<p>Deadlines have now passed or are imminent. Anyone apply for an NSF fellowship?</p>
<p>Odd that the NSF application is due before the grad school applications and, having glanced at the NSF website and the prompts, they interpose enough hoops to discourage many people.</p>
<p>My son did. At the very last moment possible. He’s not hopeful, but thought it was worth the effort.</p>
<p>Well, the odds are long. But I think my D found it useful in that it will that the three essays can be repeatedly cannibalized for her regular applications. She spent several weeks on hers and got it turned in with less than two hours to spare.</p>
<p>I was curious because I see <em>everything</em> discussed on CC but no one asking about NSF chances, essay prompts, interpretations, etc.</p>
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<p>Perhaps NSF chances are hard to predict. I found the following when I was looking into the NSF fellowship.
[Philip</a> Guo - Advice for applying for graduate science fellowships: NSF, NDSEG, Hertz](<a href=“http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/fellowship-tips.htm]Philip”>http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/fellowship-tips.htm)</p>
<p>NSF chances are notoriously random because they are reviewed by as few as 2 people. That is why chances threads are not common.</p>
<p>Plus, you’d have to see the entire application and compare it to all the applications submitted in the same field. </p>
<p>Last year, I thought Obama doubled the number of NSF Fellows to 2000, but I don’t know if that is also true this year.</p>
<p>As I’ve been told by professors, the NSF app. emphasizes different things than the usual grad school app. The NSF wants, in their words, “broader impact”, the ability of your work to improve the world by spreading diversity, improve everyone’s quality of living, extend and promote education, etc. It’s a little silly, really, because who goes to grad school (at least in engineering) to promote diversity? They go because they’re interested in the subject matter and like to be on the forefront of science/technology/knowledge.</p>
<p>Diversity is crap attached to NSF’s mission by congress (which, of course, decides NSF’s budget). However, broader impacts is no joke. Is your research important if nobody can benefit from it?</p>
<p>Is the search for the Higgs Boson useful? Probably, but it probably won’t have any practical application, if any, for another century. Useful is a relative term. If I were a particle physicist, I’d have a really hard time coming up with something for the NSF.</p>
<p>Ouroboros, NSF gives plenty of support to students for research alone. The salaries of RAs is part of the money given through NSF grants. This fellowship is something different. It’s not just about requirements from Congress – NSF fellows are meant to be a slightly different breed. Just as the Hertz fellowship has a patriotic flavor.</p>
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That’s a perfectly legitimate argument - that it may take time to be put to use. Moreover, part of broader impacts is the outreach you’ve done, not just what the impact of your research will be. You’re judged relative to applicants with similar backgrounds so there’s some leeway from that as well.</p>
<p>One big reason for the lack of chance threads is that essays dominate the decisions. Who wants to post their proposal? Bad idea.</p>
<p>I applied (as a senior in EE) and I’m pretty confident of my chances of getting at least honorable mention. Or at least my advisors are, and they’ve written letters for several successful recipients before. There’s always the possibility of getting a grumpy reviewer, though.</p>
<p>I agree that NSF depends on the essays and that chances threads would be stupid…doesn’t mean they wouldn’t appear on CC!!! Also agree that it would be a really bad idea to post proposals here. Just mildly surprised that there was no discussion.</p>
<p>MF, thanks for the link to Philip Guo’s advice. I hope my D read it but in any event it was certainly consistent with everything she talked about.</p>
<p>In years past, there has been some discussion about the NSF application, although not much – stuff like asking about sending optional GRE scores (GRE scores are not part of the application this year), how many get it, what reviewers are looking for, etc. The discussion never lasts long. Several CCers have received the award, however, and several who didn’t have shared what their reviewers said about their weaknesses. </p>
<p>CC discussion of the NSF may depend on who the most active posters are during any given cycle. In the past two years, there was a larger biomedical science presence, and many applicants knew about the NSF. This year, there seem to be more engineers, who are eligible for the NSF but who, as a whole, don’t seem to think about it as much as the biomedical science students do. Maybe that’s because the majority of them are more MS and/or professionally-oriented. </p>
