krahill

As the time approaches, I've been losing more sleep over anticipating the award annoucements. To try and help ease my uncertainty, I have a question for anyone who is familiar with the American Psychological Association Graduate Student (APAGS)/Psi-Chi Junior Scientist Fellowship Grant. This grant is awarded to applicants who are planning to apply to NSF GRFP. In addition to getting some cash, winners also get feedback from reviewers based on NSF's broader impacts/intellectual merit criterion. I was awarded this back in September and got pretty great feedback from reviewers. So I beefed up my essay a little more and made sure to mention this award and its description in my application. According to APAGS, this is a small grant to help students in the beginning stages of their research, but the main goal of this award is to help applicants win an NSF GRFP grant. About 8-10 people get it each year. However, I'm not sure the number of people who apply, or how many of these winners go on to win the NSF GRFP. I'm also not sure exactly how NSF views this award or the impact it has on an application. Has anyone heard of a recipient of this award also winning the NSF GRFP? I'd just rather not get my hopes up if it really doesn't really increase an applicants chances by that much.

If you received an email from NDSEG congratulating you on your award and they didn't catch this mistake until AFTER you tried to turn in your paperwork, they most certainly owe you some special consideration or some formal apology. These awards can make or break plans for students grad careers especially if you are looking at schools with little to no funding. If they claim it really was an IT "glitch" on their website, then there may be other applicants who are in the same boat (anyone?) However, if this is an isolated case, they may have accidentally given the award before they were allowed to release the second round of acceptances? I don't mean to get your hopes up, just trying to throw out some possible explanations. You would think that since there are only 200 awards given out, it isn't too much to ask for the program team to double check the list of names once or twice before sending out emails. Has this happened to any other applicants?

That's terrible, I'm so sorry to hear that. I can't imagine how they managed to screw up that badly. Talk about a let down

Thanks! That was helpful. I guess it's just a matter of playing the waiting game at this point.

Question for anyone who might know: How does NDSEG view disabilities in terms of academics and GRE scores? I read somewhere that if you're not in the top 80th percentile academically, there's a good chance you won't be ranked high enough to be reviewed by the DoD. My disability is cognitive and related to a birth defect. My GRE scores are low and I have a relatively mediocre GPA. I expected to not even make it past this first round but did manage to recieve the "still being considered" email. However, I have 3 publications (2 in press, technically), have worked in 2 DoD laboratories, and have 5 awards (all research, none academic). What exactly does NDSEG weight more?