Rails111

I did #2 and #3 as well. Having easy-to-read essays and using personal stories to demonstrate what you learned and to grab attention are very important. I had asked people not in my field (biology, economics, engineering, sociology) to read my essays and make sure they all made sense (esp findings from previous research and logic in research proposal). Plus, my advisor told me over and over that nobody can effectively consume the information in writing if it's boring.

I don't think so. As someone said earlier, good applicants can come from anywhere. I'm from a very small liberal arts college (that i'm sure no one has ever heard of) and reviewers didn't knock me for it at all...plus, I know people who mentioned that they were from relatively unknown colleges and that reviewers looked upon it favorably.

I think your professors are mistaken, though there have been people who have received awards without publications. I had 1 publication, 1 submitted, and a bunch in prep. I also had around 4 presentations at national conferences I'm in my first year of grad school. Field: Psychology

You can send me your email and I'll send you my personal statement (which is where I wrote about the broader impacts)

how do we figure out our percentile rank?

I got an award in psychology! Anyone can feel free to message me and I'll send them my essays/review sheets Intellectual merit: Excellent, Excellent, Good Broader Impacts: Excellent, Excellent, Excellent

OMG i got it!!!!

For those of you who read last year's thread, do you remember the guy who got all the awardee names before NSF posted to the website? Did he figure out the "excel export" thing or was it more sophisticated than that?

lol, it was a joke. Notice the April 1st in there.

oops! nevermind. found it.

What is the URL for this site?

Thanks for posting. I read your essays -- I think your story and your theme is beautifully done.

egosumliber and iLikeTrees: I absolutely agree with both of you. egosumliber: I wish people would readily share their essays, but the truth is that many do not want to. I had contacted many (playing the probability game) and a bunch did email me back, but the majority said they felt uncomfortable giving their essays to someone they did not know. So the goal of this was to have some information rather than none (and to assume that selling yourself in the essays is incredibly important and will not be something that can necessarily be taught by this forum). iLikeTrees: yes, citations and number of service projects seem as though they do not play a major role, but both of these topics have been asked (extensively) in this thread (meaning that at least a handful of applicants were curious and that THEY thought it played some major role). I completely agree that the NSF is worth applying for no matter what - i learned a tremendous amount..so perhaps the reason I stated wasn't the best. I doubt anyone, however, can deny that winners and HM's will share commonalities and that these commonalities can be observed to SOME extent numerically. If i'm wrong, then i'm fine with that, but you never know unless you try. Yes, the value and the process IS more meaningful (but somewhat abstract / difficult to explain to future applicants without sharing the essay), so having *something* (anything) a little more concrete is better than a guessing game. And as I said before, SOME of those categories are used to address questions that applicants tend to have (i.e., dwell on), and not necessarily what the panelists look for. Again, you're right that panelists will not be counting service projects, but they will be noting the types of service projects... and so that people do not have the list explicitly what they have done in the past (which is what I assumed everyone would not want to do), they can symbolize it (to some extent) with a number and a brief description of the nature. Any more detail would probably be idealistic. Lastly, i completely agree that, "Good applicants can be anyone, come from any institution, or have any background as long as they show personal motivation and capacity to do good research." BUT my point is that some applicants do not realize this! Look at earlier posts and you'll see that some people say that they do not come from a tier 1 school and are therefore worried about that. OR they say that they think their GRE scores are not high enough, all the while not realizing that there are people with a 1000 still getting an award. The reason why it is not known is, in part, because winners are not making it explicit. So you may think that the people who will post will have these outrageous scores that will intimidate everyone, but rather, i think it will show a more complete picture and be able to illustrate your exact point that "good applicants can be anyone and come from anywhere."

Oh c'mon, lol, it would take you no longer than three minutes.

haha...in a way. I mean, I guess the point is to address many of the questions we have been trying to figure out in this forum. It's nice to take away at least some of the guesswork. I'm sure that people who do not get an award will be wondering WHY, and this may help. If only 10 of every 100 get an NSF, then that's a lot of rejections, of course. And, people next year will be looking at this forum (as we all did with the 2009 thread) and they'll be wondering if it's worth their time to apply / how high the bar is set. Some quantitative information (rather than qualitative/spectulative) would be nice...and i'm sure we would be able to spot commonalities across award winners.

I was thinking....it would be nice if people who get an award or HM this year posted their relevant stats on this forum. I feel like this would be incredibly helpful for those applying next year and for those of us who do not get awards. For example, people could list the award type (NSF GRFP, HM), demographics (level applying [i.e., senior, 1st year grad, 2nd year], gender, ethnicity, geographic region, field), intellectual merit (GPA, undergrad institution, grad institution, GRE score, # of publications, # of presentations), broader impacts (number of service related projects, type of service related projects), number of references, and number of citations in the research proposal. ...along with anything I forgot / any combination of the above. What do you all think?

yes - it can be used for anything school related

yeah...there's this little part of me that doesn't even want to find out.

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Washington-DC/National-Science-Foundation-Graduate-Research-Fellowship-Program/71182286186?ref=ts

"Steven" is right, sorry I was referring to citations, not reference letters (in psych we use APA formatting, which calls the bibliography, "references," hence my assumption/confusion). I had 3 reference letters - undergrad advisor, grad advisor, and undergrad prof who I told explicitly to comment on my broader impacts.

If people with 3 and 4 references have won, as they have, then it's prob save to assume that the *number* of references doesn't play a big role. What would be bad is if your experimental outcome/conclusions/method were based on assumptions and/or logic to which the validity was not cited. As for typos, i think it's important to keep in mind that in all three rounds, they only have 15 minutes to view an ENTIRE application. They are required to complete 4 applications per hour. Pretend you were in their shoes for just a second and consider the demand this places on attention...on the plus side, minor errors will likely not be perceived, on the minus side, panelists will miss whatever you do not make explicit and clear. That's really why my advisor (who had received the award when she was younger) stressed that it's critical to make the essays incredibly clear, and also fun to read.

True. I can't speak for any year other than 2009, but I know for sure that 2009 had the exact rules we did. I didn't apply in '09 because I heard about it the night before applications were due but I did spend some time looking at the instructions so I would know what to expect for 2010. Yeah, they're vague about references. They're vague about many things...I guess applicants need to discover these subtleties on their own.

I had 6. I also had the essays from previous winners - these are people I emailed asking for their essays after looking at http://www.nsfgrfp.o...nstitutions_m-t One had 4, one had 11, one had 6, one had 10, one had 3. These were all 2009 winners. Thanks for helping me procrastinate

Shrinking down your references (and ONLY your references) is absolutely fine. I spoke to 3 past panelists that said many winning applications did this. I had also contacted previous winners asking if they could send me their essays (again, almost all had references in teeny tiny font). One previous winner just included in-text references. For example (Blah1 & Blah2, 1995). I did the same and haven't been disqualified either. When you look at the NSF GRFP instructions, they only say "references," not the extent to which those references should be cited.

GRE's are only valid for 5 years