<p>Hi, I’m an NSF fellow.</p>
<p>-Yes you do get feedback on your application - but only after you get rejected in April, and it’s not very extensive. It is helpful, but it’s basically a paragraph from each reviewer.</p>
<p>-No, it doesn’t have to be the topic of your research per se, but it should be strongly related to what you plan to do. There’s no pressure to follow through on it, but your proposal will be evaluated not only on its merits but your capability to actually do it and the support that your university give you. Basically, NSF is not interested in the particular project you do, but they ARE interested in whether you are capable of proposing a realistic project that you can carry out. That says a lot about your potential for success.</p>
<p>No, you don’t have to pick a target school that you intend to attend, but I would caution against selecting a school you have no intention of attending. The proposal will be much more convincing if you are actually passionate about your topic and excited about your future program.</p>
<p>-Typically at this point in your career, you work closely with a mentor to formulate a research proposal. You should read a lot of papers first. Your paper should have a unifying theory - some theory you want to test or a way to extend a body of research into an area not previously touched. As a graduating senior, you won’t be able to do anything “completely original” yet; and ideas like that are unlikely to get funded anyway. Research is like a long extended conversation between researchers and nothing is “completely original” anyway.</p>
<p>I had a 3.4 ugrad GPA. Don’t worry about things you can’t change. (I also got the fellowship as a second year PhD student, though.)</p>
<p>I do have another question though. Most PhD’s don’t know what they’re doing after graduation. How were they able to justify their career goals prior to applying?</p>
<p>What would make you think most PhDs don’t know what they are doing following graduation? Most PhD students may not know exactly where they will work, or they may change their minds during graduate school. But no PhD student should go into a program with zero idea of what they want to do next, and I would wager that few do. There’s a reason you get a PhD, after all. Many (most) want to be academic professors, and most probably already know whether they want to work at research-intensive schools or more teaching. There are some (like me) who want to work in government research. I wrote about that in my own proposal. Others want to do industry research or something else. It doesn’t matter, but it must be research-oriented and you must justify to the NSF why their money would be well used on preparing you to do whatever it is you say you want to do.</p>
<p>* At this point, the selection process doesn’t sound like it’s based on individual merit, so much as it is based on your ability to embellish your writing.*</p>
<p>You need to get this idea out of your head now if you want to be successful at writing this proposal.</p>
<p>It takes a LOT of work to write a research proposal. It’s not just about being a good writer. You have to be creative enough to think of a good project, scientifically oriented enough to know what’s doable with your skills and experiences, intelligent enough to synthesize past research and theories with current knowledge and your future expectations, disciplined enough to place limits on the problem and well-supported and mentored. You have to do all this in 2 pages. It’s much harder than it sounds!</p>