DiscoTech

Hopefully, it means the DoD panel has not made a decision yet and all they have are first round reviews. I suppose the worst case is you did not make it past 1st Round Reviews. Would definitely call to make sure one way or the other.

The funny this is that they briefly put up a list of awardees and took it down within a matter of hours. Saw the cached version. Not sure what went into that. Given how pissed off the people ranked 70-200 were, they likely did want blow back from the other 3,000 who would have been livid to learn that a 200 sized fellowship class was cut to 69.

Yeah, I know the waiting is rough. One always wants to latch onto a glimmer of hope. I know. This happened to me last year. There are also good reasons for hope - people will decline if the NSF comes through. I think Epi's and Entangled's point is that you should push STI-TEC for information YOU need and not trust what STI-TEC puts out. They just want to stop the phone calls. If you need to know your status because of a particular deadline, push them hard to get an answer as to where you stand. Of the 2000+ application, 40-60% were cut during the SME review panel in early February. They have the information on hand.

This sounds right. I personally know 2 other people with offers made at 3pm ish on 3/29. I have not seen or heard about any offers since then. Also, Epi is right. Given that STI-TEC lied about funding cuts last year (a lie that made their client look bad, no less), I would not trust information from them. I too am counting on an NSF so yes, some hope for after our 4/15 deadline.

Second year grad.

Mine was ARO too. However, a friend in Aero also got the award too. Naively, I am assuming his was AFOSR. BTW, last year they did not send out rejection notifications to a lot (most?) people. Those ranked 69-200 got an e-mail saying there was not enough funding, but a lot of us outside the top 200 did not hear a peep. Had to call them.

This is terrible advice. @Zanelol is on point. Accept the offer at the deadline if you do not have funding elsewhere. You can always just not go if you are not feeling up to going in debt (the right choice IMO). However, at large research universities, it is not unusual to show up right before the fall semester and find a professor willing to take you on as a research assistant. The notifications for most funding instruments (grants from NSF and DoD) start in July and run till September. If a professor got lucky and went 3-for-3 on grants, they would be in a position to take on more graduate students starting in the fall. Again, this is a risky bet. But it could work out. If you decide to go into debt (and shouldn't have to in the sciences), keep it to a semester or two at the most. Professors will fund money for good students. If you can't find full funding after a year, you should leave with a Masters. Something about you and that particular graduate school is simply not working out if you have to keep paying for a PhD in science/engineering.

Would be interested in the answer to this too, although GRFP results are not out yet. I didn't apply for the GRFP last year because the stipend is essentially what I am getting now. However, after last year's application season (I applied for NDSEG only and got dinged), my advisor was incredulous that I would apply for the NDSEG and not the NSF. It was news to him that NDSEG offers more money and conference support (maybe this was not always true?). Regardless, he said the NSF is the "better opportunity" whatever that means. So why is there this bias against NDSEG?

Avoid USC like the plague. It is a shameless diploma mill that is unlikely to give you meaningful graduate training.

If you do not have a graduate degree of some kind, you will want to put your GPA on there. You can't really hide it because people will be looking for it. If you have 3+ years of solid work experience, you might consider omitting it then.

This is a very naive view of how hiring works. Do they care about the US News ranking of your school? No. But do they have a sense for which programs are a cut above others. Sure. A lot of companies, especially for their select openings (like within their research arms), do not bother actively recruiting candidates outside the top 4-5 schools. Unless you can totally blow away the competition with a world-beating CV, you are not going to get called in for an interview over the candidates these employers already met at campus events. With just an MS, that is a hard thing to do. At the interview stage and beyond, where you went to school matters much less. The trick is getting that interview. That said, I do not know that there is that much of a difference between Duke and NCSU. I'd look up placement data for their MS graduates. I suspect they are not terribly different.

Assuming OP's loan doesn't have a bonkers interest rate, the cost differential, spread over a 20-40 year career, is not all that much. As far as reputation goes, there is nothing to suggest NCSU is more highly regarded than Duke in ECE. Rankings from US News are garbage, but they are an indicator of program reputation. Duke > NCSU ever so slightly. All things being equal, I would choose Duke simply because many states in the US are putting their universities systems under financial strain to the point where they will continue to fall behind their private counterparts. Duke is likely the better long term bet.

Rankings are a dumb thing to factor into your thinking becauae for rankings that low (outside top 8-10) there is very little separating the schools. Rankings in a discipline are based on a reputation survey. In 2019, the difference between Duke and NCSU, in terms of the stupid reputation score, was 0.2 (3.7 v. 3.5). For meaningful data, go here - (http://profiles.asee.org) or here (https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/herd/2017/html/herd2017_dst_55.html).

I think people understand that mistakes happens. Just talk to the people at your home institution ASAP while can still find someone to fill your spot.

This might have been the problem with your application. Your replies are not actually responses. 1. All talk of effort and hard work is pointless. A quality fellowship application is a quality fellowship application. Does not matter how much time went into. 2. I never said anything about taking rejection well. My only point is that your future in academia is full of rejection (publications, fellowships, grants applications, etc...). People who lost it over one fellowship application probably don't stick around very long. But yeah, keep up the lousy attitude.