fellowlearner

Same thing. I will be interning at MIT Lincoln Lab for the next two summers and would love to network! Feel free to PM me!

For the Columbia University thing, I would say yes, especially if they expressed interest in funding you earlier, but reach out to them to Columbia’s GEM point-of-contact to make sure. Congrats, by the way! In terms of the second question, that’s literally how I got my MIT Lincoln Lab offer. I wrote a post about how I reached out to recruiters and past GEM fellows on LinkedIn who work for the companies I wanted to be partnered with on page 4 of their forum I believe.

To answer your first question, it just means they have been considering your application. It does not mean that you have been selected. Once you have been selected by a employer, you will receive a notification on your dashboard that you have been selected. You can be matched and unmatched several times before an employer will decide to pick you, if they decide to do so since employers are not obligated to select applicants. To answer your second question, someone posted a "hack" to do this earlier. It's in the third post from the bottom of page 4 of this forum.

Yeah I wish we were given more of a definitive answer from NASA. They were my top choice and I would've love to have been selected by them and even got my app held by them twice, but I really do like the offer I got from MIT Lincoln Lab. Especially since I told them about NASA potentially not accepting people from my major and they pretty much just decided to take me on even after they already made final selections back in December. They do a lot of projects with NASA anyway, so it's not like I won't be doing something NASA-related.

I got the offer from MIT Lincoln Lab! I might accept it, but there’s this full-time job at NASA I’m applying for that I want to hear from. I might just accept the offer now and if I get the NASA offfer, I’ll probably accept that. I just don’t want to burn any bridges. Does anyone know if the offer is non-binding until I accept my grad school offer?

So apparently, one of the MIT Lincoln Lab researchers reached out to me since they liked my resume, even though they already selected all their GEM fellows, and now I have my first interview tomorrow to see if I would fit in their group. Wish me luck!

If you want, I can send you the contact info of the NASA people I talked to and see if they can unmatch you. You could also tell GEM. I emailed one of the reps and it seems they are aware of NASA's situation after I told them because I was unmatched from NASA a few days ago and rematched to another company right after. I also didn't an email.

Yeah they dropped me too, so it might be that they are probably not gonna do GEM this year, unless someone has gotten through the interview process. Also, got into my first grad school yesterday. Now just hoping to be with an employer I like.

Update: For anyone waiting on MIT Lincoln Lab that hasn't been contacted yet, it looks like they have already made most of their selections, including alternates. Reached out to them and they said decisions were made back in December and they are waiting for people to decline before moving onto alternates.

You can reach out to GEM, but GEM will contact all the schools you applied to and confirm everything themselves, even after February 1st. As long as at least three of the schools under the Applicant Self Report Status column say applied, you should be fine.

The email you got from GEM said that that notification means nothing unless you receive an offer letter or are contacted for an interview. Selected is the status you’d want to see. There is no place to accept the offer because that notification isn’t an offer. You get that notification every time a company looks at your application.

Yeah. That’s weird because that’s what they told me. They apparently met with their GEM person last week, so things might have changed. I talked to the people who head the program at Goddard, where a good portion of the interns last year were at, and they both said the same thing to me. Even the one advisor I reached out to emailed the same heads of the program and she replied back with the same response they did. They said they would let me know if anything changes, but it’s not looking good. If anyone wants to look at the emails I got, you can just DM me.

NASA was actually one of the places I talked to and after talking to them, it looks like they do not plan to accept any GEM fellows this year. If they do, there will be not be any positions in science and engineering this year, unless you're going to grad school for computer science or cybersecurity. Last year was actually NASA's first year back in GEM in 10 years, so they've been pretty spotty when it comes to GEM.

Hey everyone! Just wanted to say that I've been looking over this thread over the past few weeks and what jackdefellow7 said was definitely some great advice as I was successfully able to reach out to two of my top companies and have scheduled a meeting (not a formal interview) to talk with one of them in a few days. Hopefully this post won't be too long, but this is basically what I did. For privacy reasons, I'm going to keep the names of the companies I contacted private, but they are both nationally-known aerospace research facilities. First off, I finished my app back on Nov. 1st like everyone else and completely forgot that a large part of the fellowship is finding/being selected by an employer and working for that employer until at least once (in my case twice since I hope to do my masters). It actually wasn't until this thread that I saw that I remembered that companies outside of the top three you picked can select you, so I decided to use what jackdefellow7 said to make sure I got picked by one of my three choices, especially since I had prior internship experience with my top choice. Basically, I used my LinkedIn to reach out to a bunch of the 2021 GEM fellows who interned with my first choice. A list of the fellows, as well as where they interned and where they currently go to school, is already on the GEM website, so if there's a company you really want to work with, this is a good first option. A little less than half of them replied back and gave me a bunch of info, including the contact info of the GEM recruiters at my top choice. Decided to email the recruiters with my resume and asked if they had any groups I could join and they actually gave me a phone number for me to call. So I called the number and they said they would have their GEM point of contact review my application and go from there. Literally two or three days ago, I saw that my portal had changed. There was a notification that the company had started looking at my application and my employer status changed to held, so now I'm hoping they just decide to select me before their window to select me ends. In terms of my second choice company, I actually reached out to the director of the lab on LinkedIn and he gave me his email. I sent him my resume and he forwarded it to their GEM point-of-contact, who they also gave me the email of. I'm set to have a meeting with the point-of-contact soon to talk about my application. So yeah, that's basically what I did for anyone that really wanted a way to connect with their top choices. Feel free to DM me if you want to know which companies I talked to/some other pieces of advice that I decided to leave out.

From what I understand, the notifications on the eGEM dashboard (located where you would click the bell icon in the top right corner of the page) don’t really matter unless you get an email or call from that company. I even called GEM and they confirmed that that notification doesn’t matter unless the company contacts you, usually from outside the website, or you see an offer letter in the dashboard. I got the exact same message from MIT Lincoln Lab a few weeks ago and haven’t heard anything since. Also, I got the same email about the seminar too and from my understanding (and according to my friend who got the fellowship last year), it basically means that so long as you have applied to three schools by Jan. 15th and attend the seminar, you will most likely be receiving a GEM Fellowship, so long as you accept both the fellowship offer and the GEM Employer offer, if you receive one. At this point, we’re kind of at the mercy of the employers and if you get stuck with a company you really don’t like, it looks like you’d have to reject the fellowship altogether. Lastly, I’m pretty sure as long as you say you applied to three schools by Jan. 15th in the portal, you should be fine. I think they contact the reps at the schools to verify that you applied anyway, so it may not update in the portal for a while.