Winning a nationally competitive fellowship is a highly prestigious accomplishment. This recognition will follow you for the rest of your scientific career. Having your own research money can afford more flexibility in terms of choosing a graduate program, research lab and/or project. Fellowships often provide funds for lab supplies, conference fees and travel expenses. As tedious as it may seem, the application process is a good exercise in grant writing, an extremely important skill to hone as a scientist. As long as you meet all of the applicant criteria, there’s really no reason not to apply for a fellowship.
Nationally competitive fellowships awarded most frequently to Stanford Biosciences graduate students are the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP, or simply NSF) and the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (NDSEG). Having said that, there are countless research fellowships from which to choose. At the end of this post you will find links to fellowship databases as well as a link to a list of fellowships available to minority students.
Here is some general advice relevant to the fellowship application process:
Getting organized
- Research fellowships, decide to which ones you’ll apply
- Make note of deadlines
- Generate a timeline by which materials must be submitted
- Become an expert on the fellowship philosophies and agendas (e.g. Broader Impacts carries a lot of weight in the NSF fellowship application)
- Develop an organization system for you applications (i.e. directories/subdirectories on your computer)
- Don’t procrastinate!
Requesting letters of recommendation
- Make sure you understand the recommendation letter criteria of the fellowship(s) to which you apply (e.g. how many are required?)
- If possible, ask for recommendation letters from the same people who wrote letters on your behalf for graduate school applications
- If you feel your current Stanford rotation advisor knows you well enough to write a recommendation letter for you, don’t hesitate to ask
- Be very clear in communicating what’s required of recommendation letter writers for any given fellowship (how/where/when to submit letters, required forms, etc.)
- Send a current CV/resumé to those who agree to write letters for you
- Send polite email reminders to your letter writers one or two weeks before the submission deadline
Obtaining input from peers and colleagues
- Read and learn from award-winning fellowship applications
- Have your parents, friends, classmates, etc. (as many people as possible!) read your personal essays and statements
- For more technical research proposals, have classmates, older grad students, postdocs, and/or advisors read your proposal(s)
- Ask for advice from anybody who has been awarded a research fellowship*
*Philip Guo is a Computer Science PhD student at Stanford who has written an informative article titled Advice for applying for graduate science fellowships: NSF, NDSEG, Hertz. If your goal is to win a research fellowship, I HIGHLY recommend reading this!!!
As mentioned previously, BioAIMS is hosting a ‘How to write an NSF’ workshop next week. Students who have been awarded the NSF fellowship will share their advice and provide NSF applications of past award recipients. If that’s not enough to entice you, there will be free lunch!
Fellowship Databases
Stanford offers a number of gradate fellowships. These will be the topic of a future post. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment or send me an email.
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