bioinformaticsGirl

Check out the posts about NSF vs NDSEG or other threads along those lines

I heard back a few weeks ago, but I know it's on a rolling basis, so they've been sending out 1-2 new acceptances after each committee meeting

This is a good summary of the review process: https://www.nsf.gov/od/oia/presentations/lh/MRev_DOE_EERE1_26_10.pdf There are 5 different ratings you can get, which correspond to E/VG/G/F/P: Excellent Outstanding proposal in all respects; deserves highest priority for support Very Good High quality proposal in nearly all respects; should be supported if at all possible Good A quality proposal, worthy of support Fair Proposal lacking in one or more critical aspects; key issues need to be addressed Poor Proposal has serious deficiencies Other people on the forum said that you are actually given a raw score which is converted to the 5 categories listed above. Even if you get all E's, if you are on the lower end of the E category, your total "point" score can be less than someone who doesn't have all E's. I haven't seen anything to verify this, so it may or may not be true! However, according to their website, the reviews only make up part of the decision. The Program Officers have the final decsision and consider other "external factors" such as different approaches to significant research and education questions potential (with perhaps high risk) for transformational advances in a field capacity building in a new and promising research area achievement of special program objectives The Program Officers are recommended by NSF to support riskier proposals, and particularly noes that are different in some aspect to what has/is currently being funded.

it almost seems as if one of the reviewers put the wrong feedback. It really seems as if they should double check the feedback if one is clearly lower than the others

I'm not sure... I'm an undergrad, so I might have just put a random PhD Program that I was applying to. I don't have anything under "View Fellowship Status Details/Request Fellowship Status Change" nor do I see a button to change anything, but perhaps I need to accept the award before I can make any changes?

On the FastLane page, I see: Fellow Status: Awardee Fellowship Status: Awarded Organization: Harvard University What does "Organization" mean? Is it the university that is in charge of coordinating my fellowship?

Should you tell all universities you're still considering that you got NSF? Or only when you accept the offer? I wanted to let the two I'm still considering that I received the award so they can choose whether to accept someone off the wait list, but I'm not ready to commit 100% to any university yet... Also, I can't believe some people's proposals were returned without review because it was disease related! My proposal was exclusively about studying a particular disease, albeit looking at it from a different perspective.

Should you tell all universities you're still considering that you got NSF? Or only when you accept the offer? I wanted to let the two I'm still considering that I received the award so they can choose whether to accept someone off the wait list, but I'm not ready to commit 100% to any university yet...

I'm sorry to hear that :/ During one of my interviews, one of the professors gave me some really good advice when selecting a school. If you're interviewing at these schools, there isn't a wrong choice. They all have top notch research, and it doesn't really matter where you go, because you'll have the same opportunities no matter what. It definitely sucks to be rejected, but you seem like a capable person. Just remember you get to decide your own future.

Anyone hear back from Stanford BMI yet?

@Cal guy What type of Bioinformatics research are you interested in? I'm not very familiar with UNC's program, so I can't speak to that, but if you are interested in population genetics, epigenetics and gene expression, or biocircuits, UCLA is well regarded in those fields. There's also a $500+ Million challenge to help combat depression that just started the previous year. There are pretty exciting opportunities in precision medicine with crowd-sourced data, wearables, medical records, and mult-omics approaches. If you're interested in "Big Data/ML" in the Biosciences, the Institute for Quantitative and Computational Biosciences is very closely tied to the Bioinformatics PhD program. They have tons of seminars, classes, and professors who are developing ML methods for tackling new biological problems, so if you are all interested in that, UCLA would be a great fit!

I got mine last week, so yours should be coming soon!

I believe the first round of invites should come the Monday or Tuesday after the 2nd interview weekend

Not yet, so crossing my fingers!

It seems like SysBio's offers come over a few days, so don't give up hope yet!