owlpride

It might at some schools. In my discipline (math), anecdotal evidence suggests that MIT, Princeton and Stanford don't care about outside funding but Berkeley, Michigan and Austin do. I will spare you the plethora of stories I have heard about each, but I will elaborate on one example (let's take Berkeley) to show you what I consider anecdotal evidence. A friend of mine got the NSF as an undergraduate. He notified Berkeley, which had initially rejected him. Supposedly they told him that they couldn't change the admission decision for that year, but they'd be happy to let him transfer in later provided that he didn't touch the NSF money in the meantime. I met another graduate student at Berkeley who transferred in after failing her qualifying exams at another institution. She too had 3 years of outside support. (I assume that Berkeley would have been much more cautious to admit a drop-out of another program if they had to fund her.)

Now that I finally know where I am headed, I am trying to decide whether to put my NSF fellowship on reserve status for the first year. Pros of reserve: The first-year duties for departmental funding are lighter than the duties in later years. First-year students only hold office hours, which might be a valuable experience before I stand in front of a classroom later. Furthermore, the department gives a fellowship to all students for their first summer, which I would forfeit if I took the NSF money. I would also get to keep the full NSF as an "insurance policy" in case something happens later. (It would be easier to transfer to another program, or spend a semester visiting at a different institution.) Cons of reserve: I hear it's nice not to have additional duties in your first year because the transition to grad school is hard enough as it is. Plus I would be taking a pay cut at some point down the line. Currently department funding is barely below NSF funding, and with regular pay increases (mandated by the university) it will exceed NSF funding in 1-2 years. Opinions?

Received a fellowship. E/G, E/VG, VG/E. No publications, noted by all three reviewers. Two bumped down my Broader Impacts, one the Intellectual Merit.