dendarii917

Eep, I'm sorry, it's the middle of the night and I can barely type straight. I definitely didn't mean to sound insincere, bc I'm not! I think the process is silly. And I know that's what I was telling myself when I expected to lose, and am reminding myself anyway now. This award is really not indicative of sole potential to do amazing research: we're all holding that potential, and we're all amazing to have applied. My award was in CS, amd since I'm female that means the bar was lower. My scores might have been lower than many who didnt get awards. That's weird and a little annoying, bc I won't know how I stacked up without the diversity angle. I'm still allowed to be aware it's a fairly arbitrary process, yes? Anyway, sorry if I stepped on toes!

Just got woken by phone beeping with the email. (From reading the last 10 pages, so glad I went to bed at 1am and missed the confusion from logins but no list, etc.) Scared to believe what email is telling my groggy brain, but... I seem to have gotten one!! Shocked and humbled and happy. Congrats to all the awardees and HMs! And remember for those who didn't - it's a rather arbitrary process, and you are all awesome!

The 400+ of us are proving too much for poor GradCafe. I'm starting to worry they'll wait until much closer till 5 AM this year. Maybe to make sure people find out from emails instead of the list online? Who knows. So annoying. Bedtime, with my phone set to beep on new emails...

OK, NSF. What's up with being slower than previous years? If you make me wait until 5AM like the maintenance message says, I will be even more sad, to not get to sleep between my rejection and work tomorrow....

Yes, I think this is definitely true, and is backed up by reading previous years' threads, where a higher-than-10% of regular posters seemed to win awards. Kinda sucks for those of us who don't, actually, because it's that little bit harder to remember just how hard it is to do. GradCafe can make it feel "normal" to win.

So that's nearly 3% of applicants? That's... really incredible.

Oh, heavens. I'd be dead by now. ;-)

LOL!! The thought has crossed my mind, too...

FastLane goes down at 11:00PM ET. The last two years it went back up (with the award and HM lists) at 1:00AM ET and 12:50AM ET respectively, with emails following around 20-30 minutes after that.

202 users currently active on this thread. In 2010 there were 12,000 applicants. That is an outrageous percentage of total applicants to achieve on a message board... EDIT: 218... At this curve, we'll bring GradCafe to its knees, and then who will we wait in eager anticipation with?

I honestly can't decide if I want to fast-forward the clock until at least 11pm.... or if I never want it to come because I actually just don't want to know.

Something tells me we're going to be answering this question all day. Previous pages of the thread will answer it too, but... 1.) Twice in 2009 (when there were 2 waves of awards), and in 2010, the announcements were made at 1:00 AM ET after FastLane went down for a pre-advertised "server maintenance" period at 11:00 PM ET the day before (a couple of hours before emails started going out and the spreadsheet went up on Fastlane). 2.) The second wave in 2009 and the 2010 awards were both on Tuesdays at 1:00 AM (i.e., late Monday night). [Yes, that was April 6 last year, but it was a Tuesday early-morning.] 3.) There is now a "server maintenance at 11:00PM ET tonight" message on FastLane. So yes, we are speculating with high confidence that it will be tonight.

Hey, currently there are 114 people on this thread and they give 2000 awards. We CAN all get great news! ;-)

I know, weird to think I'll wake up tomorrow and not have this thread to refresh constantly (at least, past the point where I know the outcomes for everyone - I'm cheering for all of us GradCafe addicts!). Next year is my last eligible, so I will be back, same place same time, only armed with more info on how to stress Broader Impacts in my essays...

It's an advisory on the main Fastlane page only, https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/index.jsp

This was the pattern twice in 2009 (both waves of awards) and in 2010, yes.

Ditto, you're right, we should spend our last 12+ hours of waiting as positively as possible! :-) It will be very awesome to tell my advisor _good_ news if I win. No one in my department has ever won one before.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE ohcrap, here we go. Suddenly I'm not sure I actually want to know...

Exactly. Imagine how we'd all feel if he'd said, "And wow, some applicants just stick out like miserably sore thumbs compared to the rest..."

Wow, thank you for posting that, that's incredibly helpful. Wish I'd read it six months ago! I am totally screwed on broader impacts. Ah well, there's always next year.

At least from the rhetoric on the Sunday talking heads shows this AM, it's not looking like a given that they'll reach a compromise at all, at least not without a temporary shutdown... In 2009 there was still budget "uncertainty", at least according to the NSF at the time (I don't remember when the stimulus actually passed, went into effect, etc., so not sure what "uncertainty" meant exactly), when they went ahead and did the first wave of awards. So that, plus the fact that when people called this week they were told "within a week", makes me pretty confident they don't have to wait until after whatever happens with the budget on April 8. That they can at the very least award a conservative number of fellowships (leaving room for a few tens of millions of dollars of cuts in whatever compromise is eventually reached), and tack on more later once things are settled. Since that's what they did in 2009, it seems likely that's what's coming early this week. But there's some chance they'll just award them all: none of the proposals currently floated by either side have huge NSF cuts (though they do have small ones).

This. By this time tomorrow, I hope to see a "server maintenance coming at 11pm" message up on Fastlane. I think there's almost no chance it will be overnight tonight, though. Of course, if the gov't shuts down, this might be the last weekend in awhile NSF employees are getting paid. Maybe they'll all work overtime this weekend... but I doubt it.

