Graduate Research Fellowship Program

The narrative statement, limited to three pages, should allow the reviewers to gain a clear understanding of the applicant’s (your) personal attraction to STEM, pertinent background, and long-term career goals. Engage in a visioning exercise to first develop and then share the academic milestones you intend to achieve and professional opportunities you foresee seeking as part of your comprehensive personal development plan. Identify your individual connection to science, prior experiences, personal characteristics, and proposed graduate school opportunities that will permit you to make fundamental scientific discoveries or advance technological frontiers. In describing unique science stories, experiences, and preparation, you need not limit these to your proposed field of graduate study. Explicitly communicate the link between your proposed advances to STEM knowledge and their potential for broader societal impact. Your narrative statement should provide a coherent direction to reviewers regarding how your experiences, skills, and accomplishments align with the intellectual merit and broader societal impacts of your proposed research.

Formulate the personal narrative to illustrate experiences that have informed your decision to seek graduate education in a STEM field: e.g., how you overcame a personal challenge or adversity to excel in STEM disciplines; how you parlayed your academic interest and performance in a specific course into a research project; or what you learned during an industrial internship about the implications of scientific and engineering research in transforming the future of work. If you have performed research in an academic, government, or industry laboratory, clearly communicate the specifics roles that you played, e.g., independently performed preliminary design of experimental apparatus and then collaborated with a team to produce and test a prototype. Moreover, discuss the skills that you developed or honed through your research experience and its value for your graduate career. Explicitly describe the opportunities that you engaged in to develop your personal, academic, or research profile, e.g., attended research or project-review seminars where you participated by presenting your own work, interacted with seminar speakers to discuss their work’s implications to your own research and sought their guidance, etc.; presented talks or demonstrations to broader audiences about your internship, e.g., K-12 teachers, students, and parents, or marketing and service departments, among others. In narrating the aforementioned activities and experiences, purposefully showcase their outcomes (for example, learned to communicate findings of STEM research to non-STEM audiences) and their role in preparing you for your long-term career aspirations (for example, your unique capacity to perform research at the convergence of frontier technologies and your skills in communicating cutting edge research to non-scientific audiences will allow you to pursue professional development opportunities in STEM policy development as a AAAS Fellow).

Upon graduation, NSF Fellows join the ranks of internationally renowned specialists in their fields. Moreover, they continue to grow their professional expertise through scientific and engineering advances, both in research and training. Your narrative statement should reflect your preparation, potential, and fortitude to excel similarly at a high level in your own professional career.

For those who have finished over a year of graduate or post-baccalaureate coursework, or a professional degree with a break of a minimum of two years, kindly provide an explanation for the same.

As you begin the task of composing your narrative statement, following questions may help you engage in some self-reflection. Such an exercise, done in a purposeful manner, can enable you to uncover some powerful stories and experiences that can aid in the creation of an authentic personal statement.

1. Why does your specific field of research appeal to you?
2. What are your unique skills and leadership traits that are relevant to your specific field?
3. What personal characteristics and strengths make you a strong candidate?
4. How will the fellowship award help you achieve your career aspirations?
5. What varied research experiences have you had that are applicable to your graduate career and professional aspirations?
6. For each research experience, characterize the following: key questions, methodology, findings, and conclusions.
7. During your research or internship experiences, what did you independently and what did you do as part of a team?
8. What did you do to analyze the results?
9. How did your prior activities address the Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts criteria?

Even though this is a personal narrative, this should not be used for simply boasting about one’s capabilities, skills, successes, etc. Instead, the narrative statement should be informed by how varied experiences, individuals, organizations, etc., shaped you as an individual and imparted the varied capabilities, skills, habits, etc., that allowed you to enjoy the successes you have had. So instead of simply turning the lens of this essay to focus on you, turn it outwards to discover and identify externalities that allowed you to become you.

The Broader Impacts criterion is concerned with the potential societal benefit. An applicant’s prior personal, professional, and educational endeavors and goals and aspirations for future provide critical information that can be utilized to assess his or her potential for boarder impact. There are no universally applicable formulations concerning how an applicant can demonstrate potential for future broader impact. For example, it is possible that an applicant’s primary research activities in a scientific or engineering domain are directly amenable to demonstrable societal benefit, broadly and beyond just the creation of new knowledge. Alternatively, another applicant may engage in secondary activities that support or complement the main goal of the project to create broader societal benefit. The National Science Foundation places high value on activities whose direct outcomes are of inherent benefit to the society. Some illustrative examples include:

• Increased participation of women, people with special needs, and underrepresented minorities in STEM (host undergraduate students for summer research internships).
• Improved STEM education at all levels (e.g., engaging high school students in research, collaborating with K-12 teachers to develop learning modules that are informed by your research).
• Increased scientific literacy and public engagement with science and technology (e.g., presenting an exhibit, demonstration, or hands-on activity at a local science museum).
• Development of a diverse, globally competitive STEM workforce (conduct a workshop for industry practitioners at a professional conference).
• Increased economic competitiveness of the US (disseminate your research database, algorithms, tool design, etc., through community resources such as GitHub).
• Improved national security.

