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.

Basically, there is no healthy reason to worry about the dates.

I would be careful about this, and about interpreting any data from that sheet strictly, just because there is likely a selection bias in who decides to fill out.

As far as I'm concerned, the only new info we will have is if someone talks to Sysplus today. Otherwise, there are plenty of other things more worth worrying about.

Honestly, there is no new information, and we have no real reason to believe that we can read these tea leaves-- compulsively checking this page is probably not healthy.

Another lurker here. I won NSF in 2018, and applied NDSEG the same year that the annoying "budget" issues resulted in less fellowships being awarded. I'm now finishing my MS degree, hoping to get PhD funding. I submitted ONR Mechanical (with BAA #N00014-20-S-B001) on Dec. 4, which is also when my app shows as last updated (12/4). Here is to hoping that the dates mean nothing!

You're making an awful lot of assumptions... STI-TEC has little or no influence on the number of awards given. At the same time, there is also no reason to conclude that criticizing the administration (STI-TEC) would hurt the program funding. There is a difference between them saying that criticizing the program is bad, and criticizing them is bad. Additionally, they have known of these issues for months and haven't addressed them. The one job that STI-TEC has is data management. They clearly failed at that. They have been doing data management for a while, and when that's your "core competency..." I personally have no pity for them, based upon their conduct. For example, they didn't even have their kickoff meeting for this fellowship until nearly December. They didn't even define criteria until Nov. 27th (~4 months after receiving the contract). Clearly, this contract isn't a priority for them.

I got my rejection email this morning, after having emailed and called multiple times on Friday. There is a difference between the funding being removed versus finding a different contractor to take care of this. STI-TEC has failed miserably.

Yeah, she clearly has little close affiliation with the people actually handling this...

I mean based on prev comments I made, NDSEGF component of STI-TEC is in Ohio. So the question is if Barb is really in Tulsa or Ohio. If Tulsa like the area code indicates, then yeah I'd bet she literally knows nothing more than us. She always refers us to the email address. So I'd bet she doesn't know anything. But, your're the one who talked to her on the phone. I don't know what her tone was. I can see why she would say no email==reject, or better phrasing, I could see how she would assume no email== no processed application.

Oh yeah, lets be clear-- for many of these defense contractors and SBIR grant-based companies, they rely on connections more than anything. Often the contracts they bid on were written with a scope such that they are nearly the only company allowed to bid. I will be contacting my reps, regardless of my results. This contract should still be with ASEE.