Sat 07 October 2023
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.
As a current PhD student, I have had the opportunity to coach aspiring applicants through research projects, and now have a much better understanding than I did at the time.
I want to eventually write down the advice that I give to mentees all in one place with links, not because I think I'm a particularly important specific personality to get admissions advice from, but just because I want one place I can point people to to read first so I don't have to repeat myself as much 🤣. However, I don't really have the time to write that essay out for now.
However, one easy thing I can do now is share my successful National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP) application materials, as well as the feedback I recieved. Feedback from more senior colleagues who had successfully applied, and from mentors who had helped others successfully apply were both instrumental in my success in applying for the fellowship, and I have been privately sending my materials to all who have asked for years. However, I can't really think of a good reason to not just post them publicly directly, so see below for links.
When you apply for the NSF GRFP, in addition to getting 3 recommendation letters, you have to complete two statements, a "Graduate Research Plan Statement" and a personal statement ("Personal, Relevant Background, and Future Goals Statement"). Additionally, you provide your CV. Here's what I submitted:
After you apply, you get feedback from the reviewers (whether your application was accepted or rejected). Here's the feedback I got:
I think the following were key elements to my success:
I absolutely went to town bolding, italicizing, underlining and combination-of-those-three formatting the text in my statements. Please make sure you do this (with taste) in order to hammer home the few key points from each set of paragraphs, to highlight the key definitions, etc. I even write my papers this way, it really helps make sure readers don't miss key points.
My proposed project was a direct continuation of my demonstrated experience. Even though GRFP reviewers are explicitly told they're reviewing candidates, not project proposals, and that the proposal is a sample project, not a commitment, they still may judge your proposal like it's any other NSF proposal. Write a proposal describing what you think you can most convincingly show them that you can do right now and then pivot to what you actually want to do once you have the award.
I applied in the electrical engineering track rather than the computer science track. I did this for several reasons; I was applying to a mixture of CS and ECE programs (NLP and Speech broadly) and had more of a speech background, so applying as ECE made sense to match up to my strongest-project-I-can-execute (see 1.).
Furthermore, I think I benefited applying as a deep learning person within ECE because those reviewers were probably seeing a much more diverse range of proposals—people working on signal processing, people working on power efficiency, etc were all in my pool—had I applied as a CS person perhaps they would have not found this invocation of deep learning as novel or exciting.
My description of a research agenda of pretraining good adaptable deep learning backbones (which was very much the zeitgeist at that time) for the specific problem area of clinical speech analysis (which is an easy-to-motivate problem but not a massive research community) perhaps gave me a best-of-both-worlds outcome where readers didn't view me as yet another exhausting applicant trying to ride the DL zeitgeist. Maybe consider this before building your app around LLMs 😉. Also, GRFP panels are explicitly trying to have balance, and award grants to a wide array of topics. In a less crowded field your chances are better!
Finally, I think my application went well because I was able to convincingly motivate why I'm interested in the problem area I proposed (neurological disease) by relating it to my own personal story (having a neurological disease).
(I didn't originally plan to do this, but was suggested to do so by mentors). I think this improved my application by further convincing the panel that I'm a good pick for someone to advance that area, and it served double duty with implicitly justifying deficiencies in my CV that were impacted by my condition.
If you have any further questions (too late for this for the 2023 app cycle probably) about applying to the GRFP, or if you have your own previous successful application materials that you would like to share with me so I can distribute them as examples for other prospective applicants please email me.
Category: Career; Tags: PhD, Admissions, NSF GRFP, Applications