DSU Scholarship Application Guide

The DSU is not only a cash grant. One single application puts you in the running for a whole package of benefits:

• The DSU scholarship itself, a cash amount paid in instalments. The example call offers 1,700 scholarships.
• The canteen service, a daily meal allowance worth €4.50 per day for local and commuter students and €5.00 per day for fuori sede (away-from-home) students.
• A place in university housing at a reduced rate: 1,349 places in the example call, with a €500.00 deposit and only 48 hours to accept the offer once the email arrives.
• A top-up for international mobility such as Erasmus, raising your monthly mobility grant up to €600.00 per month.
• A degree award (premio di laurea), an extra payment for students who graduate within the official duration of their programme.

None of this renews automatically. Every bando is autonomous and independent from the previous one: to keep the benefits next year you must submit a brand-new application, every single year.

Your financial situation is measured by an official certificate, and which one you need depends on where your family's income and assets are. This is the slowest step of the whole process, so start it before anything else.

In the example call the declaration had to be signed, or the documents delivered to the approved CAF, by July 21, 2026 for students enrolling in subsequent years and by August 5, 2026 for students enrolling in a first year.

The application is filled in on your university's online student services, and it is a completely separate procedure from enrolment.

• You can apply before you are enrolled, and even before you know whether you have been admitted. Waiting for an admission result and missing the DSU deadline is the classic beginner's mistake: the deadline is its own, and it does not move.
• In the same form you also declare whether you are competing for the reduced-rate housing and for the international mobility top-up. If you do not tick those boxes, you are not in those rankings at all.

The deadline is a time, not just a date: 12:00 noon Italian time. You must click "close and send" and save the receipt, because an application left open counts as never submitted. Once it has been sent, it can no longer be modified or cancelled.

Fuori sede (away-from-home) status applies to students whose home is more than 90 minutes away from campus by public transport and who therefore rent accommodation nearby. It is worth by far the highest scholarship amount, and it is never assigned automatically.

• You must request it explicitly, on a dedicated form (Form A in the example call), sent by its own deadline: October 9, 2026. That deadline falls months after the application deadline, which is exactly why it gets forgotten.
• You need a paid lease agreement in your own name, registered with the Agenzia delle Entrate (the Italian revenue agency), covering at least 10 continuous months, from October 1, 2026 to July 31, 2027 in the example call. A lease that starts even one day later is not accepted.
• A parent may appear on the lease only as a guarantor, never as a co-tenant, and the contract must make clear that the accommodation is rented for the student.

Fuori sede status never carries over from a previous year, even if the same lease is still running: it has to be requested again in every call. The request must also arrive as one single email with one single PDF. Submissions that are incomplete, illegible, sent in several parts or completed later are rejected outright, and nobody will contact you to ask for the missing document.

Appearing in the final ranking is not the same as having the money in your account. A few administrative steps are up to you:

• Enter a valid IBAN in your online profile. It must be an Italian or SEPA account in your name (a joint account you are a holder of, or a prepaid card in your name, also works). In the example call, failing to enter correct bank details by December 31, 2027 counts as a waiver: the cash part of the scholarship is lost for good.
• Non-EU students must upload a copy of their entry visa. Without it the payment stays blocked.
• The first instalment is processed around December 2026 in the example call. The payment order and the actual credit on your account are not the same day: banks usually need another five to seven working days.
• First-year students must still pay the second instalment of their tuition fees while the scholarship is unconfirmed. If the scholarship is later confirmed, the tuition fees are refunded, except the non-refundable administrative fee.

First-year students are ranked on income alone, and their academic merit is checked afterwards. This is where most scholarships are lost.

• In the example call a first-year student had to earn at least 35 ECTS on Engineering and Architecture programmes, or 40 ECTS on Design programmes, by August 10, 2027. Miss it and the second instalment is lost and the canteen service stops.
• Students in subsequent years must already hold the required credits by 10 August, before the academic year even starts: in the example call 35 ECTS for the second year (40 on Design programmes), 90 for the third and 150 for the final year, always counted from your absolute first enrolment.
• Students in subsequent years also have a one-off credits bonus that can be added to the credits actually earned, purely to reach the minimum: 5 credits if used for the second year, 12 for the third and 15 from the fourth year on. It can be used only once, it is not cumulative, and it can never be used to confirm a first-year scholarship.

If the minimum credits are still not reached by November 30, 2027, the scholarship is revoked in full. That means repaying the instalment already received plus the monetary value of the canteen meals and the housing you used, losing the tuition refund, and being barred from future DSU calls until the debt is settled.