I am a 2021 NSF Graduate Research Fellow. In keeping with the theme of these sections, here’s some advice. Shoutout to Jon Hoffman for asking me questions and kickstarting this set of unsolicited thoughts.
If you are curious about my proposal/reviews I am happy to share them on request, along with drafts and personal advice within reason.
-
Have a couple of ideas for proposals, but most likely the strongest thing you can write on is building off whatever your most intense experience has been on — mine was designed to build on work I was already working on. I had a list with three ideas that I sent to my PI/mentor/advisor and he suggested that I would be able to build a more cohesive, well-developed proposal building off my past/current work.
-
They’re not kidding about broader impacts, in my reading of multitudes of blog posts and advice listicles, I found that this is a really common weak area. I had the good fortune to have been actively involved in science outreach and teaching and mentoring activities throughout undergrad. Mention everything that fills the criteria, but also examine the criteria closely – there are unconventional aspects to the notion of broader impacts and hopefully you can tell a narrative of consistent broader impacts work.
-
Apply broadly — find things that you’re eligible in your field for. I also applied for the Hertz Fellowship and the Stanford-specific Knight-Hennessy Fellowship and was going to apply to the Ford Foundation fellowship but dropped the ball by about 3 hours (ope). Especially with highly competitive fellowships, it is best to apply to more because the chances of winning any one are often fairly low, statistically speaking. It’s also important though to note that there are different aspects valued by different fellowships – what is a perfect fit for one person’s story might not be perfect for someone else and that is good, but you should make sure to tailor your applications to each application
-
Find a person in your field who you trust to read things over — your research advisor/PI is an especially good choice if possible, especially as professors often serve as grant reviewers and may have advice or experience in writing grants. Talk to people who care about your professional development about the idea of applying to fellowships and see if they’ll read things over for you. My PI/mentor/advisor offered to do so with the caveat that he doesn’t typically read undergraduate grants so he might be a bit “harsh” (his words not mine). I think my proposal was much stronger because of his “harsh” feedback.
-
Think deeply and carefully about your hypothesis. This is feedback I got on my first outline from my PI — by choosing a specific hypothesis, you can better design experiments to really deeply address these. I thought choosing fairly well established techniques made my proposal plausible given the ambitious thing I’m trying to do in it, but got a bit of flak from a reviewer and they said I could “be a bit more creative” – on the flip side, if you overcomplicate things, your writing might be hard to follow or your proposal might be viewed as implausible.
-
Have fun with writing your research proposal — this is your chance to propose scientific experiments that you are excited about. There’s an extent to which you can kind of “assume” things will work when you are writing, which is fun, but it is important to identify caveats and plan things to help differentiate confounding data.
-
When you’re developing your hypothesis, think about what experiments would immediately break your hypothesis. If your hypothesis can be immediately broken and breaking it would also make the rest of your proposed work useless, you should think carefully – it might be wiser to think about a way to write aims and a hypothesis where the experiments that you propose will yield potentially useful information regardless of whether your hypothesis is correct. Make sure people haven’t done what you’re proposing — this is where using an area you’ve worked in for a bit is really valuable.
For a basic overview of the NSF GRFP and common advice and samples, everyone links the same few sites. A basic Google search will bring those up quickly. I’ve been trying to find one more obscure site in particular that I found really really helpful as I was writing my research proposal, but in the meantime, these ones provided useful advice and also are not the same sites linked by everyone else