I suspect that even those numerical scores, though, are not the whole picture. I'm sure people with higher numerical scores get HMs while people with lower ones get fellowships. Not all the time, but I'm sure it happens. We're not behind the scenes, but there are lots and lots of reasons this could happen, the biggest being that NSF does have a mandate to ensure diversity across a variety of factors. (We could argue all day about whether that's ultimately a good thing or bad thing for science, and to be honest I could argue either side quite passionately, but the bottom line is that that's how Congress wants it). My point was really just that we're never going to have a "scientific" answer or understanding for why we end up in the bucket we do, because there are so many human factors, and that the inherent arbitrariness of the process is something to remember as consolation if you're disappointed in the outcome (and as humbling if you're thrilled with the outcome). Partly this is because it gets harder every year: they rank the undergrads against other undergrads, the 1st-year-grads against other 1st years, etc., b/c for example, no publications is a lot more acceptable for a senior in college than a 2nd-year PhD student, and they realize this. But also, I think this backs up the certain arbitrary nature of the process: it really depends a huge amount on your reviewer, who is a human and has all the associated biases, the diversity profile of the other applicants that year, etc etc. Which means that none of us should be putting too much personal stake in this! We should all be proud of ourselves just for slogging through the application, and sticking out grad school even though the pay is total crap and the hours are long, because of the contributions we want to make to the world. And in the meantime, we can keep obsessing about the spreadsheet mystery... though I tend to think that it doesn't mean much and it'll still be Tuesday at 1am most likely.

Yes, statistically the most likely outcome is a no-HM rejection. Will letting the fantasy of being a fellow play out in my head make it more painful if I get a rejection email, as is extremely likely to happen? Of course it will... for a little bit. That's a price I'm willing to pay for having been excited about it, though. And when/if that happens, I'll be sad and disappointed for a little bit, and then I'll remind myself of the following: 1.) My success in grad school will be determined by how hard I work, the quality of the research I do, and the quality of the people I get the privilege to learn from and publish with. The GRFP will ultimately not have too much impact on that. 2.) I learned a heck of a lot about proposal-writing from the application process. My application next year will be better. More importantly, since I plan to stay in academia, future NSF grant proposals of mine will be better because of what I learned this year from the GRFP. 3.) I will learn something from the rejection, too. Life in academia means having a thick skin: You will have conference papers you thought were groundbreaking rejected because one reviewer couldn't be bothered to read carefully and the review will state "doesn't address X" when in fact there's a whole section about X. You will get crappy evaluations from students who hated you no matter how hard you tried to help them. You will have your exciting, novel grant proposals rejected by the NSF, etc. over and over again, and meanwhile, see the guy who runs the lab down the hall who has never published anything that has advanced the state of the field, ever, bring in millions of dollars of funding because... lots of reasons. It's just the way it goes. I want to make it in academia because I love teaching, and the fact is that getting used to the rejection will be the hardest part for me. I value the opportunity to begin learning to shrug and move on. 4.) The process is hugely arbitrary. I spent much of yesterday paging through all the previous years' threads trying to find the exact announcement times, and I read pages of people posting their review scores and decisions. People with E/E, E/E, and E/VG get honorable mention. Someone in the same major field with VG/G, VG/VG, VG/VG will get a fellowship. Why? Maybe because the second person had harder reviewers, and the computer adjusts for whether a reviewer tends to grade harshly or not. Maybe the NSF needed more diversity in that field that year (be it gender, state representation, etc.), so pulled someone up who fit the criteria they need to satisfy their mission from Congress. There's always the chance you get screwed by some reviewer because he happens to hate your research area and thinks it's trendy, overfunded, and ultimately not going anywhere, because he just happens to research a competing solution. Or because he post-doc'ed with your advisor way back when and they hated one another. Academia is the most political place in the world. The point is, we'll never know. I'm not saying it's not a huge achievement to win, because it definitely is! But if I win, I'll remember how arbitrary it is, and how many equally- to better-qualified candidates got rejections. I'll be hugely proud of myself, but I'll also know that the same application in a different year, or with different reviews, might have had a different outcome. And I'll be humble and know I got lucky, too. And if I get rejected, I'll be reminding myself the same thing. So yes, the most likely outcome is a no-HM rejection. And yes, it would hurt less if I didn't get excited about it. But I'm still going to savor the excitement of that glimmer of a possibility anyway, because it IS exciting, and because I know that I'll walk away _better_ from this process either way the decision goes. *shrug*

In other news, a Mozilla Firefox "bug" that is. not. funny., especially since I did the following over the course of 30 minutes with a browser window I had open in the background of other things, thus not realizing that I'd committed the 'back-without-refresh' sin: 1) Go to https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/grfp/AwardeeList.do?method=loadAwardeeList 2) Click 'Export options: Excel' at the bottom of the (empty) 2011 awardee list displayed by default. Blank Excel sheet loads 3) From dropdown menu for 'Award Year', choose 2010 and click 'Search' 4) Scroll down to bottom of first page of 2010 list, and click 'Export options: Excel'. Excel spreadsheet with last year's awardees loads 5) Hit browser's "Back" button. You'll be back on the (empty) 2011 awardee list. 6) Without refreshing the page, click 'Export options: Excel' at the bottom. NON-BLANK Excel spreadsheet loads 7) Have heart attack. Search for name on list. Die with disappointment when name is not on list. 8) Realize that this is the 2010 list. Thank you, Firefox. I hate you. (IE does this correctly, as does FF if you're not an idiot and refresh the page first. Still. As I said, it was an old window and I didn't realize I'd loaded the 2010 list from it 30 minutes prior. Gah.)