Since I was addicted to this forum last year, I thought I should contribute this year.
FYI: Last year the budget was tabled March 29th, and I got my letter in the mail (Montreal) on April 5th. My departement was notified the day before I got the letter.
Also, I initially won a PGS-D3, but got a letter informing me it was upgraded to a CDS-D3 on June 11th.
My stats were:
1 submitted 1st authored paper
3 published 2nd authored papers
3 refereed 1st authored conference presentations
3 non-refereed (2 1st authored, 1 second authored) conference presentations
My GPA for my 2 years of my masters was 4.0
Even is not technically taken into account, my GPA for my last 2 years of undergrad was 3.95
I had never won an NSERC scholarship prior to this (not even a summer student award)
This was the first time my application went beyond the university competition
I got accepted for the award during my first year of PhD at Mcgill (Biomedical Engineering)
I did my Masters degree at the University of Western Ontario (Physics)
I did my Undergraduate degree at the Universite de Moncton (Physics)