Pauli

Ah, thanks 小豬. That means the hotel people either lied to me or are deceiving us! And awesome suggestion with seatguru.com!

@ ajcsh15, GarbageNerdUCF: Did you two already get your seat assignments for your flight to and from D.C.? I usually just show up to the airport to the airline counter and get my ticket with my ID (driver's license or passport) when I book through SATO, and then chance it with whatever seat they give me when I check-in since I tend to show up early if I haven't received my seat assignment yet. For the D.C. trip, I'm guessing most of us already have our seat assignments available since we're booking on a domestic carrier and got a seat with a couple weeks in advance. But last year, some of us didn't get seat assignments for our international flights, especially for overseas carriers. I think we can just call our SATO agent since they tend to have similar information to those airline agents?

So according to the hotel, we will be receiving three (3) food meal vouchers that are good for the restaurant inside the hotel: 1 dinner voucher for April 1 2 breakfast vouchers for April 1 and 2 The breakfast voucher for April 1 is pretty much useless since almost all of the non-local D.C. area fellows will be arriving after 11 AM. Ah, well. Also, I think Elena probably already sent out host country-specific e-mails regarding the upcoming pre-orientation to all the fellows within your host country program. Within that e-mail, you should be able to see the e-mail addresses of all the other fellows for that host country. it might be a good idea to copy all those e-mail addresses and send out a greeting e-mail to everyone else that is going to that host country with a quick intro and possible meet-up plans for a host country dinner outing for Day 2 on April 2.

You guys crack me up, lol. So is anyone coming into D.C. for the first time and taking the metro from the airport to the hotel? If so, be sure to bring some exact change. Oh man, the employees at all the metro station service windows I've been to told me they don't give out change for the automated ticket machines, so they couldn't break my $5 bill to make a less-than-$2 trip. And the stupid machines put credit all into those paper ticket cards. I ended up going to Dunkin' Dounts to buy a drink and getting change to catch the metro back to the airport. /end rant

Mine too. Operation: Cherry Blossoms Party commencing soon.

So the NSF EAPSI program is pretty major news to your university, so you may likely receive an e-mail from your department or college PR member to write a news blurb about you and also a photo. I know of some fellows last year such as myself receiving an e-mail some weeks before orientation, and if you haven't received one from your department or college, you may possibly receive one afterwards also. One suggestion that I would like to share is what past EAPSI fellows have done in previous years by taking their photo in front of one of the famed D.C. historical monuments (e.g., Lincoln memorial) and using it as their photo for the news blurb. Another suggestion that PR people really love is posing in that photo with a large flag from their university. I can share some examples for mine below, and you can catch some more from other previous fellows: http://engineering.tamu.edu/news/2012/03/30/computer-science-graduate-students-awarded-nsf-eapsi-fellowships http://www.cse.tamu.edu/news/items?id=2856 http://www.cs.utexas.edu/news-events/news/2012/utcs-alum-awarded-nsf-eapsi-fellowship

Ah, yes. I got this question from a fellow fellow (lol) recently, and I remember this session quite vividly. It's basically a group-wide activity which the NSF coordinators split everyone into their round tables (about 8 per table in a large banquet hall?) that they're already sitting at, and we discuss how to improve our abstracts and titles from our accepted proposals with our tablemates before we submit final versions to the NSF coordinators. Each table then sends one of their members to the microphone to tell the coordinators and everyone else in the room what their old and new titles were. That's what they did last year, at least. The session is primarily so that we can make it easier for external people (like non-expert government-funding policy-makers) to better understand our research projects in plain English. Some people had really long and complicated and difficult-to-understand titles, so this session made their titles surprisingly...more clear to everyone.

I can't seem to edit my orignal post anymore, CountingSeeds, but that should be plenty of time to meet up for group dinner fun. Details TBD.

@ ajcsh15 Hell yeah! Cherry blossoms party! Count me in.

Yeah, that message is something we can pretty much avoid since it's automated. I talked to SATO earlie this week about that message, and they said that my ticket will be finalized tomorrow or so.

Flight arrivals for Day 1 that I've seen so far. If your name is not listed below, feel free to share your arrival dates, and you can also PM your cell numbers to make it easier to coordinate. I have numbers for two thus far. Day 1 Arrivals Pauli: 12:10 PM @ Reagan japple: 11:30 AM @ Reagan GarbageNerdUCF: 1:54 PM @ Reagan ajcsh15: 2:30 PM @ Reagan dcfryxell: 3:30 PM @ Reagan For people arriving around noon-ish, we can rendezvous at Starbucks near the American Airlines check-in counter, since that area is very close to the entrance to the Metro National Airport Station that can take us to the hotel by taking the northbound yellow line to nearby Metro Judiciary Station (gotta love the democratic-sounding station names). Otherwise, we can scope out a bar, restaurant, or coffeeshop near the hotel after 3:00 PM check-in. And if you plan to sightsee on Day 1, totally do that instead of meeting up since we can always just meet up on Day 2 and not everyone gets to visit D.C. often. I'm sticking around the area though since I'm kinda sick of flying to D.C. at this point...

@ pastemonger The EAPSI coordinators are contacting the foreign agencies for each individual EAPSI fellow, so they're going through all 200-odd. The foreign agencies might just be a little slow. Just in case, locate the EAPSI Singapore handbook and contact the main coordinator either by e-mail or by phone for possible updates. @ ajcsh15 Metro line is relatively fast in DC (EDIT: Well, fast as in 20-30 minutes at worst case). For an American metro rail system, it's pretty effective in both terms of timeliness, speed, and coverage. And regarding the $1000+ airfare...lol.

