CS Grad Programs: NSF GRFP and DoD NDSEG - acmutd/help-guide GitHub Wiki

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)

The GRFP is perhaps one of the most important fellowships you will apply for. You typically apply a year before you would start your PhD studies. For most, this is the Fall of their senior year. The GRFP provides you funding for up to three years of PhD study, which gives you extreme freedom for choosing your advisor and not TA-ing intro classes during your graduate studies. Furthermore, it is considered extremely prestigious.

Unlike the Goldwater, you do not need to be nominated by your university for this (as of Feb. 2021). This means that there are more applicants from each university, and also that universities like MIT and Harvard have many students who receive this fellowship. Nonetheless, there are always a few students from UTD each year who also receive it.

I was awarded Honorable Mention when I applied my senior year. Here are my application materials: personal statement, research statement, feedback / reviews on my application from NSF. Note that the GRFP is essentially a more intense Goldwater in that the research statement and personal statements are significantly longer. There is also a focus on "broader impacts" of both your research and extra-curricular activities: this is something I did not expect when applying for competitive research scholarships. I.e. my experiences in student organizations at UTD actually came in handy!

Honorable mention doesn't give you any $$, so it's just a line that you stick on your resume. You can apply for the GRFP a total of two times, and this can be split across undergrad and grad school (i.e. can apply once in undergrad, and again in grad). To get a general idea of the selection process, I recommend carefully reading through the GRFP program solicitation. Make sure you look for the updated one for the year you are applying for. Some things may change between years!

Similar to Goldwater, get every professor you know to read your application and give you feedback. I had 5 professors who gave me feedback, in addition to some of my friends. In addition, getting feedback from previous GRFP winners / Honorable mentions can also be helpful.

I'm not going to go too much into detail about what you should focus on in the application, because there are a whole lot of resources online:

• Compiled Successful NSF GRFP Apps - This HUGE list of successful apps was compiled by Alex Lang. I heavily referenced many of the apps when writing my own GRFP and DoD apps. He also lists many more additional resources on the "Tips for Getting Started" section on this page of his site.

Department of Defense (DoD NDSEG)

This is similar to the GRFP in that it is a competitive scholarship which funds two to three years of your graduate study. It actually pays out a higher stipend than the GRFP! Most people work on GRFP first, then copy pasta their stuff into the DoD NDSEG application. You also have to focus a bit on a particular application of your work within the DoD, which you can get your advisor to help you out with. Here were my application materials: personal statement, research statement.