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.

I’m a chronically unhappy person to the point of being somewhat cheery about it. And, to some degree, I think that’s because the little spark of optimism that I have keeps hoping for the world to get better.

It’s a very silly thing when I describe what I want to do for the rest of my life: I want to make toys that help people. But I really want to create devices that are entertaining to use while serving a practical benefit. I firmly believe that designs work best if the widest range of backgrounds and implementations are considered. And I mean wide:

• economic backgrounds
• cultural heritages
• education level
• experience
• age
• gender
• disability
• ethnicity

And I do care about practicality. I want to create things with some purpose so that they have a use beyond temporary amusement.

I’m going to change the world. And I’m going to make sure that others have just as much fun while I’m doing it.

I like cheese. I like it a lot. I would happily eat it plain without any crackers, bread, or chips.

This summer, I became lactose intolerant. Cheese, milk, chocolate, and cookies are no longer alright for me to eat. But then there’s more stuff that I hadn’t even considered as containing dairy: hot dogs, bread, Asian food… Things that I can’t even fathom why dairy would be added. I have to be careful about eating anything.

And it bothers me. I can’t eat the things I want to because someone decided extraneous ingredients were needed. My personal favorite being “lactose” on the ingredients; not even bothering for milk or whey.

And there’s lots of people that can’t eat certain foods. Heaven forbid a person have a corn allergy in America; the stuff is everywhere.