mocefacdargeht

With regard to your situation, I would guess they can only work with the information they have. That being said, only the people handing out the awards know for sure how they do it. If that post I quoted was accurate at the time, which is a big if, there is no way to know if it applies to us this season.

According to this from this post your chances should be better.

For 2017 I had W2 income from my undergrad and the summer, so I did contribute. I think if I get the NSF (unlikely), fellowships will be my only income in 2018 as I am currently a first year and am finishing a 1 year fellowship. Breaking it up like that would be nice!

I haven't seen anyone else mention this but one of the reasons I'm anxious to see if I got the award or not is to know whether or not I can contribute to my IRA this year, since it requires W-2 income. If I don't get it, I will be paid on an RA and be able to contribute right away, but if I do get it, I'll be paid by fellowship and have to open up a new taxable account to save. Maybe it's actually financially better for me to not get the award.

On topic: I am predicting Friday this week. Five of the last six years have been announced between the 29th and the 1st, and while the outlier early announcement last year corresponds to the same solicitation as this year, I think we're safely out of the "early" period and can expect to go back to the pattern of the previous 5 years. Hopefully there is a maintenance announcement in the next few hours to prove me wrong!

A nice reminder that people in STEM are not immune to irrational thought. If maintenance of debt costs less than return on investment, the rational thing to do is increase debt to increase investment. This "debt is always bad" mantra is a weird psychological trait was probably useful at some point in the evolution of our species, but should be called out as moralizing as it's not clear what you mean by "good thing". Also, the US uses a FIAT currency, and is the reserve currency of the world. National debt has absolutely nothing to do with "living within our means", of which I assume you are confusing it with household debt. The national debt can, and should, grow forever assuming you are in favor of things like retirement accounts and modest inflation. I know I'm making it worse but I hope all these economic and political posts (including mine) get deleted so we can get back to complex schemes for predicting the award announcement date.