<p>Maybe the CCers who are NSF Fellows can come out of the woodwork. IIRC, we have Fellows here in the biomedical sciences, psychology, and engineering. And I’m sure there are others I don’t know about.</p>
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The research proposal is the least important place to emphasis Broader Impacts. As an applicant in the biology field, I also can make only vague statements of the impact my research will have (i.e., “improve our understanding of so-and-so process”) because including the potential impact on disease runs the risk of having the application rejected for being too health-related.</p>
<p>I am applying for the NSF this year. I dedicated 80% of my personal statement to broader outreach because I felt that the intellectual merit of my application was already adequately addressed in the past research and research proposal essays.</p>
<p>I was marginally confident in my chances until I saw that only 3 out of 2051 fellowships last year went to applicants in my field. I know that the number of fellowships awarded in a field is proportional to the number of applicants; but with so few applicants, it takes only 3-4 applications stronger than mine to take me out of the race… :(</p>
<p>The number of fellowships is not proportional to the number of applications. In some fields, such as the social sciences, the funding rate is far lower than in, say, engineering. This knowledge was one of the reasons I applied under engineering rather than the hard sciences, which is where I actually work. I can’t say for certain it helped, but I applied as engineering and was funded despite having a pretty awful graduate GPA at the time (~3.5).</p>
<p>gthopeful, you might be right. All the instances where I have read about the number of fellowships awarded being proportional to the number of applications in a field refered to past years. I just assumed that this was still true, but there’s a good chance that the NSF has changed the rules at some point. </p>
<p>The most recent numbers of applicants vs awards I found were from 2006-07, when the number of applications was still proportional to the number of awards - except in computer science and engineering, where there were additional awards for female applicants.</p>
<p>I applied, my first time doing so (I’m a senior undergrad engineering student). I spent so so much time on the essays. I’ve had two nightmares since submitting then waking up freaking out that I had a sentence with a bunch of typos in it.</p>
<p>So congrats to all. I had a bit of a horror story to share from this. Those procrastinators among us are probably aware that the deadline for the application was 5 pm today. At 3, I noticed that one of my references showed up as “unsubmitted”. I had checked this days ago and thought they were all submitted. That recommender even had an email from NSF letting him know that he had submitted his recommendation. I scrambled to find the grants administrator at my university and called in rapid fire succession to the recommender. The upshod was that he resubmitted his recommendation in time.</p>
<p>Ouro, I went to graduate school to increase diversity. I’m in public health and psychology. The science was paramount - I wanted to do the research and be on the forefront of my field, finding innovative ways to improve the public’s health. However, a secondary goal of mine was definitely increasing the diversity of the science workforce, both by getting a PhD myself AND by hopefully being a mentor, teacher, and role model to a diverse body of students. One of the main reasons I (a black woman) got a PhD was because I went to a college with a lot of black female professors, and I saw that it can be done. I had and have the desire to do the same thing for others.</p>
<p>I think that’s why I got the NSF, because I was able to articulate that I was in it for the research but also for the impact you have on your world as a scientist. NSF wants strong researchers who also know how to connect to the public and make their science useful.</p>
<p>Belevitt, one of my recommenders actually submitted my letter three days late. The deadline was extended to a Friday, I think, and she still didn’t have it in. She called the NSF and talked to someone, and they told her she could still submit it on Monday, which she did, and I got the award. So if anyone looks at this thread in the future and has to deal with this, don’t give up hope.</p>
<p>I have a somewhat related question. If you receive the NSF award can you accept any stipends or financial support from your graduate school, such as teaching assistantships? What happens if your graduate school offers more money than NSF (which applies to some of the schools that I am applying to)? Would you turn down NSF?</p>