What Can £5,000 Buy You as a Postgraduate Student?

The cost of living crisis isn’t going anywhere so every penny counts. Postgraduate study is expensive and students are becoming increasingly reliant on external funding to help. While government loans might not cover everything, scholarships and grants are a great way to top up your finances by a few hundred pounds to £5,000 (and even more) in some cases.

This got us thinking, what can £5,000 buy you as a postgraduate student? We’ve done some calculations!

A few months’ rent

According to our estimates, it costs an average of £1,000 per month to rent a room in a shared house in most UK cities. With £5,000, you’ll be able to cover five months’ rent. In London, where average rent is around £1,500, you should be set for around three months.

You can get even more for your buck in some of the cheaper cities in the UK. In cities like Liverpool, Leeds and Sheffield, average rent is closer to £500 per month. £5,000 could cover (almost!) an entire years’ rent.

A long-term research trip

We discovered when looking at what £1,000 can buy you as a student, that it is comfortable to fund a few days on an international research trip. Imagine the same trip but with a lot more time and resources! If you spend £600 on return flights from London to New York, with the remaining £4,400 you could stay for 15 days for £2,400 at a decent hotel, leaving you with £2,000 spending money.

We asked PhD student, and guest contributor, Holly Giles what she’d do with the money and she absolutely agreed. “The number of conference/travel grants has really reduced since COVID, meaning it is harder and more expensive for students to attend conferences. If I was given £5,000 I would use this to attend an international conference, such as in America.”

Your research could even take you across more than one country if you budget carefully!

A home study (or office) set up

You’ll be spending a lot of time doing self-study as a Masters/PhD student and you might also be working an online part-time job as well, so having a home study/work set up would be ideal.

£5,000 could get you a fully up to date set up complete with a monitor, a standing desk and a comfortable chair. You could buy one of the flashier IKEA standing desks for about £600, a nice study chair for about £200, the latest Apple iMac for £1,500 and an Apple MacBook Air for £1,000 totalling up to £3,300. That would leave you with enough to put towards some decorating as well!