Reflections and advice from my (completely) successful NSF GRFP proposal and (sufficiently) successful PhD applications in NLP. Why I think my applications worked well, what I wish I did differently, and links to my actual statements and feedback from the GRFP reviewing panel.
Preprinting and promoting one's work online is one of the most impactful and accessible career advancement methods for early-career researchers. Policies that hinder this process are thus disproportionately harmful to early career scientists, relative to their senior peers. As online promotion is more accessible than traditional routes of namebuilding, we contend that depriving "low-prestige institution"-affiliated early-career researchers of this avenue for self-advancement futher disproportionately harms them relative to their "high-prestige" peers. Finally, a broad culture of posting quality preprints has community-level and scientific benefits. We contend that the ACL anonymity policy is harmful for the ways in which it forces early-career researchers (ECRs) to choose between participating in ACL or doing what's best for their careers.
To test that my blog implementation works, I'll share my pytorchlightning-based replication of dataset cartography!