Epigenetics

This is incredibly interesting! I wish I had known about Hertz as a G1, I would've taken the shot there. I think it's so prestigious that few people know those who have it or have it themselves, so everyone focuses their effort toward NSF.
The other problem is that NDSEG has allocated more money, but at least in prestige fields like biomedical research you're already guaranteed more money than the fellowship anyway, so the program covers the difference. So NDSEG has decreased its reach while providing benefits that only change it's appeal (like the travel benefits).
I will also say I applied for NDSEG literally on a whim, I think I edited my NSF statements up/down in a day to fit NDSEG and threw it in. My previous PI I worked for as a research tech basically told me she'd never heard of anyone getting NDSEG and throw it in but don't worry about it. I have grad classmates who has an exceptional resume and didn't apply for NDSEG cause he didn't see the point.
I really appreciate the context and find it very interesting to have this insight! Here's hoping I actually have any need to consider it haha.

I also got only two reviews:  E/E, E/E and I was offered an award for cognitive psychology as an undergraduate. 
The reviews are quite a bit more positive than I would have expected, and my jaw dropped at this line: "Your letters speak impossibly highly of your abilities, drive, and sense of purpose.  You are described as the best undergraduate that these faculty have had the pleasure of working with and everything in your application materials reflects that to be true."  While I'm honored, that seems a bit over the top >.<   
I'm currently 35, and my first attempts at community college right out of high school were quite unsuccessful for 6 years, with a GPA under 2.0.  My family and friends are quite shocked that I'm graduating, let alone being accepted to Yale and winning this award.  The moral: don't let failures from the past impede your successes in the future.  
ViewApplReview.pdf

I don’t understand what you’re saying.
Pretty much everyone is admitted to PhD programs without their own funding. In biology/biomedical programs, the program covers your funding for the first couple years. If you’re an applicant and get a fellowship, it relieves the funding burden of the program and can open up a spot for you if the limiting factor on admission was money. If a program can only afford 10 students but someone has a fellowship then they can admit another student. The fellowship substitutes for this program funding and beyond that it is usually the advisor who covers funding.
If youre starting or in the first year of a program, the program requires your advisor to be able to pay your stipend/benefits when you join their lab. Having a fellowship can make additional labs an option as well as you more stability in that process, as your funding is yours not your PI’s. 
As a second year grad student, fellowships are mostly about alleviating funding for your PI so he/she can spend that money on your experiments/resources. Fellowship are also great for showing you are able to obtain funding and help with later grants and appointments. NSF/NDSEG are much shorter apps than the NIH F31, and three years of funding means I don’t have to do this again until (presumably) postdoctoral fellowships.
I can’t speak for other fields but in biology/biomedical programs, fellowships are rarely/never about TA requirements or increasing your stipend. Those things are guaranteed and set in stone. But it alleviates funds for research and gives more stability to your work. 

Haha, thanks! But yeah we've already obsessed over it in some of the previous pages of this thread. Feels ages away. 

Second year grad.

No I'm a second year graduate student.

Woah, I feel like I haven't seen you in two years! Good luck with this cycle!

I can't imagine it's beyond Friday because the response deadline for other fellowships (and grad school for the undergrads here) is April 15th and we need to know before then to make a decision.

I can't imagine it's beyond Friday because the response deadline for other fellowships (and grad school for the undergrads here) is April 15th and we need to know before then to make a decision.

I would not be surprised if the date of release was not a Tuesday or a Friday but I would be very surprised if the results went up without the maintenance notification. I don't think the system allows them to upload results without taking the site offline. If they could, they wouldn't have been doing it that way for so many years. Perhaps this is why they are moving everything to a new page?
I know you guys are excited. I was practically foaming at the mouth this time last year but it's wishful thinking to expect something different than the past few years. Stop refreshing fastlane and go do your homework. ?? 

