NSF GRFP 2016

[juilletmercredi]

But now I'm curious about where the declined fellowships go as well. Can anyone else attest to getting hm but being offered a fellowship after some of the awardees declined?

This did not happen to me personally, but I do know some people to which it happened. They had HM, but were told a few weeks later that they were offered a fellowship. We assumed that it was because some of the awardees turned it down to take other awards. I don't know anything about the practice or general guidelines for this, though - it sounds like it's completely a waiting game, and it depends entirely on how close you were to being awarded and how many people in your broad area turn down awards. (I'd be willing to guess, for example, that those in the physical sciences probably are more likely to have this happen to them than those in the social sciences, since there are more funding opportunities for the former than the latter.)

[kafcat]

For those of you that received the award and applied during your first year, did you have recommendation letters from your current institution (if you didn;t work with any of them before starting the PhD program)? I think I will apply next year but I am worried that the reviewers will comment that I do not have any recommendations from my grad school (doesn't make sense since I will start the PhD program in late September...). 

[Butterfly_effect]

15 hours ago, juilletmercredi said:

They had HM, but were told a few weeks later that they were offered a fellowship. 

Cool. Not getting my hopes up, though. It seems pretty rare. 

[Adelantero]

3 hours ago, kafcat said:

For those of you that received the award and applied during your first year, did you have recommendation letters from your current institution (if you didn;t work with any of them before starting the PhD program)? I think I will apply next year but I am worried that the reviewers will comment that I do not have any recommendations from my grad school (doesn't make sense since I will start the PhD program in late September...). 

I'm in a program where we are essentially admitted to a specific adviser, so I was able to get a letter from her pretty easily, but wouldn't have felt good about asking anyone else, as I didn't really know the other faculty well. If you're in a program where you don't yet have an adviser, I bet you can still get a pretty good letter. After all, a committee of these people sat down and decided that they wanted you in their program. so they already know you well enough to think you're going to do great. If it's possible, maybe sit down with one of the faculty that shares your interests most closely in Sept., talk about your plans and your proposal, and ask that person what you would need to do to get a letter out of them. I guess that sounds like bribery, but what I mean is that they probably have an idea of how to get to know you well enough to write a letter. Alternatively, I bet you could get a professor that's teaching a course you're taking or TAing to write a letter, as long as you take time to sit down with them and chat.

 

[kafcat]

4 hours ago, Adelantero said:

I'm in a program where we are essentially admitted to a specific adviser, so I was able to get a letter from her pretty easily, but wouldn't have felt good about asking anyone else, as I didn't really know the other faculty well. If you're in a program where you don't yet have an adviser, I bet you can still get a pretty good letter. After all, a committee of these people sat down and decided that they wanted you in their program. so they already know you well enough to think you're going to do great. If it's possible, maybe sit down with one of the faculty that shares your interests most closely in Sept., talk about your plans and your proposal, and ask that person what you would need to do to get a letter out of them. I guess that sounds like bribery, but what I mean is that they probably have an idea of how to get to know you well enough to write a letter. Alternatively, I bet you could get a professor that's teaching a course you're taking or TAing to write a letter, as long as you take time to sit down with them and chat.

 

Great advice thank you so much!

[Vader Was Framed]

On 4/5/2016 at 1:25 PM, kafcat said:

For those of you that received the award and applied during your first year, did you have recommendation letters from your current institution (if you didn;t work with any of them before starting the PhD program)? I think I will apply next year but I am worried that the reviewers will comment that I do not have any recommendations from my grad school (doesn't make sense since I will start the PhD program in late September...). 

1 from current institution (new advisor) and 2 from prior institution (master's) for me.  

[ashcanpete]

I got the GRFP this year, and I'm thrilled but I now have a kinda tricky decision/situation with funding to deal with. This is my second year in my PhD program (started the program Fall 2014) and so I was already being funded by an institutional training grant. Now that I have the NSF, I was expecting a raise (NSF stipend is ~$4500 more than the base stipend in my program). However, the training grant director wants me to put my NSF on reserve until the training grant funds run out. Unfortunately, it's a two year training grant, and I only started it at the beginning of my second year last October (right before applying for the NSF). Thus, my training grant funding won't run out until the beginning of my fourth year.

