NSF GRFP is one of the competitive fellowships for graduate students in the sciences. Providing a nice stipend and tuition for 3 years, many students entering the first year of graduate school or in their first year apply each year.
This fellowship focuses on intellectual merit and broad impact of supporting a particular student. (The NSF wants to get it’s monies worth. Intellectual merit not only includes the academic career of a student, but the researcher potential and ability to work in a team and solo. Broad impact focuses on supporting diversity, broadcasting knowledge, discovery of novel information, and benefiting society.
I’ve never been particularly good at promoting myself. Hell, I’m downright self-deprecating. Yet, in the last year, I have worked very hard at getting past this and applying to REU programs and a scholarship to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.
I applied to these fully expecting to be rejected. I don’t think I’m special; I believe that there are other people that deserve it more than me. I write my essays honestly and imbue as much as my passion as I can. My best guess is that my past successes are because the readers get tired of reading bullshitting.
I get to write 3 essays for the NSF GRFP:
- Personal statement: where my passions for my field come from, what’s unique about me that I bring to the field, & why I need the money.
- Previous research experience: what I’ve done & what have I learned from these activities.
- Research proposal: Prove that I know the requirements for making a proposal; what is the hypothesis, how to go about testing it, literature support, and general formatting.
These are all single-spaced 2 page essays. I doubt they would disapprove of being shorter, but the questions do need to be answered. At present, I’m trying to write the personal statement, while mentally reviewing what I’ve read for the research proposal.
This isn’t going to be easy; not by a long shot. It’s just… I’ll be attending a school where I am not guaranteed funding for the length of my career. I would rather not worry immediately about how to pay for my graduate education.