Long time user, but given my professional ties, I opted for anonymity. So I once had this dilemma (NDSEG v NSF). In my case, the choice was easy because the money was almost exactly the same. However, had the NDSEG paid $0-10k more, I still would have taken the NSF. Here is why.
The reputations/brand of fellowship programs, not unlike the universities you are applying to, have been built based on their history and performance. In terms of raw prestige, at least in science and engineering, nothing beats Hertz. If you turn down the NSF or the NDSEG for the Hertz, not a single professor will ask - "why did you turn down the NSF/NDSEG?" However, turning down the Hertz or the NSF for the NDSEG will get you stares from faculty. You have to remember that the Hertz and NSF were around when faculty were younglings and their perception of these programs has been shaped by that. This is not a great reason, but I did not want people to look at my CV and wonder - "hmmm .... everything looks good, but why didn't she get the NSF?"
So I got the NDSEG when ASEE was running the show, but it sounds like the new sheriff has not done anything to boost the profile of this program other than offer a couple thousand more dollars. I suspect the reason ASEE lost their contract was because they could not boost the profile of the fellowship. To their credit, their approach had merit . By maximizing the number of fellowships offered, you can boost the chances the tomorrow's superstars were once NDSEG fellows. However, the NDSEG (200 fellows per year) was tiny compared to the NSF (1,500-2,000 fellows per year) and could not compete with Hertz. I mean look at the people on this list - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertz_Foundation. This approach was simply never going to work unless DoD put more money into the program.
The new sheriff has tried to turn this into a Hertz-type fellowship (although it sounds like there is some skimming of funds too) - fewer awardees and additional benefits relative to the NSF. A run-of-the-mill defense contractor is simply not equipped to develop a highly regarded fellowship. This a matter of both vision and resources. Well, mostly about vision. Contractors are excellent at two things - winning DoD contracts and managing relationships to avoid losing contracts. Sadly, neither talent correlates well with actual performance. A foundation/academic non-profit with some experience in this area would have been the right steward. Boosting the stipend/benefits is definitely a good move. But then to go ahead and have what looked like a disastrous roll out as they did last year just quashed any chance of a quick brand reboot. To circle back to my point about reputation - as a poster above notes, some high profile professors criticized the running of the program publicly. Do you think any of them will recommend their students choose NDSEG over Hertz/NSF?
I think the DoD rightly has aspirations to compete with the Hertz and the NSF (and the Ford, Google, and other fellowships). But, as usual, it seems to think hiring a contractor and telling them what they want will fix the program. If you are thinking along reputation/brand name lines, the question you have to ask yourself is what you think the current steward of the program will be able to do for the program in 5-10 years - when people are looking at your CV. Given what a disaster the SMART program has turned into (completely different structure and contractor) and the recent management of the NDSEG, I am not terribly confident that it will rival the NSF in prestige anytime soon. I really think DoD should put more money behind the program if they are serious about competing with NSF/Hertz, but I suspect saying this to DoD is a great way to lose the bid for the contract. 
Any discussion of reputation and brand is fraught with biases. Mine are based on when I applied and what professors' impressions were. Things might have changed.  
Cliff Notes:
1. If you have any interest in academia/government, IMO Hertz >> NSF > IBM/Google/Ford > NDSEG >>>>>> SMART
2. If you have no interest in academia/government, just take whatever fellowship offers the most money. No one in industry cares very much about these signalling cues. 
3. External funding is awesome. Do not obsess too much about one over the other. But if you are, hope this helped.
4. Good luck!!! ?

Get over your own ego. You're misinterpreting MIT's rejection letter. I'm sure you have other good options. 

Oh, I got that email. When I first read it I thought they said that "we have more highly accomplished applicants than you." I was pretty upset for about an hour before I realized I misread it.
Still a little annoyed because during the interviews I qualified my responses with things like "if I have the opportunity to go here, _______" and just about every prof would stop me and say that everybody gets in. Guess not.  

Got my first rejection today. I thought the interview went well so a bit surprised. I really can't understand how they evaluate a candidate based the really informal conversations I have had at all four of my so called 'interviews'. Still waiting for an acceptance. Don't know if it is getting too late. 

My application journey ended today. Very likely will choose Tri-I. Thank you guys!

Didn't get into my dream program. Felt like the interview and weekend went really well, but turns out I was wrong. Any advice on getting over a place you were 100% ready to move to? It was my dream to go there for like the past six years so it's really killing me, but I'm trying to put it out of my mind because I have one more interview left.

