NSF Fellowship

A few days ago, NSF posted a list of recipients of the 2009 graduate research fellowships. NSF awarded 950 fellowships, which is on par with previous years (from 2005 to 2008, the numbers were 1024, 909, 920, and 913). This year, however, a notice was posted on the website along with the released names:

"Due to the complexity of the current budget situation, the 2009 GRFP awards will be announced in installments based on fields of study and other factors. The first installment is now available on FastLane. Awardees, as well as Applicants not recommended for funding, have been notified by email. Recipients of Honorable Mention and any additional Fellowship award offers will be forthcoming. Applicant ratings sheets will be available after all award announcements have been made. We thank you for your patience."

As luck would have it, my name is not on the award list, nor did I get a rejection email. So despite the delay in announcing the award recipients (which was originally supposed to be done in late March), I am still no closer to knowing whether or not I received an award. I hear there are about 2000 people in my boat--roughly 20% of the applicant pool.

During the week or two preceding the award announcements, the NSF GRFP forum at The Grad Cafe was very active, with new posts every few minutes as people scrutinized every minor change in the website to try to figure out when the results might be released. This provided for some valuable camaraderie among the people (myself included) who were sick of waiting for the results and getting no answers from NSF. For a brief period, people were able to access their ratings sheets by submitting a request to have their username/password sent to them by email; however, NSF disabled this very quickly after it was discovered, so only a few people saw their sheets. People kept holding out hope that there would be some other glitch leading to leaked results, but no such thing happened this year.

According to people who called NSF, the main reason for the delay was budget complexities--NSF simply did not know how many fellowships it could fund. The number was anticipated to be higher than normal, but it looks like the size of that funding difference was (and apparently still is) in question. NSF has received stimulus package money, but it's unclear how much of that (if any) will go to graduate research fellowships. Presumably because some people needed to make graduate school decisions based on whether or not they received a fellowship, the NSF released a first round of results probably listing most of the award recipients.

So at this point I am thinking I will probably receive an honorable mention, and there is a small chance I will receive an award, depending on how much funding is made available. My guess is that the number of second-round awards won't be trivial (or else why would the NSF have gone to all this trouble?), but I have no idea if it will be closer to 100 or 1000.