hkcool

Other people above have explain the scoring letters already, so I won't really touch on that. Each reviewer will give you a rating on both intellectual merit and broader impacts. But actually, we letter score you get isn't how they determine who gets the fellowship. Each reviewer actually gives you a number score which is converted to the E, VG, G, etc. Then your Z-score with respect to that reviewer is computed - if you got a very high number score but the reviewer actually ranked most other people higher, then your Z-score will be low. Similarly, if your number score is low but actually higher than most of the people the reviewer scored, then your Z-score will be high. This is how they protect against reviewers who are abnormally harsh or lenient. This is not true. I was awarded last year and I got one good and two excellents. It strongly depends on who is reviewing your application and how harsh/generous they were overall. I've noticed that in biosciences, a lot of people seem to get mostly excellents and 1-2 VGs and still not get awarded, but I think reviewers on those panels tend to award a lot of high scores.

Congrats! I received the fellowship last year (but ended up turning it down). My impression was that the proposal was non-binding.

I was nominated for a very good university fellowship two years ago. I found this out from the director of graduate studies at the time, but it turned out that I didn't get it. The department nominated 3 people and the other two both got it. It was a highly competitive fellowship though. I personally think it's odd to tell an acceptee they were nominated before knowing the outcome, but that's just me. Anyway, I would put it out of mind until you know for sure.

Hi all, were we supposed to get some sort of confirmation email after we accepted the award? I accepted on Friday and didn't get any notification. I guess I'm just being a little paranoid that the deadline is going to pass and I find out I accidentally didn't accept the award

The subject was "2018 NDSEG AWARD ANNOUNCEMENT"

Just found out I got it! April 13, 2018 Dear ________: It is a pleasure to inform you that you have been selected to receive the 2018 National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship Award. This fellowship is awarded to you in recognition of your academic excellence and Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) achievements, from over 3600 applications that were received this year. Program Awardees receive full tuition and all mandatory fees coverage for up to three years at any accredited U.S. college or university that provides advanced degrees in science and engineering, and a monthly stipend of $3200. In addition, Fellows receive up to $1200 annually for health insurance coverage, and up to two trips (all expenses paid based on the government travel policy per year for training and/or conferences that support their educational initiatives). The NDSEG Fellowship Program is sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the Army Research Office (ARO), and Office of Naval Research (ONR) under the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, OUSD (R&E). This program is administered by Solutions Through Innovative Technologies, Inc. (STI-TEC). Please indicate your acceptance of this Fellowship by signing the NDSEG Fellowship Terms of Award (See Attachment). We must receive your signed terms of appointment no later than May 1, 2018. Upon acceptance, you will also need to complete all forms in the Awardee package along with the form linked below, and upload all documents by June 1st.

Anyone not heard back yet? I'm assuming I didn't get it since I know acceptances went out already, but the waiting always makes me anxious

Just got my email and the awards are up! Awarded!!!

I can't help, but I would strongly recommend asking this on the academia stackexchange (with specific schools and identifying info removed). The people there would be in a pretty good position to help you as most of them are either faculty or senior grad students.

They seem kind of disorganized lol. If the final panel review ended yesterday, surely they must already have two lists of applicants corresponding to who moved on and who didn't, and it should just be a matter of emailing those lists all at once...

Not KaffeeCafe, but mine only had my name and major field, so I checked yes and just added the other fields. I am almost positive I put this information down in my original application though, especially my current institution.

Nothing on my end. Maybe it's an email sent to senior undergrads requesting to know what school they've chosen? Either way, sounds like you're still in consideration! Edit: I just received the email as well. Not sure why they're asking to be honest...

This is the full text of the email: Dear ___, Thank you for applying to the NDSEG Fellowship Program, we accepted over 3600 applications for the 2018 Fellowship Class. Just a reminder, we are still accepting GRE Scores, Transcripts and References until January 5, 2018. Please keep in mind as we upload these documents into your profiles, correspondence via email and phone might be delayed due to the volume. The next steps in the process are: The application packet review by our Subject Matter Experts in February, who will choose the top forty percent. The top forty percent will then go to the DoD panel review starting in March, who will make the final selection of 200 fellows for the 2018 Fellowship Class. Notifications to Awardees will be sent in April. To plan for Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) throughout the federal government, all programs must capture race and national origin (RNO) Data. To provide this data, please click on this link: Click Here to Open EEO Form When you complete the form and save, it will automatically post to your file. Please note, providing this information is voluntary and has no impact on your selection status. In addition, we encourage you to join our social media sites if you haven't already, you may go to the website to join: www.ndsegfellowships.org. We will be posting STEM information on a regular basis. Thank you for your interest in the NDSEG Fellowship and best of luck to you! Sincerely, NDSEG Fellowship Team --- They never explicitly stated 1400, but they said they received over 3600 applications this year in the update email sent on March 16th, so if the 40% figure is to be believed, then approximately 1400 applicants would have made it to the DoD panel review. That seems like a pretty large number to me, and they assembled subject matter experts to only cut out slightly more than half of the applications, but who knows at this point?

