NSF Fellowship, revisited

NSF just announced the remainder of the graduate research fellowship award recipients, bringing the total to 1236 for the year. Unfortunately, my name was not on the list.

I received an honorable mention. This is supposed to signify that NSF thinks I am worth funding, but there were enough people higher than me on the list that I didn't make the cut. But honorable mention feels sort of like a consolation prize that you get just for trying (this is not actually the case since many applicants get rejected without honorable mention), since it just comes with some supercomputer access that I doubt I will use.

Before the results were announced, I was looking forward to seeing my ratings sheets so that if I did not win, I would be able to get some useful feedback on how to improve my application for next year. NSF sent me an email about the ratings sheets just ten minutes after sending the honorable mention notification. There are three ratings sheets, each consisting of two ratings for the award criteria ("intellectual merit" and "broader impacts"), with each rating followed by a one-paragraph explanation. I received three "excellent" ratings and three "very good" ratings, and all of the explanatory text was glowing. There was only one bit of criticism about my research proposal, but it came from someone who gave me an "excellent" on intellectual merit, so I can't imagine it carried much weight. I'm not annoyed that I got an honorable mention--I understand that there were weaknesses in my application and that these evaluations are somewhat arbitrary--but what irks me is that there is no indication of why I received "very good" instead of "excellent" ratings where I did, nor of how I could improve my application in the future. I was really hoping for more detailed comments--ideally, scanned printouts of my essays so that the reviewers could make comments by hand and point out their thoughts on certain parts--but now I am quite disappointed in the feedback system.