otherss

After talking to people and my own reasoning, I decided to use an intellectual merit heading as how I could improve on this research by what I would take in grad school and other stuff instead of what will I have done or what the research says.

Yeah I think my broader impacts will be good (or I hope so at least). I def addresses both but I hope they're easy for the readers to discern (I didn't use headlines for both bi and im in the personal).

I wake up and this thread has exploded. Only 10 more hours! To address the earlier comments, I feel like my personal was way more polished than my research proposal, granted I wrote the proposal a couple weeks before the deadline. I actually had to scrap the one I was wanting to do due to feasibility and I wasn't able to send the newest proposal to my letter writers. I also feel like I didn't connect my proposal and personal enough (or at all). I won't go back and read it before the announcement happens. Oh well

I was able to login to mine just fine. Dang a 6am time...that's still reasonable for me (7pm) but I was hoping to sleep through most of the waiting period

Haha I can see the NSF being all, let's mess with these guys and make a pattern for no reason and if they ask we can say there's no pattern.

i have been working/thinking under this assumption. Like you said I'm not sure how true it is, but just knowing a little bit makes me rest easier at night.

Hey hey! Congrats!

Something else you might be able to consider is if your potential schools offer conditional acceptance so you can take the missing classes during your first semester (or first year). But I agree with @breadwinner. Try to take them beforehand if you can. It will be one less reason for them to reject you (if it comes down to it).

I suggest you talk to your school (either advisor, departmental head, or secretary) about this. There could be rules in place to prevent you from even having this option. If your school is funding you, then you may not be allowed to take an outside job/internship during the Fall or Spring semesters. Actually, you may not be able to take an outside job even if they aren't funding you (that's my brothers current situation). But as for the workload, I know full TA/RA-ships are for 20 hrs/wk anyway with a full course load. I don't see how this would be any different. I can't help you out on the second part of your question. That's more of a personal thing. Though I will say by doing this internship during the fall, you may be able to connect your classwork with the internship (which might help you understand better).

I believe if programs don't have a hard cap for the number of students they are allowed to accept, then they can overturn their decisions because you come in with a source of funding. If the programs have a hard cap then winning the GRFP won't help you out.

It's not necessarily a rejection. You could've very well have been waitlisted (which is by no means a rejection).

Yea it's my understanding that each group would be evaluated against their groups for their particular field (non-grad students vs other non-grad students, new grad students vs other new grad students, and 2nd year grad students vs other 2nd year grad students). I'd expect it to be the same next year, otherwise 2nd year grad students would have an advantage versus new grad students. It would be interesting to see if the majority of the graduate students would wait until their second year to re-apply if they didn't get it as non-grad students. While you would be strengthening your application, so would everyone else (and the awarding committee would be grading you harder as well). If I don't get it this year, I might apply as a new grad student so that I might have a little bit more freedom with the committee (even though I won't have any publications).

I am a social worker. I help run the after-school activities at the college and I teach life skills (relationships, empathy, safe sex practices, etc.) during the day. I also help out with community English classes and just pretty much do whatever. I really wanted to do environmental work but it hasn't worked out.

Working for the US Fish and Wildlife Service was a great experience for me. It also helped me to develop the skills that I couldn't pick up in most schools that could be useful when applying to permanent positions: car/atv/utv/heavy equipment maintenance, vocational-type skills, fire fighting, bird banding, etc. It also allowed me to become certified in some of these skills through the government. I was hired to work on the red-cockaded woodpecker (RCW) recovery project at the refuge. This meant using all of those skills previously mentioned to make sure all of the equipment was in working condition (and that I could fix it in the field when something happened), to modify the equipment used to better suit our needs, to assist in prescribed burns around our clusters, and to plan future actions using GIS. This last part was where I played a big. When I first arrived, the forester had just retired. Unfortunately, he was the only one using GIS on the refuge. Since I was just a temporary hire, the staff had to learn how to do GIS from me before I left. When I got there, my skills were average at best (but that was still more than they knew). I had to do a lot of experiments just to know how to work certain applications and what shapefiles represented what. It helped a lot that I knew the field-level specifics about all of the data (I even found some places that were previously recorded on GIS that the rest of the staff didn't know about such as archaeological sites). Towards the end of my time there, I was running models on the landcover types, ages, and understory to determine where future cluster placements should be, where immediate forestry actions needed to take place in order to remain complaint with the endangered species act, and where unknown clusters might be at. I was also fortunate enough to be around when the refuge had to update their comprehensive conservation plan, which meant that I did all of the maps for the plan. I consider it to be a quasi-published paper but I don't include it on my resume besides a line under job descriptions (it was accepted by the service and you can find it online). I am not in school right now, but I want to get a MS in landscape ecology and hopefully a PhD in landscape genetics. Both of those work with models looking at habitat-matrices and landscape genetics adds an animal component to landscape ecology. Ultimately I want to be able to manage land based on ecologically-sound theories and principles. Right now, I'm hoping to get into the University of Idaho, dept of Forest, Range, and Fire Sciences. I applied late (as in past the priority deadline), but there are a lot of professors working on landscape ecology.

Here's something I tell people who want to pursue non-academic careers such as me. Just as in ecology, it is best to be a generalist rather than a specialist. As a generalist, you have the potential to fill many different roles, whereas the specialist can fill maybe one or two. Pursue your career as a generalist for several years. Only then should you consider making yourself into a specialist. So by that advice, I would suggest taking a GIS class or two. Like I was telling SunWukong, GIS is a new field so there aren't a whole terrible lot of pure GIS technicians. From what I've noticed, those who do specialize in GIS end up working on the application/extension development side. Besides why hire a pure GIS technician when you can hire someone to do two jobs (unless there's a lot of GIS that has to be done). Another thing to keep in mind is that the problem with bona fide GIS technicians are that they may not be able to connect the GIS to the job, that is where you would have an advantage. You would know the material and you can make those connections. That's going to be the same for every field. Just to give you a quick story, for the national wildlife refuge I used to work at, we were having a hard time with an external application that connected to ArcGIS via a Microsoft Access personal database. We were on the phone with the developer for many weeks trying to tell him what we were wanting from this application. I believe we were wanting to include more informational fields for different landcover types (for both practical and theoretical purposes) so we can analyze that with the rest of the information. He didn't have the background knowledge of the field to understand what we were talking about even though he worked for an environmental consulting firm. While we were able to correct it in the end (I think), if he had some basic knowledge about the field, the problem would be resolved faster (and they could be making more money by working on a different contract instead of working with us). That being said, I'm all for learning new skills, especially when you're trying to find a job in the first place.