thel

No email here lol. Website says under eval still

I imagine they are just gearing up to add the next years application in a where you can still access the the 2020 one

I assume it was a lowest-bidder situation, but I have a friend who was managed by STI-TEC and she said that there was a semester where they were like 6 months behind on paying her tuition bill. Could be related

It seems like it gets punted to a new contractor who has no idea what's going on every couple of years. I assume they every reset means the loss of a bunch of knowledge about how the program should be run

To be fair, this is a new policy for us (started a couple years ago), some alumni started a fund for it specifically.

Some programs will give you extra money on top of the fellowship receiving external awards, which you may not find out until you have an offer in hand In my program's case, people can receive up to $5,000 a year extra, but it depends on how many other people receive national awards that year

I believe so

Plot twist, they don't even make the deadline and were just saying that it would be on Wednesday to keep people (relatively) sane

Same here...

It's all conjecture at this point, but the consensus seems to be that it was excluded on the first round of reviews

I wouldn't be surprised if it was actually earlier; they have likely just been told that, no matter what, people need to know by the 15th so they are echoing that in emails...

Same here 4/3 --> 4/7

That's nice to hear, there may still be hope ?

Yeah, if you get excluded on a first round it is much more likely to be some sort of a technicality (letter didn't go through, made a mistake on the form somewhere, etc.), than an actual deficiency in the application

I was once told by a mentor that these kind of numbers for someone who is early career can be treated as a red flag by reviewers since it is hard to meaningfully contribute to that many works (obviously I have no idea what your situation is though)

Same, my letter writers were contacted the day I submitted to resubmit (even though they were all submitted originally in November)

Doing the lord's work

Interesting, now we have had April updates from all three branches

I heard very similar things about the previous contractor (know someone who's tuition almost didn't get paid because they delayed so long), sounds like all of these contractors are not the greatest.

The original comment made me laugh pretty hard, ngl

It's unfortunate that we may never know what these dates mean, since they likely won't tell us. That being said, it's fun to wildly speculate... here's my guess: <= Dec 6th: you submitted the app Dec ~20th: you made it through the initial bureaucracy checks (GPA, completion, etc.), and was sent for review Feb ~20th: your review was one of the "top 30%" as ranked by reviewers, sent to DOD >= April 3: they are filling in the results from DOD as they come in (right now it just seems ARO are back) I would expect that once all of the branches are back is when we will get the email

Same here, 4/3 update updated from the February date, ARO Neuroscience

I am still getting "NSF Systems and Services Unavailable"...

Adding another datapoint: Application Period - (9/4/2019 - 12/6/2019) Discipline: Cognitive, Neural, And Behavioral Sciences Last Update:2/28/2020