mana_chique

That confused me a bit, too.  I emailed them and asked if conference poster presentations should be listed in the publications section, but that question was in an email with several questions, and they ignored that one.  (I have my posters on my CV, though.)  I've tried to ask a number of questions that I haven't gotten clear answers on, and found some bugs in their Survey Monkey web forms that they seem to have fixed now.  I called once, and the person who answered the phone sounded like a general receptionist/tech support who knew less about the NDSEG than I do.

Last year's was also a 3-page proposal, but it really is hard to find examples and/or tips for the application, because they've changed the requirements so much over the years, and NDSEG doesn't give application feedback the way NSF does. I applied last year as a first-year grad, didn't get it, gonna try again this year but yeah it's been hard to figure out what to improve upon.

I love how the cost per student went up so much that the number of awarded fellowships fell by close to a factor of 3. STI-TEC probably found create ways to line their pocket when raising the cost per student on DoD. New outreach programs? Social media department for $5M? If DoD ever audits these guys, I would love to read the report.

Just received the following email:
Dear 2018 NDSEG Fellowship Applicants,
 We are writing to you today to retract a part of our statement regarding the selection of the 2018 Fellowship class. In our email, we reported budget cuts as the basis for the number of fellowships awarded. We would like to provide clarification on the allocation of funding for the program.
We incorrectly reported that the National Defense Science & Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) program has experienced budget cuts; however, the Department of Defense (DoD) increased the spending on the National Defense Science & Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) fellowship program compared to the previous fiscal year. In an effort to ensure that the program remains competitive with similar fellowships, the Department made programmatic changes to the FY17 NDSEG program that increased the cost per student.  This increase in costs per fellow has, in turn, reduced the number of fellowships available. Moving forward, the Department intends to review the programmatic changes instituted during the FY17 fellowship class to properly balance the competitiveness of the program against the overall number of students that are trained in areas of defense relevance
We apologize for any confusion that our statement may have caused. We appreciate your understanding and your support of the program.

-The NDSEG Fellowship Team

This is so bullshit; for these types of programs feedback is important to help young scientists and engineers grow. Fine, they dont provide that. But I at least deserve a results email in a timely fashion.  Its so bullshit that I both called and emailed prior to 10 am this morning and still have no result despite the April 15th deadlines. This is how you make a generation of scientists pissed off for a lifetime at your company.

That's bullshit...

Dude... only 69?!??? That's crazy!

Got it! Email came at 9:42 AM Pacific.

Dude... only 69?!??? That's crazy!