GoldenDog

The awardee list was posted on NDSEG's website, with 159 awardees.

From my selection email, the number of applicants was 7942 this year. Given that the number of awards is ~150-200 most years, you can imagine how competitive it must have been. I hope all who applied will bear this in mind. Wishing all of you good health and happiness.

For what it's worth, Rob Ross had discussed why it takes time for decisions to go out:

It would be super helpful if everyone sorts their statements in the drive into the selected/not-selected folders. Get to try again next year!

Not selected. I wouldn't be too hard on yourself, as alot of this can just be that the panel selection wasn't quite right, or the topic wasn't something they wanted to see this year. Will try again next year.

Sure; can you elaborate on goal versus objective?

Is there anythnig worth reading on this? I don't totally follow.

Care to elaborate or share some examples?

I could be down for that.

It's not clear to me if the did connection matters. Is there any reason to believe that it does?

That also sounds slightly true, but if that was totally the case then GPA/GRE etc would matter relatively little. I don't know how true that is there.

I think that in general, the way to win NSF is fairly different from winning NDSEG. NSF is much more transparent about their process and they are looking for specific things: broader impacts and intellectual merit and all that they encompass, diversity in a variety of forms (e.g. geographic), and other items. As a result of their process being more transparent, there are alot more tricks you have to know to totally play defense and prevent yourself from giving the reviewers an excuse for a rejection. NDSEG seems more cut and dry. They don't give you feedback, so the process if very opaque. They claim to have some selection criteria, but I don't know how strictly its used. I would be unsurprised if there were quota's and cutoffs based upon GPA and school. In other words, the fellowship is less holistic, which I think is unfortunate and ultimately not the best way of selecting students. A big problem with both fellowships is when students' advisors just write the research statement, or the writing is pulled from their Prof's research proposal. At least for NDSEG, this advantage is less unfair since there are just less tricks to be incorporated. However, I'm interested to hear how people wrote their applications. I was an NSF winner so maybe I'm just less familiar with this fellowship.

Yes, exactly my point. He could easily have even just gone with "I'm not sure when this will be sorted out" since the beginning of this month.

Eh. I think that one thing I've learned in graduate school so far is that speculation and unwarranted assumptions primarily lead to regret above all else. Unless there was something significant that changed, I'd still say he could have avoided making such statements. There is a reason that you see a lot of administrators hedge when asked questions.

You're not wrong, but at the same time he should have known better than to confidently state that everything would be done by the 15th. That is totally on him, regardless of the DOD.