NSF GRFP 2010-2011

[smarmie]

I got the e-mail around 2:14, after I'd gone to bed. Nice thing to wake up to, since I was sure I must have dreamed getting the award last night!

haha I thought the same thing. I logged into fastlane and saw that it "Welcome Fellows." Freaked out and had the hardest time sleeping. I kept thinking to myself, "if this is a dream I'm gonna be so fucking pissed!" It was nice to wake up in the morning, check my inbox and find out that it was for real.

[smarmie]

Don't worry about it. It's a common thing for people that get the award when they apply as an undergrad, and they don't bother changing it. In fact, I'm the only person I know that got the award as an undergrad that's actually going to the school listed on the NSF website. And that's only because I put down my #2 choice to try jinx the system .

Related question: Can you change both your school choice AND program choice? I was awarded an NSF in Cultural Anthropology and listed University of Oregon as my school but I will most likely be attending UC Davis' Geography program (besides really liking the program, it was my only acceptance this year.)

The statement of purpose for Geography was exactly the same as the the SoP that I wrote for Cultural Anthropology, and both were modeled after my NSF project proposal.

[kdilks]

Related question: Can you change both your school choice AND program choice? I was awarded an NSF in Cultural Anthropology and listed University of Oregon as my school but I will most likely be attending UC Davis' Geography program (besides really liking the program, it was my only acceptance this year.)

The statement of purpose for Geography was exactly the same as the the SoP that I wrote for Cultural Anthropology, and both were modeled after my NSF project proposal.

You'd probably need to talk to your program coordinator about that.

[psyentist4good]

I feel truly honored to have gotten an Honorable Mention.

Thanks to all of you who posted tips and info to help strengthen our apps for next year.

I'm inspired to try again!

[KineticKid]

Last year I got E/VG VG/G with glowing comments, especially about my broader impacts, but no HM, no award, not even a third review. What mild criticism I did get, much of which I had to read between the lines, I addressed very carefully this year. I also STUDIED again for the second time, after a year of contemplation fine tuned everything, added better letter writers, etc. 4.0 GPA both grad and undergrad, 1570 GRE (last year when it mattered), yes, only one publication, but half a dozen conference presentations. Once again, no HM, no award, no nothing. So yeah, I'm going to have to say there's some arbitrariness, at least to preserve what little self-esteem I have left today.

I was thinking about this earlier tonight: Since different committees judge different groups of applicants, perhaps the "arbitrariness" comes from the fact that each group might judge differently? That is, perhaps it's useless to compare a math person's application to that of a computer science person since the different committees might have their own merit criteria?

Re: GRE scores.

I was totally disappointed that they didn't look at GRE scores this year, too. I have the same general GRE score as you (1570) and a great physics GRE score, too. In fact, I was counting on my GRE scores to "offset" my less-than-perfect GPA (I still graduated with honors...but I definitely didn't get a 4.0).

[jendoly]

Honestly, I think it depends 100% on your reviewers. I had three reviewers last year (but didn't get an HM...hmm), and their biggest critique was that they didn't think it was feasible to get access to the facilities I mentioned in my proposal (though I have since discovered that I totally could have done it, grr). They also hilariously contradicted each other - one raved about my BIs/outreach, and one thought it was terrible. I actually laughed at how bipolar the reviews seemed (despite feeling terribly crappy about not getting it). And that was that. My friend got an HM with his only critique being that he said he was going to continue on at his current university and the reviewer thought he should aim for a better school in his field. Ouch.

Edited April 6, 2011 by jendoly

[Eigen]

Absolutely. Last year, I received an HM for essays that I wrote with no feedback. This year, I had professors and previous awardees galore provide advice and suggest improvements to my application. In addition, I addressed all the shortcomings mentioned in my reviews. This time, I did not receive even HM status.

Very depressing. Makes me wonder if I should bother fine-tuning my application next year.

Keep in mind that each successive year brings much "harsher" reviews, as well as competition. You can get an HM your first year, have significant improvements on it for the next year and not "move up", because you're competing for a different pool of awards, with different expectations of the applicants. The panels expect much less of undergrad applicants than they do of first year applicants, who in turn are less severely graded than second year applicants.

