Science and Engineering Scholarships and Fellowships Blog

The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship recently opened in August and applicants are probably looking for advice on how to put together a winning application. NSF does not release sample applications “in order to preserve the originality of the application pool”, but successful applications do share some common threads. With some persistent searching applicants can find lots of good advice on the internet. Jean Yang, an NSF fellow in 2007 provides potential applicants information on applying for fellowships and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship via her blog: updated sporadically at best.

NSF. For the NSF fellowship, you are required to write a personal statement, a statement of research experience, and a research proposal for a project you would pursue in graduate school. I was given the very helpful advice that I should make my essays clear and concise, as the readers would likely to be skimming. My materials are below:

* Personal statement - I write about my life goals as they are relevant to my graduate pursuits and how I came to develop them.
* Research experience - this was fairly straight forward. One helpful editor told me to provide enough background for understanding each research experience.
* Proposed research - I described my undergraduate senior thesis. The project does not necessarily have to be a project you for sure plan to pursue in graduate school; you just need to show that you have thought about a large-scale project, the reasons for pursuing it, and what impact it may have. One good piece of advice I got was to make the problem as clear as possible as early as possible.

Past GRFP review panelists offer their advice for putting together a competitive application as well. Applicants may also benefit from the new GRFP website.