Rails111
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Posts posted by Rails111
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Does anyone know if reviewers look down on applicants who are staying (or are proposing to stay) at the same institution from which they received their Bachelor degree? Looking through the winners (and HMs), I can't help but notice all of the awards that went to students at top schools. (Of course, students at top schools are often very well-qualified and many of those schools require grad students to apply for the GRFP so the proportion might be skewed.) I'm wondering if reviewers are more hesitant to give an award to a student at a smaller/less well-known school than to a student (with the same qualifications) at a large, well-known research institution. Hmm...
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.
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For those people that had publications listed in your application (especially people who received an award/HM), how many did you have and where did they come from? And what is your field?
I and it sounds like a few others got the shaft for not having any publications. When I mentioned this to a few professors, everybody seems pretty surprised and thinks it would be rare to have publications when you're in your 1st two years of grad school, but perhaps we've been under the wrong impression? I have presentations from my research experience, but my reviewers apparently thought that there should be journal publications. For those that got awards, did you have any publications?
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
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I am curious about what kind of broader impacts people wrote about. I am very active in my graduate school community, but I guess I wasn't specific enough about how I would educate the people. The reviewers had VERY kind things to say about my intellectual merit, but I only received a Fair BI score from all 3 of them. Anyway, I am definitely happy about the recognition I get with an HM, though money would have been nice too. And since this was my one and only shot to apply for NSF (I'm a 2nd year), I guess the fact that I did so will on the IM criteria gives me more confidence for applying to grants like NRSA, that are primarily based on those types of scores.
I dunno, I can't help but feel that the BI part of the essays is how well you can BS your way through things. I purposely wrote a little more broadly so that my personal essay wouldn't read like a list of how awesome I am. But I guess I should have gone in to more detail about other experiences too. The one comment that really set me off is that I didn't do any BI stuff in undergrad, which isn't true, but I chose not write about because I've already been out of undergrad for 4 years, and have done a lot of stuff since then. grrrrr.
Okay enough ranting, just curious what other people wrote about for BI... Thanks!
You can send me your email and I'll send you my personal statement (which is where I wrote about the broader impacts)
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how do we figure out our percentile rank?
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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
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OMG i got it!!!!
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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?
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hmmm I don't know if I believe that. Are you sure your friend wasn't joking? That would mean it could take up to 10 days and I think they want to get them up as soon as they can, because a lot of applicants need to know if they have funding before April 15th.
lol, it was a joke. Notice the April 1st in there.
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oops! nevermind. found it.
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omgomgomg
ok so last night while clicking around randomly, I went to the "award offers and HMs list" page. Remaining on the original page (i.e. where it says 2010 awardees not available yet), I clicked on "export to Excel". One heart attack later, I saw that it had loaded all the 2009 awardees and HMs into an Excel sheet.
BUT when I did the same thing just now, the excel page has been made blank!
...
ok that is all. [retreats back to lair]
What is the URL for this site?
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Some of you have expressed a desire to read previous winning essays. I won the NSF and NDSEG last year, my essays are at http://www.cs.illino...1/research.html
Enjoy. And good luck to you all.
Thanks for posting. I read your essays -- I think your story and your theme is beautifully done.
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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."
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I am waaaay to lazy for all that.
Oh c'mon, lol, it would take you no longer than three minutes.
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So basically post our applications to this forum?
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.
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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?
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Is the cost of education ($10,500) exclusively for tuition? For example, I already have a full tuition scholarship + stipend in addition to a one year fellowship through another NSF funded program... since my tuition is already covered by the school, can the cost of education be used to text books or a laptop if I needed one?
yes - it can be used for anything school related
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Can someone give me a link for this facebook page people keep talking about?
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"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.
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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.
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I don't remember when rules changed, but there weren't always the same guidelines or restrictions on essays. (For instance, the two-page limit for the proposal is a relatively new thing, if I recall correctly.) It's probably important to bear in mind that, in previous years, formatting references differently to save space may have been explicitly acceptable, but if it was acceptable this year as well, it certainly wasn't made obvious in the application instructions.
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.
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How many references did each person include in their proposal? Also, does anyone know how many references past winners had?
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
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As time goes on, and my anxiety about the GRFP grows, I find myself obsessing about a few things. First of all, when looking at winning example essays from previous years, I came across a lot of proposals that included the references in slightly smaller text than the required font. I chose also to shrink down my references by 1.5 and abbreviate some of the journal titles because the huge number of necessary references. Well....did anyone else do this? I wonder if it will influence my research proposal negatively. As far as I know, I did not get disqualified yet!
I also went through my essays and found a few terrible typos (Genus name not capitalized in one case, and a random extra period etc.). No one can know this, but how much do you think things like this matter? Did any one else happen to make silly errors that they didn't catch until it was too late? Oh the horror!
To save my pride, when I don't get the GRFP I am going to blame my wretched tyops and not my wretched research!
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.
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April cannot come soon enough!!
Just a question for you guys... if I took my GREs in August 2005 (did my master's, worked for a bit, now going back to school in the fall) and I wanted to apply for this fellowship or the NDSEG or whatever else NEXT fall, would I need to take my GREs again?? They would expire in August 2010, right? Is there any way around taking them again, if I wanted to apply for these fellowships?
thanks for all your help!
GRE's are only valid for 5 years
NSF GRFP 2009-2010
in The Bank
Posted
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.