It's more about how much more preliminary data you have to add to your proposal (for IM) and how much you've done as far as reaching out to the community (for BI) once you get into the grad school application years, from my understanding. If you're saying you want to work with underprivileged youth in your city, but you haven't over the last year, that can bump you down from E to VG (from the reviewer sheet a few pages back) for example.

That said, I think the process is quite arbitrary, and from talking to other prof's seems to distinctly favor some subfields over others.

Edited April 6, 2011 by Eigen

[Cicero]

the link now appears on my log in page to view/print reviews, but when I download and open it, its not readable...just a bunch of symbols and formatting code. Is anyone else having this problem?

[Bruin123]

the link now appears on my log in page to view/print reviews, but when I download and open it, its not readable...just a bunch of symbols and formatting code. Is anyone else having this problem?

Try it again, mine was doing the same thing, but they're now up.

[Cicero]

Try it again, mine was doing the same thing, but they're now up.

Hrm, mine are still screwed up. By the way, does yours download as a .do file and open in excel?

[Bruin123]

Got my rating sheets.

VG/VG, VG/VG, VG/VG yielded me an honorable mention. Only one reviewer actually included criticisms (completely constructive, not destructive, which is nice to my ego). Basically said I need to demonstrate how I intend to publish my research (because I haven't yet, only presentations), integrate education with research, broaden opportunities, and up the diversity. Those are fair assessments in my book.

While it's great to see mostly nice things said, it would be nice to know why I got VG instead of E from the other two reviewers. Oh well, I would say there's always next year, but I'm a second year grad student. At least I feel honored by the HM.

How did everyone else's rating sheets turn out?

[Bruin123]

Hrm, mine are still screwed up. By the way, does yours download as a .do file and open in excel?

Nope, it opens a .pdf in another tab of my browser.

[Joesh]

Got my rating sheets.

VG/VG, VG/VG, VG/VG yielded me an honorable mention. Only one reviewer actually included criticisms (completely constructive, not destructive, which is nice to my ego). Basically said I need to demonstrate how I intend to publish my research (because I haven't yet, only presentations), integrate education with research, broaden opportunities, and up the diversity. Those are fair assessments in my book.

While it's great to see mostly nice things said, it would be nice to know why I got VG instead of E from the other two reviewers. Oh well, I would say there's always next year, but I'm a second year grad student. At least I feel honored by the HM.

How did everyone else's rating sheets turn out?

E/E VG/E E/E got me an award. No criticism from the VG award.

[KineticKid]

Got my rating sheets.

VG/VG, VG/VG, VG/VG yielded me an honorable mention. Only one reviewer actually included criticisms (completely constructive, not destructive, which is nice to my ego). Basically said I need to demonstrate how I intend to publish my research (because I haven't yet, only presentations), integrate education with research, broaden opportunities, and up the diversity. Those are fair assessments in my book.

While it's great to see mostly nice things said, it would be nice to know why I got VG instead of E from the other two reviewers. Oh well, I would say there's always next year, but I'm a second year grad student. At least I feel honored by the HM.

How did everyone else's rating sheets turn out?

First Review: Very Good / Excellent

Second Review: Excellent / Excellent

Third Review: Very Good / Excellent

[jendoly]

oh my God, they're in LaTeX this year! (further comments once I read them)

[anotherflunky]

Received fellowship:

VG/VG

VG/VG

E/E

E/E was nothing but glowing praise. 1st VG/VG was also a lot of strong praise, but no criticism or explanation for not getting Es. 2nd VG/VG just blandly repeated my experiences with no assessment of them whatsoever. These reviews are surprisingly useless. I'm guessing I just had guys that rarely hand out Es. They liked my writing skills and international experience especially.

My "qualifications": Senior (overrepresented male), 3.9+ GPA, top 5 university in my field (electrical engineering), 1.5 years of research experience, including a semester in Germany (no pubs/conferences), lots of engineering/science projects that had been demonstrated to the public, helped out with summer camp for K-12 girls interested in engineering, international water projects for which I've traveled to Guatemala and Cameroon and done a lot of successful grant writing.

