BioMedSciMed

ok, i'm sorry but I just have to get this out somewhere; and I'm sure none of you care but I think it will make me feel better to complain. I just found out that winning a GRFP is now officially my only chance to join the lab that's doing research I care about. I have 2 "back up" labs but they both are studying an entirely different topic... not a bad topic, and Its not that I don't want to be there but It's just not my favorite thing... and I just don't really want to work on it for 5 years. The only thing is that everyone else in my class is already chosing their labs and every day that goes by I feel like my "back-up labs" are becoming more aware that they are clearly not my first choice or else I would have chosen one of them by now. becasue... I know they're willing to take me and they know that I know that so every day that I don't officially join (IE sign our "official grad student-PI contract") I feel they're becoming more aware that I must not REALLY want to be there. Everybody knows that a graduate student is a huge investment and are they really going to want to make that investment in someone who they think isn't positively thrilled to be there??? And I know, I know, we have no right to complain, I'm proud to even be considered and I honestly think It would be the happiest day of my life if I get this fellowship. It will be the difference between me loving what I do vs. having to force myself to care... everyone knows grad students have to pull 16 hour days and I'm fine with that... but 16 hours feels a whole hell of a lot longer when you don't care about what you're working on. And the isn't the WHOLE POINT of the GRFP to give students the freedom of what they want to work on and now while I try to wait to see if I'm to be granted that freedom I'm actually jeopardizing the possiblity of getting into ANY lab. so what do I do? Sign the contract that straps me into a lab that isn't my first choice? What happens if I sign the contract and then actually do get the GRFP after it's too late to join the lab doing the research that I love? Do I not sign the contract and keep putting it off? The absolute and final deadline is June 6th but 90% of my class has already committed to a lab, so I'm worried that sooner or later my back-up labs are going to decide they're better off just waiting until they can get someone who actually wants to be there. and belieeeeeeeve me, I KNOW that I have no right to complain and I know it won't help anything and I appreciate very much the fact that we're still in the running.... and I know that they could just say "fine, nobody gets anything, we'll save it until next year" but I am at the point where I honestly can barely take it anymore and I just had to get my frustration out somewhere. The prospect of this continuing until june makes me feel like I'm going to puke. that is all. I'm going to go home where I can have a good cry in peace.

oh my gosh you guys- I get back on today and see that there are like 3 more pages since Friday and for a second I actually thought something of consequence had happened. Instead I see there's some loser who took the time to fake-announce his "winning" and the rest of you spent the weekend ripping apart someone who accidentally used the wrong word when calling the first guy an as#*ole. Although I personally take no offense at all by the usage, I agree that the word in question is objectionable to some and as such should probably be avoided, but let's try to keep the conversation on topic and maybe just drop this whole verbal-human-rights debate for the moment and just take it easy on one another for a few more days. I think we can all agree that this is stressful enough already.

... I'm scared to bother people. :oops:

Hi guys, I hate to be one of those people who says "I have a source" because I don't really- but I wrote someone who I am absolutely certain knows what's going on- and they said that although they were expecting to receive a final number of awards yesterday, (and I don't know whether that happened) that due to the the fact that the extra money is coming from multiple sources, and each of those sources wants the money to be awarded in a certain fashion, - whcih I don't completely understand, but suffice to say it's not going to be super quick- he said that it would be at least another week and more likely two before they knew who would be awarded. So in all honesty, the end is in sight, I have no clue how many awards are going to be given but I have a feeling it's not 10 or 20 becasue that certainly wouldn't take 2 weeks to select 15 awardees... anyway, I'm going to go bang my head into my desk for an hour or so and then probably head home to scream into a pillow for a bit. Hope everyone else is having a nice day!!

well... I don't think they had the money for SURE until everything is officially approved which I thought just happened yesterday. I think it's good becasue it shows that their intention was to treat the GRFP as a priority. Regardless of if the numbers are exactly right, I think at least this shows that it's not like they were intending of cutting the GRFP in favor of something else etc. etc.

it's from March 24th, 2009- so still quite current!

HI guys, I hate to say it but I think that PDF is a little old. I hope more than anything that it's correct, but when your use the google advanced search and restrict the results to only come up if they're under a week or a month old, it doesn't come up, but If you set the search results to find things up to a year old then it does come up. So it's not brand new I don't think but all I think this means is that it's between a month and a year old.

the stipend is like a regular salary- If you're the sort of person who would use your personal paycheck to fund your research then go you (I personally wouldn't, but my research could go about 3 days on the stipend I get so I don't really have to worry about that!) ! but no, I don't believe it's intended for such things. More to provide food and shelter and maybe buy you a computer or something if you need one. just whatever you'd do with a normal paycheck.

woah, woah, WOAH... NSF has a twitter??

hmm... to me it means that it's just a guess and if they're not right, I'm not going to call up and complain that I was promised there would be 500 more fellowships. I guess there's some wiggle room in the definition of "Off the record" then huh?

