Rando416

The award email said that there were 4167 applicants this year.

Selected. It looks like everyone on this thread was crazy qualified and I have no idea how the DoD could even start to differentiate. If you didn't get it this year my best advice would be to not beat yourself up and try again. I realize that's easy for someone in my position to say, but I like to think being someone who took 4 years off between MS and PhD I have some perspective of things not going as planned. In the past I missed getting into the MS program of my dreams and feeling completely devastated. The same year I also missed NFS - not even an honorable mention. I ended up going to a different school for my MS, taking some time off, etc. and looking back now I can honestly I don't regret any of those decisions. My point is just that it's hard to predict what any of this means and I'm sure a lot of the people who didn't get it this year are going to have tons of success regardless. Hopefully there is some overlap between NSF and NDSEG winners so some of the waitlisted folks get the award. Also looking at the spreadsheet it seems that there were only only two applicants in my BAA (who filled out the spreadsheet anyway) so my guess would be that helped my chances quite a bit.