dumbmatter

HM for the third straight year! Fuck! At least I'm done with it. And nobody from my school won an award this year, only 3 HM. I guess that's what I get for choosing the lab I want over the school with the biggest name.

The average GRE score in my department (not a top engineering program, but pretty good) is 1310. I would bet that the average GRFP winner has a much higher GRE score... I'd guess ~1450, but I don't think there is any way to really know. All the people I know who won a GRFP did incredibly well on the GRE.

As I understand it, there is a disconnect between the people who decide who wins the awards and the people who run the website and tell us the decisions. And they don't seem to communicate that well all the time.

Monday or Tuesday? Ha!

it's been like that for a while.. check the older posts in this topic.

If your house is worth significantly less than your debt on it, why not consider just walking away?

There were some exceptional circumstances last year though... if there are no weird delays this year, it should be shorter.

I predict it will be April 1, just to fuck with us.

2x honorable mention winner here... the reviews are nearly useless if you've done your homework. that is, if your research plan has been vetted by your advisor, if your essays have been read by people who have experience with the grfp program (these people exist at almost every school), and if you've looked online at all the information posted by past winners and past reviewers. all my reviews did is confirm what i already knew were my weaknesses, which hopefully i have addressed this year.

This is all conjecture: I won HM both of the past two years. I imagine that the reviewer will see that I won HM twice before (since I can list it in "Other Experience" as a "significant academic honor"), and will think to himself "dumbmatter must at least be pretty good". So that might bias the reviewer a little towards giving me a better grade. Or maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part.

yep it's up. 1,236 awards.

beta back up?

ha! yahoo mail is down too, so i can't even check if they sent out an email notification.

ooh the beta is purple now! honestly, i have no idea what these people are doing, taking a website down for several hours every few days.

beta is timing out, non-beta is loading a blank page (but with ssl!)

question: how many people are in limbo? is it possible that, since the original announcement of the awards, we will make 1 post here for every single person in limbo? maybe that could give us another goal to work towards after 200 pages.

if we get a few more of these fake "omg the results are annouced!!!" posts, then we'll be at 200 pages in no time.

great work! but the regular funding includes money for all the previous winners too. so if that $45 million is only going to fund the first year of new awards (and i don't know that this is true, maybe they are going to preallocate 3 years of funding for the stimulus awardees), that would mean more like 1000 new awards. but who knows.

i figure, even if i don't get it this year, i'll have a better chance next year if some of the competition wins it this year.

what is with all these extended maintenance periods? i was a web developer before being a grad student, and i would *never* take a website down for that long. unless something strange happens, updates should be pushed without taking the site down at all. i can't imagine what they are doing. and it happens so frequently too.

i propose that we start calling it "purgatory" instead of "limbo" because purgatory sounds way cooler.

your link is about the budget request, which was $6.85 billion. the actual budget awarded was $6.45 billion: http://www.nsf.gov/about/congress/111/h ... 9_0310.jsp So, if the $125 million decreased by the same amount, we would only be expecting 6.45/6.85*125000000/40500-(913+950+920) = 123 extra fellowships. But that is without stimulus money, I believe. Want to start a pool? If we get enough people, then the winner will be funded

also, the $125 million figure comes from the proposed budget. i have no idea what the final number is, if it even exists yet. also, stimulus money could change things. so there is a large unknown error in my estimate.

BioMedSci: $64.8mil/1600 = $40,500 $36.45mil/900 = $40,500 ($40,500 is the cost of each fellow per year) That is funding for new fellows only. The 3075 number gives $124.8 million for *all* fellows, not just first-year. That would imply that there are 3075-(913+950+920)=292 new ones to be funded this year. (# of fellows each year taken from fastlane). That is assuming that everyone the previous three years accepted the award. I assume that some people didn't, which is where the 700 number comes from So, I'm expecting somewhere between 292 and 700 will get funded out of the people currently in purgatory.