hahah, that's great. I didn't realize they had facebook in Sherwood Forest. wait... is that the right forest? anyway... does anyone have any more information? FYI I called yesterday and was gently prodding as usual, to see if they have any more infromaiton operator: although we honestly know nothing since we're just a contractor that NSF GRFP has hired - they make all the decisions- I do know that the extra time is so that they can try to decide where the stimulus package is being spent and if they were already sure that the GRFP wasn't going to get money from it, you would all know by now. Now how much of it is going to GRFP, I honestly can't speculate me: so... totally off the record, just me asking you, if you were a betting man and had to guess...; would you say there would be like... 5 or 30 or 200 or like...500 more fellowships? just a ballpark? operator- ::quiet laughter:: well, I really couldn't guess but it seems like an awful lot of work to do to hand out 5 more fellowships doesn't it? so there's some more information... really just information stating that although another day has passed, we appear to be just where we have been in days past and we'll be here for some time yet. so you humanities majors out there, anyone like Sartre's "Huis Clos"? Cause I'm really having a moment here. "l'enfer, c'est les autres" (AKA Friar Tuck:-)

no dude... I'm pretty sure it doesn't. I think I posted the link on a previous page but unless "congress approves NSF budget" is ambiguous in a way I don't understand, I'm pretty sure they actually received 125mil. Unless there can be some taking back of money afterward... I don't know. I was trying to say that same thing. I'm sorry... I've literally never looked at a government budget request before. I better not go into accounting or anything. and to blah; yeah, well the director of the GRFP is pretty much the director of the world to me right now. so still, way to go!

are you kidding?? you talked to the DIRECTOR of the the NSF GRFP!! wow... go you!! that's awesome. and your results are awesome and the outcome of all of this could, eventually... at some point... be awesome too.

now THAT makes sense. 292 sounds pretty good to me. Of course 700 sounds better.... but I don't think the 700 is just accounted for by a few people who didn't accept the award, I think it might be some of the 3bil.

all of this is from from NSF website: here's the money they planned on requesting for 2009 "Estimated Number of Awards: 900 to 1,600 new awards will be offered pending availability of funds. Anticipated Funding Amount: $36,450,000 to $64,800,000 for new fellowships in FY 2009 pending the availability of funds." http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2008/nsf08593/nsf08593.pdf here's the money they actually got Funding for GRF in FY 2009 increases by $28.6 million (nearly 30 percent) to $124.8 million. This will support an estimated 3,075 fellows, an increase of 700 over the FY 2008 level http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=111084 and then, as far as I can tell, three weeks after this, the stimulus package gave them another 3billion. I'm not saying that it means there are going to be zillions of additional fellowships but I am saying that as far as my inexperienced eyes can tell, the money IS there, and it appears that they planned on giving away 1,600 NEW fellowships if they got 64mil and they ended up getting twice that. so it appears to me (again, i'm not experienced in federal funding) that they ideally wanted to make 3075 NEW fellowship recipients in 2009.

yeah, It's from someone who called and was told that there are 200 people left in the limbo category.

is this including the money the GRFP is getting from the stimulus package? where on earth did you find that? I remember a statement from the director saying that a large portion of the 3bil would "go directly into the hands of students and researchers" or something like that but I haven't been able to find any estimate of exactly how much would go into GRFP- I'm actually pretty sure that that is what we're waiting on. The numbers you see above are how much they gave the NSF just for it's annual budget- well before the stimulus package was approved so I'm pretty sure they don't include any of the extra 3bil. - I mean, they couldn't because the stimulus package wasn't even voted on until 3 weeks later. right?

So, does anybody think that this budget approval is in addition to the 3 bil from the stimulus package?.... I mean... I think it is. I know that we don't know exactly how much of the stimulus will go to the grfp, but we do know that some of it will, and we know that they had already had a good budget increase from the previous year becasue pretty much the entire budget increase was approved- congress actually suggested areas where they should have asked for MORE money, (not the GRFP but still...) it just seems to me as though if their entire budget was increased and they got an additional 50% bump from the stimulus package, there isn't really a shortage of money flotaing around this year. And if we know that even prior to the stimulus package they were hoping to fund 3,075 fellows.... well... I know people will jump all over me for counting my chickens. But I think things don't look too terrible here to be honest.

It looks like the NSF got an additional $18,900,000 for the GRFP. IT was not as much as they asked for, but it's still something. This was also dated from February 4th and the stimulus bill wasn't passed until Feb 13th. And then I thought they got another 3bilion from the stimulus package. their original budget request was enough to support 3,075 fellows. and they've only awarded 950, and there are like 2000 of us? I don't believe that we'll ALL get funded but i find it really hard to belive all this holdup is for 10 or 15 extra fellowships when there's all that money to be accounted for. http://sefora.org/2008/12/17/house-appr ... f-request/ The Senate would provide the Administration

aww man! that sucks. I'm sorry.

ok... but I'm just curious why it says "fellow". if you do the same thing before loggin in, it refers to the applicant as an applicant, but after loggin and the HTML says fellow. I'm just wondering, Do we know for sure that it says fellow even for people who have already recieved their rejection letter? I know everyone is already agreed that it doesn't mean anything, and I know I'm like 2 weeks late on this but I would just like to know if anyone knows for sure that everyone's page says this.

sorry, I forgot to say; I called them and they said my application was still being considered for funding but I never got an email at all saying "yes", or "no" or "limbo"

Ok, if you are using internet explorer, go to the NSF GRFP homepage and log in. When you're logged in, go to the top of your browser and on the top righ hand side it says "page". If you click on "page" and then select "view source" it will display the HTML (sorry for re-explaining if you already knew how to do it, I just want to be sure we're looking at the same thing:-) and then the HTML should pop up in a new window, if you scroll down that window to the very bottom you should see "" written on a line of its own. do you see it?

yeah... I'm studying for an exam that I had not been able to focus on PRIOR to the announcements becasue... well the entire path of my career would be drastically changed if I were to be one of the lucky few... and now I'm in Limbo which really is nice but the stress of waiting may actually kill me. soooo... needless to say, the exam studying is still suffering.

darn. I really thought it was something for a second.