LisaL

agreed, no one cares but it would be worth it to work on cutting down your proposal and keeping your points as straightforward as possible. Even at 10pt my 8 citations fit a little less than half of my second page but I chose not to reduce citations.

Thanks for that! They actually paid my healthcare (by mistake) and said they cant cover the rest next semester because of the COE difference, then said healthcare isn't a required fee. I think it's silly because healthcare is mandatory and if you opt out, you have to get a policy similar to the university's which is likely the same cost. I have a meeting with my CO next week so hopefully that goes well. I'm curious if other students their second year get out of state tuition exemption? Mine is waived the first year but that's a physics department waiver.

That's the issue, the CO is new and doesn't know the program that well either. If your school has a lot of fellows, I don't think these issues arise, especially if they have incentives in place for attracting NSF Fellows.

I'm completely amused yet troubled by what seems to be a lack of knowledge on the part of my school's budget office on what the NSF GRFP is. I understand that some schools don't get a lot of NSF Fellows but my university has at least 2 new fellows within the last 3 years and I noticed that other on this forum has mentioned conflict with budget offices. So I can deal with health insurance not being considered a required fee (even though I think it is), however talking to the budget office people, they seem to think that the COE is some sort of cap and if my tuition or fees hypothetically went over 6K per semester then I'd have to pay the difference. On TOP of that, they're saying NO tuition payments/assistance during the summer semesters. I explained the NSF GRFP is supposed to cover tuition and fees regardless of how much the COE and I just got a shrug and 'yeah well.." response. I'm not sure if the person is annoyed I'm asking the question or not, but suppose if I went to an Ivy League university that's more than 6K a semester. Then would that student have to pay the rest? Am I missing something? And I'm curious if anyone has had to pay during the summer semester? And to add, I will also need to pay the difference of tuition for being a non-resident... This all seems pretty suspect, I really hope in the future the NSF requires universities with GRFP fellows to take some sort of class or seminar. I'm curious if anyone has any ideas or answer or concerns or how they handle these situations.