kdilks

Leases tend to start on the 1st of the month, and lots of listings tend to go up 2 months in advance (because you have to give 2 months notice before moving out). Moving in August 1st would probably be a good idea. Even though classes start on September 3rd, there's orientation a week or two before that. I think lots of grad students in general live near 'Uptown', but more on the fringes, and not as much in the heart of Uptown along Lake St. There's express buses to campus along Hennepin/Lyndale during the semester on weekdays that takes the highway around downtown, and usually takes about 20-30 minutes. There's also a bunch of options for local buses that typically take 25-50 minutes (depending on traffic). You should be able to find a decent 1BR for less than $900. Mine is only $640, and I think the most expensive one I looked at was $820 (but it was also 3 blocks from Lake of the Isles and 4 blocks from Calhoun Square).

I believe you only have to give 2 months notice as to whether you want to continue your rental, so lots of stuff opens up on the first few days of the month for 2 months out. I came to look for housing in either April or May before I moved out here looking to start in August or September, and there just wasn't much available yet. Parking on campus is definitely not worth it. Some people try to bike year-round, and only take the bus on days when the roads are really bad. Ideally you'd want to live near an express/ 'limited stop' bus to campus.

Obviously you're expected to be working on research/trying to find an adviser/etc., but I think the only requirement laid out in the summer fellowship offer is that you continue to make the Twin Cities your primary residence for the full length of the summer.

http://www.vr.se/4.37eca2ee12a87a82021800045.html Interested Graduate Research Fellows are strongly encouraged to contact potential collaborators at Swedish Centers of Excellence. These include Berzelii Centers, Linnaeus Environments and Centers of Gender Excellence. Please follow the links to the right for more information on these host institutions. The Centers of Excellence are examples of institutions but other Swedish research groups can also host NSF Graduate Research Fellows.

I'm pretty sure what they're doing is against the terms of the NSF GRFP. The guide states "While on Tenure, Fellows are exempt from paying required tuition and fees normally charged to graduate students of similar academic standing", and I remember my department having to sign something saying that they would cover any tuition expenses beyond what was covered by the COE allowance.

You used to be able to accept both fellowships and use them in different years, but now you have to choose one or the other. http://www.nsf.gov/p...61/nsf12061.pdf They've only changed this rule within the past year, so there's no real precedent about which one is "better" to accept if you get both. After doing a quick comparison of the two, I would go with NSF, if given the choice. GRFP has more flexibility on when you can use it. You have to use NDSEG in one continuous 36 month block (you can take time off for internships, but you don't get paid by the fellowship then). For GRFP, you choose three 12 month blocks, and you can choose whether those 12 months start in April or September to make things line up nicely with summers that you do/don't have other funding sources available. Also, if you plan on continuing in academics, you're a lot more likely to be dealing with the NSF in the future, so it's good to have experience with them, what they look for in reports and proposals, etc. I believe NDSEG does pay slightly more, and might have more provisions than NSF for covering health care expenses, so that's also something to consider. It looks like both programs allow you to take on some teaching while under fellowship (usually a .25 assignment, or half of a regular TA), which is important if you have a second fellowship from your university.

There's probably going to be some confusion in the literature because they did change their policy last year, but then changed it back a few months later (presumably because it was a very unpopular change). You are still allowed to take on half of a regular TAship for pay during a fellowship year, but only for the sake of getting teaching experience, and only with approval from your adviser (ie, don't plan on doing this every fellowship year so you can get more money).

I wouldn't be surprised if they could release the results right now, if they wanted. They always intentionally delay releasing the results until end of March/beginning of April. This way, schools can't make offers based on whether or not you won a fellowship, but you're able to choose which offer you accept based on it. The only time people have gotten notifications past April 15th was the year they were waiting for Congress to approve the stimulus package, which would enable them to offer more fellowships than usual. And even then, only the people who would have normally gotten HM (but had a chance at getting a fellowship from the supplemental funding) were left waiting past April 15th.

False. The first half of that e-mail talks about the NRO, and then the second half says "We are also alerting you to the replacement of the $1,000 international travel award with a new international funding opportunity, to be announced later this year.".

Whittier isn't really a bad/unsafe neighborhood. It fits in with all the nice neighborhoods between Uptown and Downtown, but for whatever reason the city has it officially grouped with the neighborhoods on the opposite side of 35W where crime is more of an issue, which throws off the statistics some. Cedar-Riverside, Seward, Phillips, and North Minneapolis are far unsafer.

Info on the travel allowance, per some e-mail I got in September:

In your case, yes, but in general, you can't be sure. You can think of the reviews as being done in two stages. In the first stage, they use the scores from the first two reviewers to decide who is getting rejected, and who moves on to round two. If the two reviewers give the same person significantly different scores (when normalized against all the other scores they've given), then they have a third person give a review to determine whether or not you make round two. Then in round two, all remaining applications get one additional review, and then it's determined who gets awards, who gets HM, and who gets nothing. So if you have three reviews, it could mean that you made it to the second round, but it could also mean your first two scores were significantly different and a third reviewer's score was needed to decide that you didn't make the second round. Since you had four reviewers, I would assume that you needed an additional review in the first round, and still made it to the second round.

You'd probably need to talk to your program coordinator about that.

Unless they've changed something in the last year, you can use NSF for any 3 out of the next 5 years. I deferred my first year of NSF because I had a similar fellowship from my graduate school (for 3 out of the next 5 years) that did require I use it in my first year.

Don't worry about it. It's a common thing for people that get the award when they apply as an undergrad, and they don't bother changing it. In fact, I'm the only person I know that got the award as an undergrad that's actually going to the school listed on the NSF website. And that's only because I put down my #2 choice to try jinx the system .