1. Choose the primary field before writing research statement: There is no shortcut to determine the perfect primary field fit for your application. Nonetheless, recall that the primary field selected by you will determine which GRFP panel will review your application. It is recommended that you carefully review the available disciplinary and specialization level primary fields and select one that is most closely related to your proposed graduate program major and research specialization. This has to be an area that you are intimately familiar with through your academic, research, or internship activities. You must be passionate about this area to the extent that you are willing to devote next several years to explore it deeply. Your personal statement ought to provide concrete evidence of your preparation for this field and your research statement must provide an exciting yet achievable plan of research in this field. An advantage of selecting a primary field in which you have worked previously includes the awareness of and familiarity with the various norms of this field, e.g., vocabulary and phrases; research frameworks and methods; claim, evidence, and reasoning chain; etc. The GRFP portal primary field selection prompt allows ‘Interdisciplinary’ and ‘Others’ options, however caution is suggested in selecting these. Panels that review proposals under these two categories will include experts from varied fields under the specific interdisciplinary category and it may be relatively difficult for an application to be considered novel by experts from two or more disparate fields. Thus, the selection of ‘Interdisciplinary’ and ‘Others’ option is suggested for truly novel proposals that have the potential to impact multiple disciplines.
2. Identify and focus on a knowledge gap: Instead of funding isolated projects that may well be worthy of support, NSF is known to bet on people who have the potential to discover new scientific knowledge and advance technology frontiers. Nonetheless, it is important to understand that for the GRFP application your research proposal has to be creative and novel allowing you to distinguish yourselves from your peers. Thus, in crafting your research plan, begin by identifying a knowledge gap or a gray area where your creative ideas can instigate new discoveries and advances, thereby changing science. Moreover, your personal statement has to showcase that you are academically well prepared, possess unique experiences and a high degree of motivation, and are worthy of the panel betting on you to emerge as a leader of your discipline in due course. As suggested previously, to learn about the emerging research directions, review recent GRFP awards in your primary field and recent research grants received by faculty in your primary field.
3. Develop your research statement: In preparation for developing your research statement, first draw on your education, research, or internship experiences to identify a broad area of research for your graduate studies. Second, conduct a literature review and consult with faculty mentors and laboratory colleagues to narrow down the topic of your proposed graduate research. Third, based on above, prepare a list of points that you wish to highlight in your research statement. Fourth, use this itemized list to organize and create a section-by-section outline of your research statement. Having created the above outline, begin developing the draft of your research statement. Since the first impression is the last impression, experiment with crafting the opening paragraph of your research statement that is broadly appealing and engaging so that it holds the readers’ interest to keep reading further. Next, start developing the introduction and background statements that narrow down to your intended research and connect back to the opening paragraph. Here, be mindful to highlight the knowledge gap you identified and its importance to your research in particular and to your field in general. Continue further development of your research plan by addressing your hypothesis, research methods, and expected outcomes. Finally, ensure a compelling end to your research statement by communicating how your research addresses the Intellectual Merits and Broader Impact review criteria.
4. Communicate directly to the review panel: Research indicates that human beings are universally predisposed to the “narrative format” of communication for interpreting, comprehending, experiencing, and making sense of the world. Thus, the GRFP applicants should consider crafting their personal statement to tell a story, using it as an opportunity to personally communicate with the reviewers. The personal statement should draw and retain the attention of panelists and make a compelling impact on them. Your only target audience in the personal statement is the review panel and thus you ought to respond to the types of questions that the panel may be seeking answers for in your statements.
5. Take aim at the target and hit it right away: The GRFP statements need to be precise and concise. It is suggested that you stick to your natural writing style without relying on unusual vocabulary or idioms that you have not used previously and that are not common in your field. Use simple sentence structures that are easy to decipher for the panelists. Use a writing style with active (instead of passive) voice.
6. Address the merit review criteria: The review panel assesses GRFP applications based on the Intellectual Merit and Broader Impact criteria. It cannot be stressed enough that you should explicitly address the two merit review criteria explicitly in your narrative statements and highlight them so that they not buried with the rest of the text.
7. Mention your shortcomings, if any: It is important to have a realistic self-awareness of one self. If you believe that you have a shortcoming that can potentially undermine your application, then it is best to address it effectively in your application. Do this in a manner that honestly addresses your past shortcoming, reasons for it, and how you have or plan to overcome it. Although no one is perfect, it is crucial to be aware of one’s shortcoming and having a strategy to overcome it.
8. Use graphics, images, and tables: Each GRFP panelists may review several dozen applications. You can strategically use graphics, images, and tables to effectively highlight and communicate your ideas, ensuring that they received the required attention. However, if and when you employ this strategy, make sure that you appropriately label your graphics and size them to make them legible.
9. Apply design thinking: Design thinking is a creative problem-solving process used by innovators to break down complex problems into meaningful and achievable small sub-problems to drive real impact. Such a process can be utilized in preparing your two GRFP statements. The five stages of the process are: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.
10. Avoid common pitfalls: Make sure that you review and revise your statements several times. After you have done so yourself, ask your colleagues and mentors for feedback. As you undertake this review, pay particular attention to avoid following common mistakes.
    • Not addressing review criteria explicitly and sufficiently: Your research and personal statements need to explicitly address “both” the Intellectual Merit and Broader Impact of your proposed work.
    • Poor writing: Do not make spelling, punctuation, or grammar errors. These will distract the reviewers from focusing on the intellectual merit and broader impact of your proposed work and you will lose credibility with them.
    • Selecting wrong primary field: Consult with your mentor if you have any doubt about the most relevant primary field for your research. A mistake in this regard can cause your proposal to be assigned to a panel that may not be able to give it due consideration.
    • Lack of research focus: Do not give a shallow discussion about several broad topics. If your research builds on these topics, then explicitly illustrate how you connect these through a deep discussion.
    • Failure to link education preparation with research: You should explicitly explain how your education has prepared you to dive into your proposed field of research and to be successful.
    • Stale research topic: Seeking funding in an area that has been previously supported is not helpful. Carefully explore the status of your research field and seek funding in an emerging area of research that may have only recently started attracting interest. Find out terra incognita in this field and focus on that.
    • Lack of background research: Do not neglect to include and cite prior research literature in your field.
    • Violating page or word limits: Do not go beyond the allowable page or word limits.

