Fellowship applications

Over the last few months, I applied for the three big science fellowships, offered by the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, and Hertz Foundation. I had repeatedly heard about the NSF fellowship as an undergrad, but was unfamiliar with the other two until I stumbled across an excellent article by Philip Guo detailing these fellowships--the motivations that each organization has for offering them, how to approach the essays, etc.

The application for the Hertz fellowship was the first graduate school related application that I filled out, so I spent a lot of time preparing the essays for it. In addition to providing a resume, I had to write four essays:
1. How did you choose your field and what are your primary expectations of your future career?
2. How do your proposed field of study and career constitute an application of the physical sciences or engineering?
3. What are the considerations involved in your choice of graduate school?
4. Include here information about your favored extracurricular and leisure time activities since your graduation from high school.

I was able to easily recycle essay 1 from my Hertz application into my NSF application, which asked for a statement on my previous research and preparation for grad school; a research proposal; and a personal statement. In talking to graduate students and looking around online, I received conflicting advice about the research proposal. One graduate student (who did not receive the fellowship) was convinced that non-chemists might be evaluating my application, and so I should not make the proposal overly technical. Others indicated that I should write the proposal using language similar to what would be found in a journal article. My uncertainty about what level to write at, in addition to my lack of ideas on what to write about, left me feeling very stressed about the research proposal. But I found that once I sat down to do it, it was easy to bang out in a day.

The DoD application was due on Jan. 5, which ended up being after all of my grad school application deadlines. Armed with my collection of essays from five graduate school applications and the Hertz and NSF applications, I was able to fill out the DoD application in an afternoon.

Some general advice:

Start thinking about the whole process by early September. The Hertz and NSF deadlines are quite early and will sneak up on you, especially if you're in school. This happened to me and I should have given my recommenders more notice--it took me a while to decide whether applying for the Hertz was even worth the trouble (about 15 fellowships are awarded to a self-selecting pool of 800 applicants, so approximately 2% of applicants receive the fellowship), and by the time I decided to apply, only three weeks remained until the deadline.

Stay organized with a spreadsheet or some other list detailing whether particular documents have been sent to each fellowship organization / school. I ran into some confusion over who I'd sent my transcripts to, because the process involves submitting a form that I never made a copy of. You may think you'll remember that you sent a transcript to DoD three months ahead of the deadline, but by the time late December rolls around, you may no longer be so sure.

Don't get too stressed out about the whole process. When I was worried about my NSF proposal, I had to remind myself that nothing bad would happen if I didn't receive a fellowship--as a chemistry student, I'd still be fortunate enough to receive a stipend and have my tuition covered by the department.