curiousD
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Everything posted by curiousD
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Not THE director (like top guy) but one under him, who deals with one field (btw, not mine). And how I know him is irrelevant. But now everyone should stop speculating because that's what's going on there. And it's not just us waiting. It's everyone. People waiting to hear about young investigator awards, profs who want their projects funded, etc etc.
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I don't know if this will make anyone feel better, but I just talked to a director at the NSF who told me that nothing about the budget has been finalized. Furthermore, all grants and awards that were to be anounced after January 1st 2009 have not been, because of the budget/stimulus mess. He says that any minute he expects to get finalized results and have masses of work to do in a very short timeframe. He suspects that the details concerning the budget will be hammered out anytime now, and he doesn't think it'll be more than a few more days. He said the entire NSF is in limbo, but that it does not mean anything bad is happening. It's purely bureaucratic issues between "the hill" and the NSF. He said basically all awards and grants should be "enhanced" this year, but he doesn't know by exactly how much until he gets word from "the hill". Anyway, I think we can be confident that there will be more awards and that we will know soon, as this came from someone high up in the NSF itself.
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Haha okay. Well, for your sake I hope that they weren't just testing scripts or something and that you were one of the finalized winners who thus got to see it. I can't decide whether or not it's a good thing I didn't get to see my review sheets yet (I missed the whole fiasco). I guess it's probably better.
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I'd like to emphasize something on this forum. Repeatedly, people have said things like the NSF fellowship is an "enormous amount of money." Let's have a reality check. It's NOT. To the US government, it's a fraction of a penny, figuratively speaking. Even to us, we could have taken a job that gives us 40K a year, and we'd have 120K after 3 years. Some of us could have had jobs right out of college that would make us 120K in one year. It's really not a lot of money, and it doesn't even come with government benefits. The fact is, yes, the government should judiciously hand out money in general, as it is comes from tax-payers like you and me. However, the fact that we're even having this whole tense conversation is a reflection of the fact that the US government (and I suppose by extention American voters) don't think it's very important to make an investment in the future via science. This is the great trajedy of the NSF GRFP. In many coutries, school is virtually free, or at the very least, extremely affordable to anyone, even if they have to take out a loan to finance the whole thing themselves. Education in America is incredibly expensive. There are not that many PhD candidates in the United States. I see no reason why the government couldn't sponsor almost all of them if they decided that it were a worthwhile investment for the future. There would be nothing wrong with having a special prestigious fellowship that one can still apply for that maybe pays a bit more money, but that doesn't mean everyone else should be left in the dust, making unfortunate choices concerning their education because lawmakers in America would rather keep reducing taxes for people who can comfortably afford to pay them, funding immoral and hopeless wars, and continuing to expand the gap between the rich and the poor. America needs broad restructuing of priorities and values. Funding the education of as many students as possible (which means yes, greatly increasing the budgets of the NSF, endowment for the arts etc, which receive such tiny bits of the federal budget in the first place it seems like hardly a stretch to do so without huge changes elsewhere) is just a piece of that puzzle. While I hope that we can all follow our hearts and gut instincts in deciding what to do with our lives, we should really remember these last few days and use it as a personal catalyst to help effect change so that students in the future can broadly do as well as they would be able to if they were citizens of other countries.
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If you go to that website, then log in, and then click on accept_award_step_1.jsp 0.3 kb Sat, 21 Feb 2009 10:16:06 GMT what do you guys get? if you click i accept the award do you then get Your request could not be completed due to the following reasons: * You don't have the appropriate permissions to access this module. Please contact the GRFP Administrator regarding your access rights.
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When you log in it says this Application Package Task List Application Package Optional Task List View/Print Application Download Request for Payment of GRE Subject Test Fee Check Application Package Status If you view the source for this page, does everyone's have this line: Does anyone understand why in the beginning of the line it says "welcome-applicants" and then afterwords "welcome fellows"??