baron23

Just remember that you are all very special people!

This week, the productivity of eager young minds lies entirely in the hands of a select few. NSF, do it for America. Do it for the smell of fresh cut grass on a baseball field, for apple pie, and bald eagles, and Jon Bon freaking Jovi. Release them from the spell of Pokemon, 2048, looking for glitches in HTML source code, cross referencing results, indexing tweets, and taking the joy out of April fool's day. For life, liberty, and the pursuit of never visiting this page ever again. 
 
Roll tide NSF, roll tide. 

This week, the productivity of eager young minds lies entirely in the hands of a select few. NSF, do it for America. Do it for the smell of fresh cut grass on a baseball field, for apple pie, and bald eagles, and Jon Bon freaking Jovi. Release them from the spell of Pokemon, 2048, looking for glitches in HTML source code, cross referencing results, indexing tweets, and taking the joy out of April fool's day. For life, liberty, and the pursuit of never visiting this page ever again. 
 
Roll tide NSF, roll tide. 

only saw the bottom half of this and nearly had a heart attack.

My usual bedtime is 2am anyway, so why change anything tonight?  

This week, the productivity of eager young minds lies entirely in the hands of a select few. NSF, do it for America. Do it for the smell of fresh cut grass on a baseball field, for apple pie, and bald eagles, and Jon Bon freaking Jovi. Release them from the spell of Pokemon, 2048, looking for glitches in HTML source code, cross referencing results, indexing tweets, and taking the joy out of April fool's day. For life, liberty, and the pursuit of never visiting this page ever again. 
 
Roll tide NSF, roll tide. 

GLORY
 
Welcome to the FastLane Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP).
 
GRFP/FastLane will be unavailable from 10:00 PM ET Monday March 31st - 2:00 AM ET Tuesday, April 1st for scheduled maintenance. We apologize for any inconvenience
 
*Edit* For anyone who comes looking for this post a year from now... The exact time my auto-refreshing macro picked up "unavailable" as a text update was exactly 5:00pm pacific time. */edit*

This week, the productivity of eager young minds lies entirely in the hands of a select few. NSF, do it for America. Do it for the smell of fresh cut grass on a baseball field, for apple pie, and bald eagles, and Jon Bon freaking Jovi. Release them from the spell of Pokemon, 2048, looking for glitches in HTML source code, cross referencing results, indexing tweets, and taking the joy out of April fool's day. For life, liberty, and the pursuit of never visiting this page ever again. 
 
Roll tide NSF, roll tide. 

This week, the productivity of eager young minds lies entirely in the hands of a select few. NSF, do it for America. Do it for the smell of fresh cut grass on a baseball field, for apple pie, and bald eagles, and Jon Bon freaking Jovi. Release them from the spell of Pokemon, 2048, looking for glitches in HTML source code, cross referencing results, indexing tweets, and taking the joy out of April fool's day. For life, liberty, and the pursuit of never visiting this page ever again. 
 
Roll tide NSF, roll tide. 

This week, the productivity of eager young minds lies entirely in the hands of a select few. NSF, do it for America. Do it for the smell of fresh cut grass on a baseball field, for apple pie, and bald eagles, and Jon Bon freaking Jovi. Release them from the spell of Pokemon, 2048, looking for glitches in HTML source code, cross referencing results, indexing tweets, and taking the joy out of April fool's day. For life, liberty, and the pursuit of never visiting this page ever again. 
 
Roll tide NSF, roll tide. 

This week, the productivity of eager young minds lies entirely in the hands of a select few. NSF, do it for America. Do it for the smell of fresh cut grass on a baseball field, for apple pie, and bald eagles, and Jon Bon freaking Jovi. Release them from the spell of Pokemon, 2048, looking for glitches in HTML source code, cross referencing results, indexing tweets, and taking the joy out of April fool's day. For life, liberty, and the pursuit of never visiting this page ever again. 
 
Roll tide NSF, roll tide. 

