<p>Anyone have any tips on obtaining National Science Foundation graduate research fellowships? Just starting to look into this. Looks like the application is a major undertaking while applying to graduate programs and doing senior year coursework.</p>
<p>You don’t apply for those fellowships until your first year as a grad student usually.</p>
<p>You can also apply your senior year of college. A girl in my program came in to grad school with an NSF fellowship. She reworked an assignment from another class into her proposal.</p>
<p>It is a big undertaking, but the standards for a senior in undergrad are lower than a first year graduate student (which are also lower than a second year graduate), so if you can pull everything together you might have a slightly better shot. And at the very least it gives you practice.</p>
<p>Many NSF GRFP applicants apply during their last year as an undergraduate, but it is a lot of work to draft a project proposal, so if you think applying this year will interfere with your work, you can apply next year after you’ve started a graduate program.</p>
<p>How does the timing of notification work if you apply during senior year? And does a NSF fellowship (assuming it is awarded) confer any advantage in grad school admission, or would notification come too late to be helpful in admissions decisions? How does it work if an applicant is accepted with funding from the program itself, and also is awarded an NSF fellowship?</p>
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<p>I think it’d be too late. Fellowship award deadlines are usually in December. If it’s the same for your college apps, then the time you’re notified is roughly the same time you’re notified of your college acceptance. If your college apps are weird and are due in Feb/March then you might be ok. </p>
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<p>If this is a PhD you’re talking about, funding is always included from the program whether you win the award or not. If you get acceptance and the award, nothing really changes. In fact, you might not even see that money. That money goes towards your graduate group and research or whatever, not you personally. Since they’re paying for your tuition and stipend, it’s basically like a “big discount” for your major professor. If you win - if he/she is paying $40,000 to pay for you to be there, they just got you free for a year. That’s pretty much how it works I think.</p>
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If you’re good enough to win an NSF as a senior in college, you won’t need any help in admissions decisions.</p>
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Most external fellowships (like NSF) will notify recipients after most schools’ application deadlines.</p>
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Yes, it does convey an advantage. One of the many factors that grad programs have to consider is whether or not they can fund you, and if you have funding of your own that obstacle is removed. Award of an external fellowship is generally considered one of the only acceptable reasons to contact a department between submitting your application and receiving the thanks/no-thanks letter, so if you get such a fellowship, contact all the departments to which you applied and inform them.</p>
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You take the external fellowship, unless there are programmatic issues that prevent it (in which case, why did you apply?). External funding is more prestigious, more lucrative, frees you from work obligations, and gives you more flexibility in choosing an advisor. Plus, when the program finds out you have been awarded such a fellowship they will likely try very hard to pull back their funding offer - they want you to take the external funding so they can fund someone else with their own money.</p>
<p>Quick note: in some instances you can take both, but usually only partially. Many external fellowships know that you will be required to work as an RA or TA, and will offer a reduced fellowship on top of your assistantship. Likewise, a school can offer a “top-up” fellowship from their own money if they are trying hard to recruit you. In both these cases the second award is unlikely to be more than $5-10k.</p>
<p>I received an NSF fellowship and I applied as a senior undergraduate. </p>
<p>Retrospectively, the process of applying for the NSF fellowship was a good preparation for my graduate application. Since the NSF application deadline was in November, I had to have all letters of recommendation lined up and do all of the soul-searching for my personal statements way before any of the graduate school application deadlines. </p>
<p>I do suggest that you put a lot of care into your essays, but I honestly don’t know how much anyone cares. I keep hearing from professors who have actually sat on NSF GRFP committees that they judged the intellectual merit of an application primarily from the letters of recommendation; they only scanned the research proposal to see if an applicant can communicate a coherent train of thought and the personal statement to look for evidence of extracurricular involvement. Of course that’s in mathematics, where there’s no expectation that grad school applicants have even decided on a specialty yet. (I am kinda amused that there were fellowships awarded in the specialty “Other - undecided.” I wonder what these applicants wrote for their research proposal.)</p>
<p>Oh, and for what it’s worth, in mathematics the vast majority of NSF fellowships are awarded to undergraduates. If you were interested in mathematics, you would definitely want to apply this year and not after you start graduate school. (It might be different for other fields.)</p>
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The NSF makes the fellowship decisions in February but intentionally holds them back until April, after most graduate admission decisions have been made. Receiving an NSF fellowship is almost guaranteed to get you off of waitlists though (except at the tippy top programs) and there are even a few stories of rejections getting converted into acceptances after an applicant secures external funding.</p>
