AONomad

Best of luck to you all

Are they not picking up the phone when you call?

Another waitlist here, I did reach out but got a pretty vague response (that we’ll get a final decision  after 4/20), but haven’t heard since... thanks for your well wishes! 

Not a dumb question at all! I think you'd usually receive how much you asked for, unless it was very clear that you overestimated. Or if your program changed and the new one is cheaper, you'd have to ask them to adjust accordingly. Your amount can also be adjusted when you already start the program, if you find out you need to use less. It's always easy to go lower, they'll happily take back the money. It's more tricky to request a higher amount and approval is not guaranteed. 
I don't quite remember if there would be a separate email, but if your country has not been approved yet, you might not find out for a while. For example, the 2020 cohort never got to know the amounts we'd receive because we just kept getting deferred.

Accepted for China, but they say most likely will need to be rerouted to Taiwan

Accepted for China, but they say most likely will need to be rerouted to Taiwan

They kind of allowed us to defer, but not really. At first it was "you must leave by March 1st 2021, no matter what." I think that's the usual Boren guidelines. Then closer to the end of fall, they allowed us to defer our departure date to either summer or fall 2021. But in either case, we'd absolutely HAVE to come back to the US by December 31, 2021. Nobody would be able to stay into 2022. 
As mentioned above, they haven't actually told us if summer 2021 is an option. We're still waiting on that decision to come out. Haven't heard any updates since when we had to put in our deferral decisions in the fall.
So I think they'd be somewhat flexible, but don't expect no-strings-attached deferrals into the next academic year. You'd have to reapply.

well i am desperate so i called and they said there is a good chance notifications will go out today but no guarantees. they said if not today then tomorrow but good chance it will be today

Oooh yeah. Well they haven't been super active on twitter in the past few days/weeks so who knows if they'll say anything or if it will just be a surprise. I wonder if they tweet something like this every year. I know some people from the last cohort called Boren to ask when they'd be announcing, so if any of us get desperate enough that's another option lol

One of my friends got Boren last year (South Africa) but hasn't been given the green-light to leave yet. A couple weeks ago, she told me that Boren sent out emails and notified last year's recipients that they'd be updated on their country-specific program status on April 16th (Friday). I'm assuming that's when we'll hear back at the earliest since I don't think it would make much sense for them to notify the new cohort about their program statuses before the older cohort. But maybe that's not the case - fingers crossed for tomorrow!!!?

Okay, here are the announcement dates since 2015 I think:
2015: Tuesday April 21, 2015
2016: Monday April 18, 2016 
2017: Monday April 17, 2017
2018: Sometime during the third week of April 16-20th
2019: Monday April 15, 2019
2020: Wednesday April 15, 2020

Also, 41% acceptance rate for Fellows last year, pretty good!

@AONomad
I applied to Japan for Boren but also decided to try the Huayu Enrichment Scholarship (HES) for Taiwan, and according to the group I am in on Facebook, the Taiwanese government already approved entry for any HES recipients so I assume Boren will be the same. Good luck!

Patience is key! I am sure we will get good news soon. In the meanwhile, the NSEP Annual Report for 2020 was released a couple of weeks ago. Worth taking a look at, maybe that will help us during this wait!

April 15, 2020 was a Wednesday. According to my campus Boren Advisor, April 15 is a pretty reliable trend. I'm guessing the only reason it was the 17th in 2017 was because April 15th and 16th were weekend days, so it fell on the first weekday afterwards. So I still think it will be April 15 this year, or 16th at the latest. Could be wrong, but that's my guess.

I already deferred a year, I was supposed to start Fall 2020, but yeah otherwise that would probably be the way forward. We'll see! No use stressing about future things yet haha

I already deferred a year, I was supposed to start Fall 2020, but yeah otherwise that would probably be the way forward. We'll see! No use stressing about future things yet haha

I'm not the person you were replying to, but I also am an admitted SAIS student (for the Hopkins-Nanjing Center) who chose to defer for a year. They gave us all the option of deferring for 6 months, with the possibility of extending it another 6 months. A lot of people chose to defer and find work in the meantime. I'm not sure what their deferral policy will be like next year, but I imagine getting a job in a position relevant to your career should be a good enough reason for them to grant your deferral request, especially if covid is still affecting in-person classes in the Fall.

I think a lot of people who would have been applying to Boren (i.e. cared about foreign policy) wouldn't have wanted to work for Trump. So there were probably fewer people thinking about getting onto career tracks Boren has relation to.
Even though Trump had a decent level of support within government, the foreign policy field almost universally condemned him. Especially people abroad who had to deal with the consequences of his heavy-handed rhetoric.

Of course! You bring up a good question. I tried searching for that stat, but the applications by language is not available, just overall. In 2018, Scholars had a 25% Acceptance Rate and Fellows had a 34% Acceptance Rate.

"In 2020, the national nominating panel selected 119 Boren Fellows from 268 graduate applications and 217 Boren Scholars from 784 undergraduate applications."
So 27.6% for scholarships and 44.4% for fellowships in 2020. Hopefully the upwards trend continues!
 

Here are some quick stats:
 

I dug through old threads and found that two other recent acceptance rates were 24% and 34%. I think it was for 2017 and 2018 but I might be off by a year. So, not as cushy as 44% but hey, still relatively good chances.
As for whether more or fewer people are applying on account of covid... if I had to place a bet I'd say probably more than normal. Law school admissions are up an estimated 30%, med school an estimated 20%, MBAs also up but not sure about the percentage-- even though those are all programs that lead to improved earning potential, which isn't necessarily true for programs Boren students would be going into, I imagine a lot of people are also feeling revitalized to pursue government careers now that Trump is out of office.

Okay, thanks for the heads up! According to the fellowship statistics from last year, acceptance rate is really high (~44%), but is there any data on how many alternates there usually are?

Nice! I ended up deciding to go to the HNC after all. Here's to hoping they open those borders back up and the 14 day quarantine at travelers' expense becomes unnecessary lol. 

Whoaaaa that's awesome congrats