I think the January email went to most people's spam folders (it was in mine, and I only saw it in February). The 40% figure seems kind of off to me, but who knows...

I re-read the email they sent out in January, and it says that the subject matter experts will select the top 40%. They said 3600 people applied, so that's about 1400 who make it to the final round. I guess the chances of us getting it are still quite small (~14%). It seems like the timeline is pretty fast though if the DoD review is over on March 31...

I just got the email too! Anyone know how many they cull out in the final DoD review?

I called them today at the number listed on the NDSEG website, and the woman who answered said we should expect to receive email notification about our status next month...

I called them and the person on the line said not to worry about it, and if they needed that information from me, they would've reached out, so I guess that's good Wow, that seems so soon! I'm not sure I'm ready to find out...

If we're in our first year of graduate study, did we have to submit official transcripts from the graduate institution? I remember uploading a PDF of my official undergrad transcript in the application, but I submitted everything before any of my first semester grades were available. Was I actually expected to submit first semester grades? I'm kind of freaking out now...

Is there a typo here? You can list four and rank them. The first three will be read, which I'm pretty sure is the same as past years. In my top 3 ranked, I had my current academic advisor, research advisor from undergrad, and supervisor for a research internship at a national lab.

Hi all, I have a question about applying as a first year grad student. I feel like my application stands a decent shot. My undergrad grades were good, I have publications where I'm first author, and lots of relevant research experience. In my program, first year students don't start research until summer at the earliest. I had 3 letters of reference from past research experiences, then included a 4th from my temporary advisor at my current institution. This person was the chair of the graduate committee and is familiar with my work. I took his class at got an A, and he is slated to be my thesis advisor after this year, so he's familiar with my past research and I've met with him frequently to craft my fellowship applications. This person doesn't know me in a research capacity though. He is just in the same field as me and can maybe speak a little bit to the work I've done in the past and its impact, but I have other references for that. Do you think this puts me at a disadvantage for the NSF GRFP? I would have just gone with three references from my past research, but I thought it would look pretty bad to not have a letter from my current institution...

So I called the grad office at one of the schools I applied to today, since people have posted on here that they've been accepted and rejected already and I haven't heard anything. The graduate coordinator took down my name and presumably looked up my information, but then she gave me the email of the graduate committee head of the department and tells me to ask him, and also said all decisions have been made already but official letters have not gone out yet. I clarified with her if it would actually be okay for me to inquire about my application status with him, and she said "I'm sure it would be okay." This was a good program and I'm expecting rejection, but I'm just very confused about this exchange. I thought the graduate coordinator handled these sorts of requests or, at the very least, didn't forward them to professors. I'm probably not going to bother him since I feel really weird nagging a professor about this. Just wondering if this is common procedure though...

I think someone called the school and asked about this, and they said it was a mistake. Apparently, the official documents request is a feature they're adding next year to validate transcripts from abroad. If you scroll back on the Stanford results far enough, you'll see a discussion. If you have that option, it'll ask you for money to validate your documents, but apparently a glitch caused the option to appear this year. I'm a domestic applicant and don't see that option anywhere.

On the ETS website, my score percentiles are 89% for quantitative, 92% verbal, and 93% writing. One of the schools I applied to manually entered my scores into the computer after receiving the official report, and the raw scores match up, but not the percentiles, which are 92% Q, 91% V, 92% W. I'm going to call the school tomorrow to see what's going on, but I'm just nervous if thi means I reported the percentiles incorrectly to my other schools. Has this happened to anyone before? Any idea if it's possible for the official percentiles to be different from what you see on the website?

Interesting. All I can say though is that in the past 4 years, decisions have come out at the very end of January or within the first week of February. It is kind of crazy that admit day would be so soon after admissions though.