<p>In my field (economics), getting an NSF can often turn waitlists into acceptances. In the past, MIT was particularly well-known for waitlisting people and then admitting them if they received an NSF. However, this year, this didn’t seem to be nearly as prevalent (I know of several people waitlisted at MIT, then won an NSF but did not get an admit).</p>
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<p>Last year MANY PhD programs offered admission without funding in STEM fields. Most of these were public institutions at the top in their fields. The current economic situation has led to a decrease in department funds and an increase in grad school applications, so professors deciding admissions have fewer dollars for grad student support and more applicants. Thus, an external fellowship can make a difference if it means you can accept an offer that you would otherwise have to reject due to a lack of institutional funding.</p>
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<p>Sorry but any PhD program that doesn’t offer full funding isn’t worth going to. </p>
<p>The “current economic situation” should have little to do with admissions or the number of applicants the departments accept since funding comes from private grants, not state money or tax dollars. Therefore, the number of offers is related directly to the department’s needs/wants for the year. It may be 2 new PhD students or 10 PhD students, but whatever it is, it’s independent of the number of students that apply or the country’s economic situation or i.e., how many prospective students are unemployed.</p>
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This isn’t true in the biomedical sciences – much of the funding for first- and second-year students comes from NIH training grants, and PIs often fund third-year+ students from grant money as well. When NIH has less money to go around, grants get reduced or don’t get renewed or don’t get funded in the first place, and fewer students can be supported.</p>
<p>(And as a result, I think anybody who’s applying to or is in a biomedical sciences PhD program should be writing his or her elected officials in Congress and explaining why science funding shouldn’t be cut when cuts are made to the federal budget this fall. I’ve already written my senator.)</p>
<p>Not sure about other schools, but I know at mine since money was known to be a little tight the last few years they admitted fewer students. Like many other schools, they only admit those they are willing to fund.</p>
<p>Most graduate student funding at public universities comes from federal grants and state dollars, not private money. Universities pay for graduate teaching assistants based on their departmental need for TAs - that money comes out of a department’s alloted teaching budget. In turn, that pool is primarily state subsidies and tuition dollars.</p>
<p>^ I think where the funding comes from depends a lot on the discipline. In mathematics most students are funded as teaching assistants and that money obviously comes from the teaching budget. Friends in computer science and engineering tell me that graduate students in their disciplines are usually funded as research assistants from the professors’ own research grants.</p>
<p>denizen wrote: If this is a PhD you’re talking about, funding is always included from the program whether you win the award or not.</p>
<p>dntw8up responded: Last year MANY PhD programs offered admission without funding in STEM fields.</p>
<p>denizen responded: Sorry but any PhD program that doesn’t offer full funding isn’t worth going to.</p>
<p>Also not necessarily true. Funding is NOT “always included,” particularly not lately, and there are many top programs that last year admitted students without funding, even in some STEM disciplines. Not everyone requires funding, and in some programs it may be possible to find TA work in another department upon arrival, but accepting without funding is a risk. I would not have assumed that risk, but that does not necessarily mean an unfunded program “isn’t worth going to.”</p>
<p>I’ve yet to find a PhD program in my discipline of biology that doesn’t provide full funding for its students. But I guess they are out there…</p>
<p>As far as it not being worth it, ask these guys;</p>
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<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/graduate-school/1072166-grad-school-debt.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/graduate-school/1072166-grad-school-debt.html</a></p>
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<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/graduate-school/996825-me-ae-computational-grad-schools.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/graduate-school/996825-me-ae-computational-grad-schools.html</a></p>
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<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/engineering-majors/1038301-please-give-me-answer-do-most-phd-students-get-tuition-waiver-stipend.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/engineering-majors/1038301-please-give-me-answer-do-most-phd-students-get-tuition-waiver-stipend.html</a></p>
<p>I don’t make this s**t up man.</p>
<p>Most PhD programs fund their students. I know a handful of programs who admit PhD students with the expectations that they obtain outside funding (e.g. the Courant Institute, a research institute that can award PhDs but cannot provide stipends to students); but I cannot think of a single PhD programs who would admit students without funding and the expectation that students pay for the PhD out of their own pocket.</p>
<p>Off the top of my head, during the last admission cycle, for PhD programs in CS, Berkeley, Illinois, and Texas – all top ten programs – admitted students without funding. Among institutions ranked 11-20, Wisconsin, UCLA, UCSD, Purdue, and UNC Chapel Hill admitted many students without funding. Most of these admits viewed their offers as rejections because they could not afford to attend. Times are tough, funding is NOT “always included,” and the lack of funding doesn’t mean these top programs are “not worth going to.”</p>