Yeah, then your tuition is definitely waived as a TA. You should be good to go once you're officially accepted and your TA position is confirmed. Congrats!

Well, in-state tuition is also waived for both TAs and RAs as well. I actually was inaccurate about my previous post. What I should have said that TAs and RAs have their in- and out-of-state tuition waived, while student workers who are not Texas residents are able to be classified as in-state students and get their tuition waived depending on what kind of student worker job they have.

I'm a PhD at Texas A&M. To the best of my knowledge, your out-of-state tuition is only waived if you work for the university (e.g., TA, RA, student worker) or if you are on a fellowship. You absolutely should contact the financial aid office at TAMU to confirm; they are extremely helpful and respond very quickly, especially if you call or e-mail them.

Singapore fellows are receiving their official acceptances today. The Singapore program is providing about US$3000 for living expenses to EAPSI fellows. This is compared to the US$1000 for living expenses by the Taiwan program to EAPSI fellows last year. Now I'm starting to understand the cost of living expenses between Singapore and Taiwan...

I can give you the totals for EAPSI fellows from last year: Australia –20 China – 40 Japan – 65 Korea - 25 New Zealand – 15 Singapore – 15 Taiwan - 25 TOTAL - 205

Same here. Since you're also arriving early, hopefully we can have a Day 1 lunch. Yes, the cherry blossoms are very cool and they are definitely worth checking out. The ones in the area parks are really gorgeous. A bunch of EAPSI fellows arrived early and lingered around a bit, so they were able to drop off their luggage briefly while they grabbed a pre-check-in meal. Like CountingSeeds said, they have a room where they temporarily store luggage. I know how you feel; I canceled my Google interview after I received tentative acceptance. But chances are pretty good that all tentatively accepted EAPSI fellows will move on to the summer fellowship period. Totally. I think they're giving us dinner vouchers for Days 1 and 2, but we can opt to check out something else, and last year's fellows went to different bars after having dinner on Day 1 (we weren't provided vouchers last year).

How are people's flight plans so far? I'm arriving to D.C. at 12:10 pm from Reagan.

It looks like they're giving us dinner vouchers for the first and second days of pre-orientation, but we can either ditch those for something outside the hotel or have a post-dinner bar outing.

Pretty much. Your best bet would be to ask your internship to possibly wait until the beginning of April. I don't know if the sequester will affect the EAPSI program, but for a program that has been around for as long as EAPSI and spread out to many different partner organizations overseas, I speculate that they would give pretty decent advance notice if they were to shut down the EAPSI program for professional reasons. Last year, fellows were booked into single rooms, where everyone had their own room to themselves.

As a heads-up to people that haven't booked through SATO yet, here's some things that people might find extremely helpful: Since they work on government travel, you might find it helpful to use the NATO Phonetic Alphabet table to spell out your full name and e-mail address to the SATO representative booking your flight over the phone to make the booking process faster and more seamless: NATO Phonetic Alphabet: http://www.osric.com/chris/phonetic.html Additionally, since it's March and NSF hasn't had funding approved yet through the funding year, SATO can only book us with the more expensive refundable tickets. So I lied when I said that $700 should totally cover people now even over in the west coast. I'm flying out from Texas with a connecting flight from a non-hub to a hub city, and my flight cost $697.60. That's government contracting for you. This might mean that the flights may be higher for people further out west, but this happens quite a bit with NSF travel, so go ahead and accept the flight and then send an immediate message to Elena updating her on the flight cost if it goes over $700. Since the SATO reps handle all sorts of travel and may not have received the memo of the EAPSI fellow travels yet, they will ask if you want to book a car and hotel. Obviously say no, since you're expected to take a feeder shuttle from Dulles (IAD) to a connecting metro or directly to the metro from Reagan (DCA), and the program will be booking the hotel at the Hyatt for us. Be sure to remember your Located Number, since this number is needed to retrieve your itinerary if you need to make any changes. Hey gzahn, they're manually e-mailing all 200 people, so there's a chance that they're still making their rounds to people.

If our flights are confirmed and we finally make it to D.C. on April 1st, we should totally have a GradCafe EAPSI fellows dinner meet-up on the first day of arrival. I suspect that each host country program will branch out to do their own thing on the second day (e.g., the Japan program people went bar hopping, the New Zealand program people had dinner with the New Zealand ambassador, the Australia program people strangely went to TGI Friday's, the Taiwan program people had dinner with their EAPSI program alumnus), and everyone is checking out on the morning of the third day.

I've booked through SATO more times than I liked, so I can offer some feedback. My first piece of advice is to contact SATO pretty much ASAP. For the EAPSI program specifically, you will provide your preferred departure location and time frame, and the SATO representative will locate times with the government-contracted airlines that matches your preferences. It's pretty much like making arrangements with a travel agent, except the travel agent is specific to government-related travel. The NSF people will reasonably expect that you depart in the general vicinity of your current university, so for example it's okay to depart from a non-hub airport if that non-hub airport is the closest to your university. It should more or less be a reasonable location, so if a person attends college in, say, Georgia, and chooses a departure location from California, they're obviously not going to reimburse a vast majority of that cost. The $700 should be able to cover costs for even the west coast people if they call immediately, since the rates will get jacked up the closer to deadline. If it goes over, NSF should still be able to cover it with a sufficient reason on a case-by-case basis.

Yeah, this pending approval message is sent out to most, if not all, the host country participants. They still need a couple of weeks to coordinate with the host countries' corresponding government research divisions. IIRC, if they don't cancel your flight before your pre-orientation flight, then you're eventually officially approved during pre-orientation.