Here is a collection of my musings, class notes, and tips for students. Use at your own risk and know that your mileage may vary.

NSF Graduate Fellowship Advice

  • Make sure you have explicit broader impacts/intellectual merit headings in BOTH your personal and research statements, don’t view your personal statement as a means to convey your broader impacts and your research statement as a means to convey your intellectual merit. Both things should appear in both statements.
  • Broader impacts =/= doing outreach, you should really think about how to present the broader impacts of your work. You want to avoid falling into the trap of “I help with astronomy on tap so you should give me money,” you can say “the work I will do as an NSF fellow will be shared at Astronomy on Tap” (in so many words) but that’s a distinctly different message.
  • Make sure to emphasize any barriers that you’ve faced and how you overcame them— and how it has helped you grow/changed your perspective. I can not emphasize this enough. I’ll point out that this does not count as a broader impact, if anything, it is intellectual merit.
  • Don’t focus too much on anything they can see on your CV, mention it (because they will probably will read it, but you can’t be certain), but leave details on your CV. As well, if there’s something that they might not recognize on your CV that you don’t have enough room on your CV to elaborate on and that you think adds value to you as a candidate then you should definitely mention it because it’s not like they’re going to google whatever it is to find out more about it (or at least, you can’t count on them to).
  • If (and only if) you think you can significantly improve the quality of your application through determined and focused effort you should apply in your second year. Otherwise you should apply in your first year, now that people only get a single chance to apply I think they are going to judge the two slightly more differently and I think they will expect more from the 2nd year students who decided to wait.
  • Work together with someone. there is almost 0% chance you will be in direct competition with any specific person. You’re all independently reviewed by separate review committees so the likelihood your applications come up together and would be directly compared is small. That means that collaboration only means a better application from the both of you. Seriously.
  • Remember that at the end of the day these things are stochastic and not an impartial evaluation of your worth (either as a researcher or human being), don’t let it get to you if you don’t get any specific fellowship. There are plenty of fellowships and people who graduate and have successful careers in academia having TA’d all through grad school (it makes you a better teacher anyway).
  • Examples help– here you can find my research statement (available if you are a Northwestern student, you can email me if you aren’t). I frequently referenced the ones here (as well as the advice) while working on my application.

Derivations/Useful Class Notes (that I frequently reference)