This week, the productivity of eager young minds lies entirely in the hands of a select few. NSF, do it for America. Do it for the smell of fresh cut grass on a baseball field, for apple pie, and bald eagles, and Jon Bon freaking Jovi. Release them from the spell of Pokemon, 2048, looking for glitches in HTML source code, cross referencing results, indexing tweets, and taking the joy out of April fool's day. For life, liberty, and the pursuit of never visiting this page ever again. 
 
Roll tide NSF, roll tide. 

NSF, I NEED DIS 

This week, the productivity of eager young minds lies entirely in the hands of a select few. NSF, do it for America. Do it for the smell of fresh cut grass on a baseball field, for apple pie, and bald eagles, and Jon Bon freaking Jovi. Release them from the spell of Pokemon, 2048, looking for glitches in HTML source code, cross referencing results, indexing tweets, and taking the joy out of April fool's day. For life, liberty, and the pursuit of never visiting this page ever again. 
 
Roll tide NSF, roll tide. 

This week, the productivity of eager young minds lies entirely in the hands of a select few. NSF, do it for America. Do it for the smell of fresh cut grass on a baseball field, for apple pie, and bald eagles, and Jon Bon freaking Jovi. Release them from the spell of Pokemon, 2048, looking for glitches in HTML source code, cross referencing results, indexing tweets, and taking the joy out of April fool's day. For life, liberty, and the pursuit of never visiting this page ever again. 
 
Roll tide NSF, roll tide. 

<!--..--> Is a comment tag used to keep track of your code so it doesn't become impossible to deal with it later when you're editing the source code. It's more for the next schmuck who has to edit your website to orient themselves and has nothing to do with status. The website doesn't use any PHP or server code so I would assume that they take the website down, then manually/automatically change the homepage for everybody with their status rather than using a table that has everybody's status separate. Which is probably why they have to take the website down for maintenance. 

Hahah come on all. This is gradcafe for crying out loud. People should be able to bitch/moan/complain/whine as they please. 

Meh.  It's pretty pathetic to get all worked up about it, too, though.

Follow the link and download the presentation. If you combine 2,000 awards with the ~17% acceptance, those figures make sense.
 
Edit: They also flat out say 12,000 at the end of the presentation.
 
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCkQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nsfgrfp.org%2Fassets%2FFile%2F2014%2520NSF%2520GRFP%2520Presentation.pptx&ei=GUMyU4WmHue90gHwp4CAAg&usg=AFQjCNH9SsE3kPQmMootnNibCCdcvmC2dA&sig2=wGnq5IPC9xEQcpqnDBX7xw&bvm=bv.63738703,d.dmQ

If this is true, I wonder if more people ended up applying thinking that there were more awards on the table.  If that's the case, then this news could be doubly bad in that there may be more applicants than past years with the same amount of available awards.  It would be a bit of a cruel joke on the part of NSF putting out a number like 2700 and then in actuality keeping the number of awards at 2000

There really isn't a place elsewhere for grad students to discuss this, so here's my two beans: I agree wholeheartedly with brownlee's notion. I think even if you live in Boston/SF the NSF shouldn't be a monetary reward. Whatever the school offers as a stipend should be enough to cover a reasonable cost of living. For example, the Stanford Chemistry stipend is actually ~2K more than the NSF award. 
 
I think this is how the NSF should structure the program: reduce the stipend amount and increase the amount of awardees. At this point students will already have been accepted to programs. If the stipend amount is less than the school's stipend (e.g. if the NSF award is 28,000 and Stanford is 34,000), then the school should match up to the difference. For many cities, this is way more than the regular student stipend. For example, the UT Austin stipend is 24k, and in this case the school wouldn't have to match up at all. This way, you get more awardees and schools bear part of the cost of having an essentially free grad student. One downside I can think of is that schools will admit smaller cohorts to reflect the increased burden on their budgets.
 
tl;dr: taxpayers shouldn't shoulder the cost of funding a grad student, and school endowments should be dipped into for this purpose.