Most of these programs know who they intend to admit before interviews. These interview processes aren't actual interviews, they're recruitment weekends. Also please don't give me nonsense about "there's only 4-6 spots" no, there's 4-6 final spots after people matriculate on average per year, but the programs admit many more people than that. I know some programs can be more narrow but that is not standard.

Does it bother anyone else that schools like to start out the career path options presentations without mentioning going for a career in academia?
Why the heck would you go to grad school for your PhD if that is not your goal. I'm sick and tired of that shit, you don't need a PhD for consulting, you don't need a PhD to become a science writer, you don't need a PhD for an industry job..
Schools are letting in too many people, at every interview I've been to, I've met tons of smart people, alternatively, I've also met people that make me think "Why are you here?". I hear stuff like: "I'll be picking a mentor and doing rotations with people whose personalities mesh with mine" are you kidding me? -- I'll be doing rotations with people who are going to challenge me and push me to the edge - I'll be going with my gut feelings on who I choose to work with and it will purely be based off of their science. 
There are TOO many PhD's awarded, have you seen the statistics on PhDs on welfare (not just Biology PhDs to be fair but all in the USA) something like 30 percent on welfare. 50 years ago there were about 600,000 Bio researchers, now there are 6-7 million, it's not sustainable.
Schools need to clean up their acts, Masters degrees need to be funded not paid for by students - that can solve two problems: replicability as MS degrees can be focused on reproducing data and not novel data generation; it can also give an avenue for all the people who want to do what I would call "soft" stuff with their degrees. PhDs should only be given and encouraged for those who have raw talent and can become peers with professors not every person who applies.
If science does not keep you awake a night and doesn't wake you up in the morning... good luck.
When I'm a PI one day, I will not even let a student who does not want to become a SCIENTIST anywhere near my lab, not even for a rotation. Some of the people on this website and IRL just make me cringe, somebody needs to scientifically slap them with the truth.
What are your thoughts? Are you getting your PhD without the intent of at least trying to become a PI or Lecturer? Why? 

I have worked for ~3 years as an undergrad in my lab. I applied to (and was accepted) into the program that my PI is in and is on the adcom for. I know I am most likely not going to stay at my undergrad institution for my PhD, but I'm unsure of the best way to address it with my PI in a way that doesn't torch our working relationship (I'm finishing my senior thesis, but the due date is after April 15th, so I'll still be in lab). Has anyone had a similar situation?

Just committed to Berkeley yesterday! Very excited and I can't wait to move out there!

Harvard Systems Biology admitted. 

Uhh first of all programs make admissions decisions before interviews, you're not stealing someone's spot. Second, if you weren't that interested in the programs you shouldn't have accepted the interviews, that's on you for wasting their money and time, there was a time to withdraw and it has long passed. Have fun bro.

I 100% agree. The majority of programs don't do a lot of weeding out based on the interviews at all. I had one interviewer straight up tell me that my credentials were impressive but he worried that I wouldn't actually matriculate in his program because most people from California use their school as a "backup". There was no pretense in evaluating me at all. I also had one interview where I kept trying to bring up my research but my interviewer preferred to talk about hers lol. Even when questions were asked, there wasn't always an expectation that I would have the complete answer. That being said, I have heard that some schools do a lot more weeding out in the interview stage (eg Stanford) so its possible some interviews will be more challenging than others. 
 
Schools know who their tough interviewers are though, and they definitely take this into account. At my last interview, the graduate students were telling us about how the program had to talk to certain faculty about their interviews to make them less harsh, and how if someone interviews 6 people and all of them get terrible evaluations, its pretty obvious that its not the quality of the students thats the issue. 
I think you're probably right in the second part, my PI basically trained me before my interviews to (a) explain my research clearly and succinctly and (b) look excited/enthusiastic because when I am nervous I can sometimes look blank/bored. That being said, some interviewers clearly were not trying to evaluate me in any way and just talked about their school or their research the whole time so that was a really easy experience...

Uhh first of all programs make admissions decisions before interviews, you're not stealing someone's spot. Second, if you weren't that interested in the programs you shouldn't have accepted the interviews, that's on you for wasting their money and time, there was a time to withdraw and it has long passed. Have fun bro.