Applying for Fellowships

Here are a few pointers when applying for Fellowships and at the bottom are a couple of the essays I submitted:

· Start EARLY! This is always the first tip, and most important!!! You will run out of time, especially if you are applying while in your first semester of graduate school. I didn’t even think about fellowship applications until the end of September, but I wish I had started earlier!!! When most of the applications were due I had a research project that I was trying to finish up for submission to be published-meaning I had no time and was CRAZY busy.

· Talk to the fellowship office at your current university. I happened on this by chance when I received an email from Purdue about $500 just for applying to a national fellowship. I went to the workshop and it really opened my eyes to what I should be doing. GOOGLE for every fellowship you qualify for! A lot of them require you to be a first or second year graduate student, so don’t give up if you don’t get one the first year!

· Use your universities resources! This was huge for me. When you are writing these essays, they matter a LOT, especially if you don’t have any publications, which was the case for me. I sent my essays to the people in the fellowship office to review and critique my essays, and then I sent the essays to my professors and advisors, and did a few iterations of this. These fellowship people might not be in your field, but they are super smart and know what these fellowships look for. I got advice on what to add and take out of my essays, and they are the grammar/punctuation crazy people!

· Start writing your essays early. I thought I would be able to use the same essays for each of the fellowship applications, but after sending them to the fellowship office the feedback I received was a bit brutal, and they said I needed to target different aspects for each fellowship. NSF cares about intellectual merit and broader impact, such as how your project will help save the world and solve world hunger or something, whereas NDSEG cares about how you could help the department of defense and keep our country safe.