flanna

who wants to bet we'll crash the grad cafe site like last year? that was the WORST... fast lane down, waiting for emails to go out, and NO MESSAGE BOARD TO STALK!

Ah, I see that the first wave of "IT'S COMING THIS WEEKEND OMG OMG OMG" has come and gone I want another one to keep my days interesting. Life will be much less suspenseful when these dumb results are released...

oh no! Don't bring back the hope of more awards! I was making progress through the various stages of grief... That being said, you make a good point.

Maybe they have an automated program sending out the rejections well into the evening so that they don't get a deluge of emails/calls about them during working hours?

"all the results will go out today"... jk. Here's to a Tuesday that's going to be just as miserable as Monday!

I really hope so (I mean... I guess I'd rather an acceptance ). The fellowship waiting game is a highly efficient destroyer of productivity and I'm ready to move on!

I think we are waiting on rejections :-/ Assuming a 10 percent acceptance rate, we would expect with the 100 or so users on this thread to see 10 awards. Aren't we pretty close to that? Obviously an incredibly rough estimate, but I'm thinking there aren't too many more (if any) awards going out today.

It's pretty conceivable that various branches are sending out their acceptances separately. They may have to wait for the OK on funding from each branch separately before they can officially tell people they have awards, and given how crazy the budget has been lately I wouldn't be surprised if even the DOD is having to shuffle money around more than usual.

Let's hope we don't have a repeat of NSF results night where we crashed gradcafe...

Agreed. From what I understand of how the NDSEG fellowship works versus the NSF is that the NSF tends to be more about awarding the PERSON rather than the research. This means they strongly consider things like whether you went to HS in an area that traditionally sends very few students to graduate school, if you have minority status, etc. as part of the application. The research proposal is less about whether or not they are interested in funding that topic and more about whether or not you can choose a topic that fits your background and research lab, plan experiments, and intelligently hypothesize about where the research might lead. The emphasis is on funding the education of good scientists NOT about identifying new areas of research. The NDSEG also considers the person, but the emphasis is much, much more on training a particular type of scientist. The DOD is, on the whole, not interested in just funding science for the sake of science and progress in general (as the NSF is) but rather has an agenda of national security and defense. Consequently, they will fund outstanding students who are doing research in areas that they are currently funding (you can check the website to get synopsis of current research efforts) in the hope that these students will stay in those fields after graduation. The way the selection works is that committees similar to the NSF structure evaluate applicants and rank them based on intellectual merit. The highest ranked applicants are forwarded to the DOD, and from this pool the department chooses which outstanding students have projects they are interested in funding.

Why can't they post at a normal hour? Sheesh!! Sleep deprivation + rejection/destroyed hopes and dreams + misc. grad school angst equals sad, sad tomorrow :-(

Oh how I adore this message board.

YES! That is by far the most annoying thing.

Oh God, don't tell me this. I'm going to be tempted to start sleeping with my laptop open on my bedside table.

My week has consisted of: refreshing this forum, refreshing fastlane, and having a hard attack whenever I hear my email chime. At this point, I just want to find out and get all my hopes and dreams crushed so I can move on and GET BACK TO WORK!