Edited April 6, 2011 by gtmshine

[Eigen]

VG/E, VG/VG and VG/E yielded me a fellowship (IM/BI).

I was 4.0 with 186 hours at my undergrad (small school, though), and am 3.96 at my current school (much better ranked, although still small), 2 publications (1 first author), several state/regional presentations/posters, and an undergrad thesis. The outreach has been a lot of demos/workshops at K12 schools, the undergrad I trained at my undergrad my last year, two undergrads that are working under me now, and a 2 year program I've had working with a local minority high school to enrich their science education through demonstrations and hands on work. I also discussed the work I'm doing to bring said high school students into the lab for summer research opportunities.

Definite discussion of the fact that I could be at a "better" program, one reviewer said that my undergraduate and graduate experiences didn't mesh as well as they might (I might lack some focus, in his words), but they generally liked the publications/idea, and thought I'd done a lot of work on outreach/leadership, etc.

In response to the last poster, they seem a lot stingier with the Es this time around, at least in my field/level (Chemistry/2nd year). Most reviews basically just listed what I'd done and that it was good, no really helpful comments.

Edited April 6, 2011 by Eigen

[jendoly]

Oh, and along the lines of my previous comments on having no publications, my reviewers apparently thought I had a "significant number of publications". I guess journal articles (of which I have zip) aren't all that count. To future applicants reading this thread next year: list everything, y'all, even that college press journal your freshman year term paper made it into...!

Edited April 6, 2011 by jendoly

[ecko04]

I've lurked on this forum since about 2007/2008 when I first finished my undergrad work.

This was my first time applying for the GRFP. I've heard the countless horror stories from students, professors and past reviewers but I gave it a shot anyway.

Reviewer Ratings Sheets were just posted (IM/BI)

E/VG

VG/E

VG/E

I'm not the best but I am good enough.

Edited April 6, 2011 by ecko04

[kkompiles]

Whoa. I had Honorable Mention....and someone from NSF just called my cell phone but I didn't answer....didn't leave a message....but it had the 703-292-xxxx prefix, which is NSF!

Did anyone else that was Honorable Mention receive a call today? (April 6, 3pm EDT)

[jendoly]

Whoa. I had Honorable Mention....and someone from NSF just called my cell phone but I didn't answer....didn't leave a message....but it had the 703-292-xxxx prefix, which is NSF!

Did anyone else that was Honorable Mention receive a call today? (April 6, 3pm EDT)

.....did you call it back?!?

And before someone suggests that's rude - I'm half kidding. (;

Edited April 6, 2011 by jendoly

[husky]

When I log into fastlane it says that the rating sheets will be available within 3 days and specified in the award letter. Where are you all reading your rating sheets?

EDIT: Wait, it's working now.

Edited April 6, 2011 by husky

[Krypton]

Last year: HM from three E/VGs.

This year: VG/VG and VG/G.

What's particularly strange is that I received no negative comments, so it's impossible for me to pinpoint what might have influenced my reviewers to assign me these scores. My intellectual merit certainly hasn't worsened (I even slightly improved a proposal that already got perfect marks last year). In addition, I thought I vastly improved my broader impacts between this year and last (the positive comments I received seem to corroborate this), yet my score went down...

[kkompiles]

.....did you call it back?!?

And before someone suggests that's rude - I'm half kidding. (;

I did. I left an awkward message. Normally there is no way in hell I would do something like that, because it's awkward/rudeish. But I guess I was just reallllly stupidly excited.

ACK! It's like I'm going crazy all over again!!! It was probably a wrong number....

[jendoly]

I did. I left an awkward message. Normally there is no way in hell I would do something like that, because it's awkward/rudeish. But I guess I was just reallllly stupidly excited.

ACK! It's like I'm going crazy all over again!!! It was probably a wrong number....

You never know, someone could already have a federal fellowship and had to decline!

I said half because I would totally do it - what are they going to do? "Oh, you called me back awkwardly, we're not going to give it to you after all." (: I'm sure they totally understand either way.