Wallberg

I thought so too, but when there's no change in score whatsoever after improving most metrics and rewriting half the documents AND getting a past winner to check everything thoroughly, clearly there's some magic going on and I'd love to receive a little hint. Thanks for the kind words, but I feel like this game is all about what checkboxes you can tick, not what you can do and how good you are. Being in the top 10% is great but neither enough nor supported by any leftover documents for those who didn't get the grant. Additionally, when the acceptance rate is 25%-33% and you still don't make it, it looks rather bad, looking into the future 2-4-6 years. Congratulations to those who could make it, though. It's a great achievement and you're bound to go far!

Made an account just to vent about my results. Committee 198. 2 first author papers, a handful more non-first-author papers, a couple of research patents, 4.0 GPA, university research excellence grants (<5% acceptance rate among eligible selected applicants), multidisciplinary work that has very clear upside potential, etc. etc., I have no clue what could possibly be wrong with my application. Both scores in the low 40's, rank not even above 120/166, far from even the waitlist. This was my last chance, too. I'm still waiting for a provincial grant but I'm not exactly hopeful. I would like to believe the problem is how I wrote my proposal, but I got checked by a past winner who thoroughly checked and approved everything, and they're not releasing comments so it's hard to tell where the weaknesses are and how to improve them (though that's no longer an option), if that's even possible (I sent an email to request the comments as they suggested in the results letter at least). I'm especially worried about how much it will impact future prospects (post-doc and professorship). Looking at the profiles of young professors and of random postdocs in my and similar labs, they all have in common some form of government research grant awarded during their PhD and I have heard from the people I asked that these things matter a ton. While I'm at a good school, it's no Stanford (or UofT for that matter), so competition ought to be even worse at more interesting labs. I don't know what to do and I'm wondering if it's even worth completing my degree anymore.