FooMan

Actually, I'm in computer science. : )

Really? I grossed 18k'sh this year (all from stipend) and had to pay taxes.

Right, I didn't mean simultaneously. I just meant you don't have to decline NSF to accept NDSEG but rather can postpone the NSF money until later (as glabki mentioned).

Why would you not have accepted NSF if you got NDSEG? You do know that you can do both right?

Didn't you just answer your own question? (3400)

I got NDSEG! Good luck to the rest of you.

If anything wouldn't releasing the results earlier lessen the number of phone calls? I imagine people are mostly calling to find out their results, so I'd think there'd be less calls if people already knew the winners. EDIT: Unless they're only planning to release a small fraction of the results today...they did this round stuff last year too and I didn't get my email until April 18th.

"Apparently the number of awards per discipline is a function of the number of applicants to that area" It's a function of more than that; I don't think the number of students interested in "CS - Theoretical Foundations" has decreased by 65% compared to 5 years ago. The number of awards to CS in general seems to be decreasing over the years. The NSF most likely prioritizes its money by research area, with the fields it considers higher priority getting higher budgets. Furthermore, I don't see how it can make sense that the percentiles compare you with all applicants. There are different panels that each evaluate the different research areas. How could they compare the rankings of some physics panel with that of some biomedical engineering panel? Any attempt to do so seems artificial.

If you look at the NSF Fellowship thread from 2006, it's fairly clear that the percentile ranges don't alone determine winning vs. HM vs. rejection. Top 7% seemed to be a universal win, but, perhaps depending on research area, it seems 79-93% can either be HM or a win, and the range below that can either be HM or nothing. Some subspecialties appear to have more awards allocated to them than others.

Last year was an exceptional case. Something went wrong over at their office and it caused a big delay (I didn't get my results emailed to me until April 18th). Given how close the rounds were last year and that they say the first round this year is April 2nd, I'm guessing everyone will hear back sometime next week (just my guess).

Isn't your percentile ranking a function of more than just your 3 reviews? I'm pretty sure it takes everything into account (reviews, GPA, recommendations, awards, publications, etc.).

Same place where your rating sheets are (http://www.asee.org/nsfratingsheets/ratingsheets). Under "General Information" it says your percentile. The text doesn't particularly stand out though; just read the second paragraph.

For future applicants, let me advise you to put key sentences of your essays in bold. After reviewing my rating sheets, there's one reviewer comment that seems to imply the reviewer overlooked an important sentence of my previous research essay. Don't let it happen to you!

http://ratings.asee.org/nsfratingsheets/ Your username is your NSF user ID (i.e. the number that starts with 100...). I couldn't tell you your password; it's a random string that's sent to you in the e-mail.

Ask the school? It's not like they're going to retract your offer if you forget to do it anyway -- if anything they'll just send you a reminder email at some point.