1. Choosing reference letter writers: Reference letters are an essential part of your application, thus selecting appropriate letter writers is of paramount importance. Applicants can submit up to five name of letter writers and prioritize three for reading by the review panel. It is a recommended to get two extra letters, just in case. Your proposed research supervisor ought to be one of the reference letter writers. The two remaining letters can be from your research or internship mentors or professors with whom you have done coursework.
2. Diversity of information in reference letters: Each reference letter represents an opportunity to highlight and communicate a distinct quality or strength that you possess. The page limits of GRFP statements can prevent you from communicating all of your relevant characteristics to the review panel. Thus, it is important that all letter writers know you well and they bring out at least one unique quality about you that you have not addressed explicitly in the application. Ideally, they should be able to support what and how they think about you through illustrative examples of specific encounters (e.g., what was the situation, what task was to be accomplished, what actions did you take, and what was the end result).

1. Submit your application at least a day early: Make sure that you have reviewed all your application materials and statement for accuracy, compiled it all in one place, and uploaded it in the GRFP application portal at least one day in advance of the deadline. Having worked on it for last two or three months, there is little you will be able to add to enhance your application meaningfully. Rushing on the last day to edit or submit application can be stressful and the rush can often cause you to make mistakes (e.g. not uploading correct version of document, etc.). The GRFP application portal converts the documents you upload into PDF formal (it even redistills PDF documents) and sometimes you may find that your narrative statements no longer fit within the required page limit upon PDF conversion! Finding these issues late in the game will be stressful, it may even result in a submission that is deemed failing to meet requirements and thus turned down without review. Thus, be kind to yourselves and everyone else who has supported you through the GRFP application process (including your letter writers) by completing your submission a day early.
2. Re-apply: It is difficult for most people to overcome rejection and failure. However, with competitive awards and grants such as GRFP, it is highly advisable that if you fail in your first application attempt (as a senior undergraduate) then you make use of your second opportunity to apply (as a graduate student). Moreover, you should also seek out and apply for other graduate fellowship opportunities (see list on this website). If your GRFP application is declined, you usually receive feedback from the review panel about the aspects lacking in your application. You can use this feedback to effectively prepare your application for your second GRFP application opportunity.