Apple Scholars in AI/ML PhD Fellowship

The program is structured as fully invitation-only: Apple selects a group of universities each year and invites each to nominate up to three of its most promising PhD students - there is no general public application portal for students to submit on their own initiative. This means the single most important eligibility factor is whether a student's university is on Apple's invited list for that cycle and whether the department chooses to nominate them internally.

Beyond the nomination requirement, candidates must be within a specific window of their PhD program: applicants must have either two or three years remaining in their program as of the relevant reference date, meaning both very early-stage students (with more than three years left) and students close to finishing (with less than two years left) are not eligible for that cycle. Apple also requires that scholars not be currently supported by another full industry-sponsored fellowship for the duration of the award, to avoid overlapping corporate funding commitments.

Apple states that students of any citizenship or nationality are eligible, so the meaningful barrier for a Pakistani or other international student is not nationality but rather whether they are enrolled at one of the relatively small number of invited universities that year, and whether their department chooses to put them forward. Students at universities with an existing relationship with Apple Research, or those whose advisors have prior Apple collaborations, are generally in a stronger position to be nominated.