rufusjbuttlicker

Well, there's always that (astronomically low) potential that applicants will turn down and some of you may get awarded! I'm not banking on that myself, but its possible for some of us HM. My eyes are on NDSEG and NPSC ..

Officially changing my tune from earlier/above!!! Feeling better about NDSEG now LOL. Of course, no clue when we're hearing about this so won't worry as much.

And science grant awards are often a potluck! Better luck next year, I imagine you'll make do~

E/E, VG/VG, G/G Damn you, reviewer 3!!! Honorable Mention. NDSEG is next!!!

Or like opening a chocolate bar and hoping to get Willy Wonka's Golden Ticket.

Same position.

3AM, it says so.

What time is the email sent out?

*** Anxiety Intensifies ***

But now we'll be up all night expecting any little noise to be our YouTube video

Yep, it's just a lottery with a higher-than-average chance of success; really the best way to treat this whole thing. Shouldn't impact the day-to-day.

I was referring to EE/CS/CE majors, which is generally true; this concentration is not typically awarded the Ford IIRC? Or it's more uncommon from when I looked at previous awardees from the last 5 years. I didn't mean to imply any other connotation. Sorry if I offended you, I didn't mean to do that. :/

Funding in my department can be affected by the number of fellowships I apply for. While my funding situation is OK with GA/TA appointments, I am told to apply for as many as possible by the department chair; if I turn her down then I risk irritating her and potentially hurting myself. Academia is highly political; it is the nature of the beast. Also I had a full application package already ready from applying to earlier fellowships in the year (Microsoft, NSF, etc) that the chair was aware of, and thus told me to directly apply to this one. And on the other hand, it is also a matter of positioning. The main tenets of the fellowship is: While your ethnic background and discipline can be one that diversifies higher education by participating, that is not the only way. For example, I grew up in a majority-Hispanic, impoverished neighborhood (>90%) in a difficult state (NJ). So the majority of my formative years were spent, in many ways, as an outsider of the culture I was entrenched into. It is only when I got older and went to college did I understand how the pendulum of advantage really swings my way; this is a part of something I explained in my fellowship application. I do a lot of outreach in my old neighborhood to encourage college enrollment in STEM careers and I directly mentor and manage undergraduates of diverse backgrounds. I understand the need for differing perspectives and voice. I think it is mostly for these reasons that I got the honorable mention.

Rejected, but an honorable mention. I didn't expect much for two reasons: 1) Diversity fellowship! Being a white male, my chances were reduced even if I am a first generation academic 2) Computer science/computer engineering concentration! It's a banner year if even one of my kind is awarded the Ford! This is a useful CV line item all the same. Congratulations to everyone! I honestly don't even feel bad, happy for all of you

I haven't thought about this fellowship since I submitted it, and only starting this week have I begun reflecting on it and have been going absolutely stir crazy! Ugh. I don't feel I'm any less productive, I just find my mind wandering ...

I'm more excited for the NSF rather than the NDSEG; I felt like I had more opportunity to express myself in the NSF. The restrictions on the personal statement and the research plan for NDSEG made it very, very difficult to properly express my research! It was frustrating. However, I am very hopeful~~

This is what qualifies as "thrills" in graduate school....... can feel an adrenaline rush.

That's better than some alternatives, at least! Good work all the same. What's your discipline?

Just a bump on this for now. The NSF people are getting antsy; I want to believe some of us NDSEG are just more calm and collected but its probably just because we're a smaller group .

Don't think so. They will have constructed a wait list for each discipline that is separate from the HM and the rejections. So wait list people have agony until the 13th whereas the other two groups are made aware of their lot in life much earlier and can make their peace with it (thankfully.

Let me clear the deck for you guys: like all things in academia (as some of us know and the rest of you will find out ), getting something like this boils down to a random process in the end. Yes, you will rise above obvious terrible candidates; but by and large, most of us are very similar if not equally valued between tradeoffs on paper. So the selection is highly arbitrary and, if we analyzed it in depth, there are sure to be huge inconsistencies in ratings if we asked reviewers to look at us some days apart . Note that this also applies to other things in academics, like: 1) Graduate school acceptance 2) Conference/journal review 3) Grant proposals (also 10%, its like applying for the GRFP every year! Isn't that great?!) 4) Getting a faculty job 5) IS THERE COFFEE IN THE BREAK ROOM? etc etc. Here's something to keep in your mind once the reviews inevitably come in for our proposals: http://www.sigmod.org/publications/sigmod-record/0812/p100.open.cormode.pdf I am certain something from there will be applicable to some of us. I recently got hit with the Goldilocks thing myself in a conference review ("You have too many results. It is too dense. Reject.").

Yes, agreed. Curious to know if its by discipline

So it should tak 2~3 days to hear back about all of them? Or is Predoctoral finished sooner? CONGRATULATIONS to the people who got it!!!

It's basically the same timeline as NSF/NDSEG, so expect it latest 2nd week of April.

Question about Fulbright, hope you guys can answer it: If you're already enrolled in a doctoral program at a US university, can you apply for this? I can't seem to find any exact wording on their site/the internet that implies otherwise. Would really like to know, thanks!