Graduate Fellowships for Engineers (part II)

In Part I, I listed some of the more competitive fellowships available for graduate students in engineering fields. Now, I'm going to go over some of the critical, and occasionally obvious, advice for applying to fellowships.

1) Read the Requirements!
Each fellowship wants something different, and they're often kind enough to tell you what that is. In the case of the NSF GFRP, they're even kind enough to tell you every criterion you will be judged on. So do yourself a favor, and read these thoroughly. Consider it practice for grant proposals later in life.

2) Draft and Draft Again
Take the time to write more than one draft of every essay. You're trying to capture your voice in a fairly brief space. Get other people to read your drafts. These two-ish pages are all you have to convince a committee of people to give you tens of thousands of dollars over the course of several years. They'd better be good.

3) Get Advice
Many schools have seminars for fellowship applications, or even staff/faculty members who will help you edit. There are also convenient lists of previous awardees by school: you can ask them for help (though they may not have the time to give it). Read the FAQs. Find advice online.

4) Feel Free to Ignore Advice
If you are given advice you think is really bad, like someone telling you to write your research proposal entirely in iambic pentameter, fell free to ignore it. Your application should represent you, and what you want to do. Don't try and pretend you were Mother Theresa to improve your broader impacts score: be honest about what you have done, and what you think you can achieve. If there's advice about talking about what languages you can code in, and you're an experimental biologist, ignore that.

5) Start Early
This ties back to the second bullet. It takes time to craft a solid essay, to do the literature review for research proposal. Occasionally, you need to set it aside, walk away from it, and come back with a fresh mind set. Sometimes, you can't spot the typo, because you've gotten used to seeing it that way.

6) Get Editing Help
You, most likely, are not an English major. This is perfectly logical, given you're currently applying to graduate fellowships for engineers. I highly recommend finding one to look over your personal statements. It's amazing how much bad grammar can distract from your message. Also, as far as your research proposal is concerned, find a friend in a different subfield to help you eliminate jargon. The committee judging your application will have a background in your general field, but the odds that they are an expert in any particular subfield are rather low. Avoid using TLAs (three letter acronyms) without explanation, or other abbreviations. You may now exactly what a LJ12-6 potential is, but your reviewers may not.

7) Read the Requirements!
Because if you don't, you've already doomed your chances. It's hard to reiterate this one enough.

8) Keep Track of Deadlines
Each fellowship has a different deadline. You really, really don't want to miss them. One way to deal with this is to set yourself deadlines earlier for things like full drafts. Mark them on your calendar. Make note of times to check that your supplementary materials, like transcripts and letters of recommendation, have been sent. If one piece is missing, it's more or less like the entire application was never submitted.

9)Don't Be Afraid to Nag References
And Dr. Isis will back me up on this one. Check online to make sure the letters have arrived. Sometimes, computers freeze at exactly the wrong time. I can say from experience that if you don't double check, things can go wrong.

Graduate Fellowships for Engineers (part I)

While the deadlines for most fellowship applications may not be until November or December, much like college applications, summer is a great time to start thinking about them.  For most fellowship, you will have to write a personal statement about why you want to be a scientist, as well as a research proposal of some sort (i.e., the kind of science you want to do). These two documents are the most significant part of your application (transcripts and letters of recommendation matter too, but not as much). Logically, you will want to polish these over time, and get input from others. This doesn't happen overnight, so it's better to start sooner than later.

While there are university-specific fellowships at some schools, I'm going to focus on the national level ones. Please note that these are the ones I found relevant when I was applying, and others may exist for those who are not computational materials scientists.

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program: This is probably the most well known of the US government fellowships. It is also one of the most challenging statements to write because of the Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts requirements. It's less challenging to describe why the research you want to do is worthwhile, and why you're a good person to be doing it: this is something you probably think about anyway. Broader impacts, the impact of your work outside of the scientific community, is more challenging. Being involved with outreach programs is helpful, but you have to be able to effectively convey this briefly. You will quickly discover page limits are one of your biggest enemies.

Many universities offer seminars and help sessions for fellowship applications, especially NSF GRFP. Go to these!

The NSF GRFP is a 3 year fellowship, with $30,000 a year in stipend, plus tuition expenses. You can only apply during the first two years of your PhD program, but it is deferrable should you have money from another fellowship. I do not know if they will cover things like health insurance.

The Department of Defense has two major fellowship programs: NDSEG and SMART, which stand for National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate and Science, Mathematics and Research for Transformation, respectively. NDESG is a 3 year fellowship that increases slightly each year, from $30,500 to $31,500, which cannot be deferred. The fellowship also covers tuition, and up to $1000 of health insurance costs.

SMART can last for longer, but comes with a service requirement. During the summer term, you work at one of the DoD labs, and following graduation, you are contracted to work for the DoD for one year for each year of funding received. This is an excellent route for those interested in government service, since you are both supported as a student, and guaranteed a job at the end. You are funded at $25,000/year stipend plus tution.

If you have a TA requirement for your degree, this can be tricky to arrange with either DoD fellowship, as both limit your "other" funding to $5,000 a year without specific written requests.

The Department of Energy recently started offering a general graduate student fellowship[ in addition to their computational fellowship programs, the SCGF and CSGF respectively. The SCGF offers a stipend of $35,000 and tuition up to $10,500, as well as up to $5,000 a year to cover things like conference travel, research supplies, relevant books, and even some computer equipment. The fellowship must be renewed annually based on progress, with an annual conference for all DoE fellows.  The CSGF has a stipend rate of $36,000 annually, payment of all tuition, and is annually renewable for up to four years. Teaching assistantships must be approved by the fellowship program.

Outside of the government, the Hertz Graduate Fellowship is funded at $31,000/9 months (unpaid summers), renewable for up to five years. However, it is limited to certain universities, so check if yours is on the list.

In the next part, I'll actually talk about some of the tips and tricks for successful applications. Tip One: Apply!

EDIT: Here's a list of additional fellowships mentioned in the comments:

http://www.epa.gov/ncer/rfa/2011/2011_star_gradfellow.html