This presents 2 problems:

1. I won't get my $4500/yr raise for another 1.5 years.

2. If I take less than 6 years to graduate, I'll lose some NSF money. For instance, if I were to take only 5 years, I'd directly lose $4500 out of my pocket.

I don't think this happens that often at my school, I've been informed that most people get the NSF as an undergrad or first year, so they aren't on training grants yet. The only other person this happened to in my department was only on a one-year training grant, so it wasn't a problem of actually losing money in the long term.

I'm pretty sure I can go against my department's recommendation and start my NSF tenure earlier (this fall for instance). However, if this is going to be looked very badly upon, it might be better to just wait for my training grant to run out and risk losing some money. I think most schools that are in more expensive cities (SF, NYC) have stipends close to the NSF anyway, so this probably isn't an issue there. But for me, at least part of the NSF's allure was the 15% raise that came along with it, and I really don't want to give part of that up or postpone it 1.5 years if I don't have to. Obviously, none of us went to grad school for the money, but I think a 15% raise would go a long way towards making my time here much more enjoyable and would relieve a lot of financial stress.

Has anyone else had this problem, and what did you do about it? Also any general advice would be great, as I've never really encountered a situation where my financial interests are opposed to my department's.

[Eigen]

For one, you may not end up being out money. NSF fellowships have been getting pretty consistent raises, so it's likely that you'll be making a larger stipend as an NSF fellow if you delay a few years. 

What is the likelihood that you will graduate in 6 years, and not want any extra, funded time?

I was convinced that I should drop part of my existent fellowship (was on a 4 year fellowship, won the NSF in my second year) because "no one ever takes more than 6 years to graduate", then ended up taking closer to 7, with the extra 9 months having to be paid at the departmental RA level (an immense pay cut relative to the NSF). 

I would say, as a general rule, ensuring you'll be well funded for as long as possible is key. Staying that extra little time at the end, having a bit of a less of a rush to graduate, or getting to push out a final paper without financial stress are all really nice things to have. 

[Superres]

On 4/12/2016 at 3:57 PM, ashcanpete said:

I got the GRFP this year, and I'm thrilled but I now have a kinda tricky decision/situation with funding to deal with. This is my second year in my PhD program (started the program Fall 2014) and so I was already being funded by an institutional training grant. Now that I have the NSF, I was expecting a raise (NSF stipend is ~$4500 more than the base stipend in my program). However, the training grant director wants me to put my NSF on reserve until the training grant funds run out. Unfortunately, it's a two year training grant, and I only started it at the beginning of my second year last October (right before applying for the NSF). Thus, my training grant funding won't run out until the beginning of my fourth year.

This presents 2 problems:

1. I won't get my $4500/yr raise for another 1.5 years.

2. If I take less than 6 years to graduate, I'll lose some NSF money. For instance, if I were to take only 5 years, I'd directly lose $4500 out of my pocket.

I don't think this happens that often at my school, I've been informed that most people get the NSF as an undergrad or first year, so they aren't on training grants yet. The only other person this happened to in my department was only on a one-year training grant, so it wasn't a problem of actually losing money in the long term.

I'm pretty sure I can go against my department's recommendation and start my NSF tenure earlier (this fall for instance). However, if this is going to be looked very badly upon, it might be better to just wait for my training grant to run out and risk losing some money. I think most schools that are in more expensive cities (SF, NYC) have stipends close to the NSF anyway, so this probably isn't an issue there. But for me, at least part of the NSF's allure was the 15% raise that came along with it, and I really don't want to give part of that up or postpone it 1.5 years if I don't have to. Obviously, none of us went to grad school for the money, but I think a 15% raise would go a long way towards making my time here much more enjoyable and would relieve a lot of financial stress.

Has anyone else had this problem, and what did you do about it? Also any general advice would be great, as I've never really encountered a situation where my financial interests are opposed to my department's.

