Hi all,
I've been following the conversation for the last week or so to keep track of when the NSERC letters would arrive. It's funny, I didn't get anxious about it until I started reading this forum and everyone sounded so worried and nervous! So maybe it wasn't a good idea, but it was a bit addictive
Anyways, I keep reading a lot about the importance of papers, publications, etc, and thought I would throw in my two cents. I realize academia has this 'publish or perish' mindset (which I don't agree with, incidentally), but is the same true of NSERC scholarships necessarily? Has anyone been told that, or has it always been assume that your number of publications matter?
I attended the NSERC info session that they hold at each university last fall, before submitting my application. Most of it was useless (standard instructions that you can read for yourself on the website), but they did talk about selection criteria and what NSERC is looking for. There are the basic 30/50/20 PGS weightings that are posted on the website. What they said was that most applicants who pass through their university ranking system are very similar in the 30/50 categories (academic excellence and research ability potential), as far as can be gleaned from an application. Everybody pretty much excels in these categories. What distinguishes one applicant from another is that 20% - communication, interpersonal and leadership skills. So they hinted pretty strongly that this was the most important part to emphasize in your application.
So that's what I did and it seemed to do the trick, because compared to the publications, conferences, etc that have been listed in some posts (eg. by uwGradStudent), I've got squat!
Of course, I'm sure there are a lot of other important criteria at work here as to who gets accepted and who doesn't, but I do think people put too much stress on their publication numbers. (Or maybe I just fantasize about an academic world that doesn't measure integrity by quantity of papers...). Perhaps for the PDF this does matter, but I don't know much about that competition.
Anyways, sorry for those who didn't get accepted. I've been rejected many-a-time by NSERC, so I know how it feels. But if you do believe that you're doing good work and you enjoy it, then keep working hard at it, because it's still important regardless of whether some faceless committee somewhere decides to give you their endorsement! Best of luck in future work, everyone
