anywhere for asking why you were passed over, so energy spent revisiting last year’s outcome buys nothing. Improve the file instead: a stronger reference, a better English score or a more clearly argued motivation letter all change what the committee sees next time.
Can you be nominated while you are still finishing your bachelor’s degree?
The criteria accept provisional admission as well as unconditional admission, and provisional admission is the mechanism universities use precisely for applicants whose current degree is not yet complete. In practice that means final year students are not automatically excluded, though your provisional offer will carry conditions about final results that you still have to meet. Check the specific conditions attached to your offer letter, because failing them removes the admission the nomination depends on.
Are Dutch visa and residence permit costs covered?
Visa and residence permit fees do not appear anywhere on the published list of what the grant covers, which names tuition, international travel, subsistence, books and health insurance. Budget for immigration costs separately, and ask about them directly if you are nominated. The same applies to costs like document legalisation, which can be substantial depending on where you are applying from.
Does the fellowship pay anything towards a partner or children moving with you?
The official pages are silent on family members, and silence on a scholarship page should be read as absence rather than as a yes. If bringing family is central to your decision, raise it with the Admission Office before you accept anything, and factor in that Dutch immigration rules impose their own income requirements on accompanying family members regardless of what the scholarship covers.
What happens if your master’s takes longer than expected?
The grant is described as being awarded for one year or two year master’s programmes, which ties funding to the standard length of the degree rather than to however long you personally take. An extra semester to repeat a course or finish a thesis is therefore a risk you should assume falls on you unless you are told otherwise in writing. This is one more reason to get the award terms in detail at the nomination stage.