Honestly, if I were you, I would take the NSF. You deserve it! I would go against your department's recommendation. I am an incoming graduate student and when talking to one of the directors of the program I will be entering in the fall, she told me that the graduate school would encourage me to accept the fellowship award right away. However, the graduate school covers my first two years anyway (not the PI). She basically told me not to listen to the graduate school's recommendation and wait two years.

 

However, I also see @Eigen 's point. It's better to be over-funded than to run out of money in case it takes you a little longer to graduate. But the extra $4,500 /yr would also be really nice!

Edited April 19, 2016 by Superres

[t_ruth]

On 3/26/2016 at 4:58 PM, commodork said:

 

Thanks for your perspective! I had no idea there were faculty members on this site as well, neat. I have a few questions, if you don't mind me taking the chance to pick your brain. 

How much impact, if any, does receipt of NSF-GRFP/other prestigious fellowships affect faculty hires, in your experience? I saw something a while back that said GRFP recipients were way more likely to land TT positions (though that's probably more correlation than causation). Any application advice? 

Thank you!

I just logged on--sorry I am not getting back to you until a month later!

I used gradcafe when I was applying to grad school what now seems like ages ago and was even a mod for a time Every once and a while I pop back on to pay back all the great advice I got on here.

I'm not sure re: hires. It is probably field-specific. In my field, Education, GRFPs are still relatively new, and there is also a new(ish) push for even jr. faculty to be able to land grants. To the extent that it showed I had potential to get grants as a faculty member, I think it helped me quite a bit. To be competitive, you would still have to have the right number of pubs for your field, but I'd imagine a GRFP could be a tie-breaker. 

Best of luck to you!

[t_ruth]

On 4/19/2016 at 9:13 AM, Superres said:

Honestly, if I were you, I would take the NSF. You deserve it! I would go against your department's recommendation. I am an incoming graduate student and when talking to one of the directors of the program I will be entering in the fall, she told me that the graduate school would encourage me to accept the fellowship award right away. However, the graduate school covers my first two years anyway (not the PI). She basically told me not to listen to the graduate school's recommendation and wait two years.

 

However, I also see @Eigen 's point. It's better to be over-funded than to run out of money in case it takes you a little longer to graduate. But the extra $4,500 /yr would also be really nice!

Why don't you talk with your department about your concerns--perhaps they would find some way to give you a little extra money...

[farflung]

Hi everyone, I haven't read the full 37 pages of this thread, so apologies if this has been addressed somewhere in the archives. I am a current NSF GRFP fellow, toward the back end of my fellowship period.

First -- does anyone know when GRFP stipend increases are announced, if they are going to increase the stipend at all? I can't remember for the life of me. Right now my fastlane says I'll be paid at $34,000 for next academic year, but I don't know whether to trust this amount just yet. 

Second -- on years when stipends DO increase, how do your universities pay you that increase? Do they just do a one-time bonus for the extra amount, or do they pay it out over the course of the following 12 month tenure period? I'm trying to advise my department administrator on how to pay me... and they have screwed it up in the past, so I'm trying to anticipate & walk them through all of the contingencies at play here.

Thanks!

[Swingin_Sween]

Hey,

 

Apologies if this has been asked, but I will be applying for the 2017-2018 year. Do I need to apply to Universities as well as the NSF GFRP or are you basically a shoe-in if awarded the grant?

 

Thanks

[Eigen]

1 hour ago, Swingin_Sween said:

Hey,

Apologies if this has been asked, but I will be applying for the 2017-2018 year. Do I need to apply to Universities as well as the NSF GFRP or are you basically a shoe-in if awarded the grant?

Thanks

Not a shoe-in if awarded the grant. It only covers a small portion of the costs to the school for your PhD. 

It can certainly help, but there are places that won't reverse an admission decision even if you win one. 

Additionally, you generally find out about the NSF awards after most graduate admissions decisions have been made (late spring). To accept the award, you will need to have already been admitted to a school. 

In short, applying for grad school admission and applying for the NSF are two totally different things, although the latter may help the former. 

