Delays, uncertainty plague NSF fellowship for graduate students

From ScienceMag:

One of the premier U.S. graduate fellowships is mired in uncertainty as would-be applicants await overdue details about how to apply for the upcoming year’s awards. The National Science Foundation (NSF) usually releases the application guidelines for its flagship Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) in mid-July, giving applicants at least 90 days to prepare materials before an October deadline. But for weeks NSF’s website has read “solicitation coming soon,” leaving many frustrated and confused.

It’s not clear what’s caused the delay. An NSF spokesperson told Science on 26 August that the solicitation was in development. When asked for an update this week, they wrote, “I don’t have anything for you at the moment but will let you know as soon as that changes.”

The current limbo adds to other recent deviations from the status quo for the program. In April, NSF gave out fewer than 1000 GRFP awards—a far cry from the 2000 it doled out the year before. The agency later added 500 more fellowships to this year’s award tally. But the final list drew accusations it favored applicants in certain fields, such as computer science.

Some took it as good news last week when the agency updated its website to indicate that this year’s applications would be due in late October. Previously, some had feared this year’s program wouldn’t happen at all.

But with just over a month before the deadlines, many hopeful applicants are growing increasingly impatient to see this year’s instructions and learn whether NSF has any surprises in store—such as a shift to embracing industry partnerships. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they release the solicitation with completely different instructions,” wrote a Reddit user in a group devoted to discussing GRFP applications.

For many students submitting to the GRFP, it’s their first experience putting together a grant proposal, says Brian O’Meara, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville who has been tracking updates to NSF’s website and sharing his thoughts about them online. So, “The more lead time the better,” he says, adding that “it will be important for potential applicants to know if they are even eligible before putting in the work to prepare to apply.”

NSF’s website states that any applicant submitting a fellowship or grant application to the agency will “have a minimum of 90 days from NSF’s announcement of a funding opportunity to prepare and submit a proposal.” Susan Brennan, a former GRFP director who now works at Stony Brook University, says that when she worked at NSF the 90-day cutoff was taken seriously. “If we were 1 day late with the solicitation, then we would have had to justify it, move the deadlines,” she says. “For some reason, we are now halfway along, and we are so very late that many students will not be able to apply this year, and it’s very concerning.”

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