NDSEG Fellowship

"We regret to inform you that we cannot fund you for an NDSEG Fellowship. The selection process was very thorough; your application was reviewed by many experts in your discipline. NDSEG is very competitive and there were many more qualified applicants than could be funded; of the over 2,000 submitted applications, only 200 will be funded. It is possible that you will be eligible to apply again next year for the NDSEG Fellowship. Unfortunately, we are not able to provide any feedback on your application, but please feel free to contact us if you have any other questions. We encourage you to continue with your educational goals and wish you success in your future endeavors.

Sincerely,

The NDSEG Program Team at ASEE"

A couple of days ago when I was trying to find out when the award notifications would be made, I came across this forum at thegradcafe.com. Somehow, it was comforting to see that other people were stressing out about the award way more than I was. They may have had good reason--funding in other fields, even those of interest to the NDSEG fellowship committee, may be harder to come by than it is for chemistry graduate programs. But I have decided to take a no-stress approach to fellowships: it would be nice to receive one, but it really doesn't matter. The fellowship stipend tends to be a few thousand dollars a year more than what the programs I'm looking at pay (~30,000 vs ~27,000). Of course, there is also the flexibility that comes with having your tuition and stipend covered, but after my visits I'm not too concerned about not being able to work for someone because of funding issues (we'll see how naive this turns out to be). Going into the fellowship application process with this mentality that the fellowships aren't so important made it a lot less stressful, and coming out of it with this mentality will prevent me from having this urge to check my email every 30 seconds until I hear from NSF--which, as far as I can tell, will happen some time in the next two weeks.