[farflung]

On June 14, 2016 at 3:41 PM, Swingin_Sween said:

Hey,

 

Apologies if this has been asked, but I will be applying for the 2017-2018 year. Do I need to apply to Universities as well as the NSF GFRP or are you basically a shoe-in if awarded the grant?

 

Thanks

You need to go through the normal admissions process for any and all graduate PhD programs you wish to attend. You cannot be accepted to a university after the GRFP awards are announced if you didn't even go to the trouble to apply to that school. Fortunately, working on your GRFP essays will help you craft better admissions essays for your universities of choice. 

[Butterfly_effect]

Checking in: Did any HMs get late awards yet?

[kem0022]

I found out on June 7 that I had gotten a late award, up from an Honorable Mention in April. Super excited!

[PizzaCat93]

Does anyone know how significant of a boost one has in the job market with a GRF under their belt? In social sciences, btw. 

[juilletmercredi]

Does anyone know how significant of a boost one has in the job market with a GRF under their belt? In social sciences, btw.

@PizzaCat93- It's really difficult to quantify this in any meaningful way without doing a large scale study comparing the academic outcomes of GRF holders with non-GRF holders, and even then there are several confounds for that (GRF holders may also have been more likely to still be successful even if they didn't win). I can give a little anecdotal experience, though, in saying that I'm a social scientist who had an NSF GRF and I have found it to be a useful signaling tool on my CV. The directors at my first postdoc explicitly made a big deal about it. I currently work in a non-academic job but one that is staffed by PhDs and in which the hiring was done mostly by PhDs, and I think in the cohort of 3 junior scientist hired last year two of us were GRF recipients. We also just did two interview loops (i.e., top candidates who made it to the campus visit - our process is stunningly a lot like the academic hiring process, just much much faster) to fill two more positions this year and one of them was a GRF recipient as well.

I think it has a certain level of prestige and to a lot of professors 'says something' about you as a young scholar. So my take is that it probably helps in the job market, but you have to have the other signs of scholarly promise to back it up. Combined with enough publications and other activities, it has the potential to make you look like that coveted 'hot young rising star'. (I heard that phrase thrown around a lot, although I certainly didn't feel like one.)

@farflung It's paid out over the course of the 12-month tenure period. Think of it kind of like a salary increase - that's essentially what it is.

@ashcanpete - Are you having a hard time getting by on your department's current funding levels? An extra ~$300/month is nothing to sneeze at, but neither is having a whole additional year of funding should you need it. PhDs have a tendency to take longer than you think they will - I thought I would finish in 5 and it took me 6. I gave up a year of institutional funding to take the NSF early (although in my case, it was because I would've had to switch to an advisor who had RA money and it didn't make sense to me to switch advisors over rmoney) and I did end up having to seek external funding for a sixth year that I didn't anticipate.

If I were you, I wouldn't think about this in terms of losing money in the long run. First of all, it's not money that's actually being taken out of your pocket; the NSF is pretty much potential money. (I mean, the same argument could be made if you graduated early - but you wouldn't delay graduation just to get more NSF, right?) It's provided to help you finish your PhD; if you don't need it to finish your PhD, it doesn't actually exist relative to you. Secondly, even if you do lose that logic, the loss of an extra year of funding - sounds like just under $30,000 in your case - is so much larger than the lost of $4,500, should you need to take an extra year to finish. Even if you only need to take one extra semester, that's still about $15,000. It's better to have some cushion.

It won't look bad if you delay it or don't delay it, at least not writ large (how your individual advisor and department reacts to it is different). But if your advisor is advising you to delay the fellowship and stay on the training grant, even though you leaving the training grant could free up funding for other potential graduate students, I think that's advice you should take seriously.

@Superres - I gotta say, quite frankly, without context, this looks like bizarre advice. You are saying yourself that the director of your program is advising you to wait two years, take the departmental funding, and then take the NSF funding after the third year. Why would you then tell someone else to do the opposite and take it right away? The issue here isn't really whether going the action of going against a graduate school/department's recommendation is a good idea; it's about the actual choice of whether or not to take the NSF early.