Half-Baked Tips for NSF-GRFP Applicants

1 Introduction

I applied for the NSF-GRFP this past cycle, and was lucky enough to be awarded the fellowship. I found this surprising considering the amount of awards was cut in half this year (boooo!), meaning the acceptance rate was likely under 10%. Now that being awarded the fellowship has gone to my head, I figured I would compile some resources and tips for those applying for the NSF-GRFP—specifically about writing the essays—that I think helped me. Please keep in mind that the advice here is a mish-mash of various pieces of advice I received when I was going through the application process.

2 How To Think About The Essays

As part of the application you have to write two essays: a personal statement, and a research statement. They have slightly different purposes, but should, together, tell a cohesive story. Like with most pieces of writing, you are trying to convince someone of something. You should really think about who you are trying to convince, and what you are trying to convince them of. I’ll spoil it: You are trying to convince professors in your discipline (but perhaps not your sub-discipline) to give you money for research. Upon reading your statements, you probably want your reviewer to believe the following things:

1. This person’s proposed research is important and would positively impact the world!
2. This person knows what they are doing and is uniquely suited to perform the proposed research!
3. If this person is funded, it will have large and broad positive impacts on science, people, and beyond!

The NSF-GRFP uses a rubric to score how well you did—and thus how likely you are to get the fellowship. You should tailor your essay to this rubric. There are two main categories you will be scored on:

• Intellectual Merit: “The Intellectual Merit criterion encompasses the potential to advance knowledge”
• Broader Impacts: “The Broader Impacts criterion encompasses the potential to benefit society and contribute to the achievement of specific, desired societal outcomes.”

The advice I have pretty much unanimously heard is that you should have a section for each of these two items in each of your two essays. Again, you very much should tailor your essays to the rubric you will be scored on. Beyond the rubric, though, I think it is also very important that you tell a story. Specifically, you should tell your story. You want your essays to be engaging. Ideally, you want to make the reviewers feel something at the same time that you are convincing them of the stuff I previously mentioned. In the next section I want to give some tips that I found helpful for actually realizing the stuff I talked about in this section.

If you are having trouble starting: I suggest reading a couple of essays from people who did get the funding and start your essay off as an amalgamation of what you liked in those essays. My essays are linked in section 4.

3 Some Tips That (I Think) Helped Me

3.1 The Incredibly Obvious Stuff

• You should have the correct formatting and layout in your essays—this is very important. There is a little wiggle room about how to format citations; my best advice is to look at others accepted essays and use them to inform your decision here. Hopefully the essay is also visually appealing.
• You should clearly explain your research experience: what you did, what you accomplished, what you learned, how you grew.
• You should clearly outline a research plan. The level of detail here is a balancing act; look at some examples and use your judgement.
• Clearly explain any previous outreach, community involvement that is relevant. For example, in my essay I talked about teaching 5th graders block code—something that I did as part of a program while in high school.
• Proofread, proofread, proofread. And have someone else look over your essays too (I had my advisor look over my research statement and my mom look over my personal statement)

3.2 The Helpful Bits Of Advice

• You should definitely read other essays from people who got the fellowship. Keep track of what you liked, how they flowed, the section lengths etc. As the quote attributed to T.S. Elliott goes, “good writers borrow, great writers steal”. Don’t plagiarize, of course, but definitely draw inspiration.
• Tell the story and write the essays that get you funded. You don’t need to explain every single desire you have for grad school or worry about not following your research plan exactly to a tee—long term research plans ought to be slightly flexible.
• Add emotion to your essays—particularly the personal statement. My first draft was much too dry, and so I went back through and added lines such as “I fell in love with…”, “the research for the paper was challenging, but ultimately very rewarding”, and “while I was perhaps a bit nervous at first, …”.
• Like with any good essay, you want a good hook. I was particularly fond of my opening to the personal statement:

The emergency room and I have a fair bit of history. One of my earliest appearances happened when I was about six years old. We were eating dinner as a family and my dad decided that I was old enough to cut my own meat. It didn’t take long after being handed the steak knife for me to slice my finger open. I still have a scar from that one. As adults, we often overlook how hard it is to safely perform some tasks that we think are simple. Similar to the knife-wielding, six-year-old me, robots can struggle to perform well on many manipulation tasks when placed in novel circumstances. Fortunately, this is a solvable problem. It is also a problem that we should solve.

• I feel as if a crisp, clean, and relevant figure can help make your research statement more interesting to read and easier to understand.
• Take advantage of your school’s resources. The University of Utah had a weekly event/thing where you would show up and read each other’s NSF-GRFP applications and talk about improvements.

4 Useful Resources

4.1 My Essays

I applied during the 2024-2025 cycle and was awarded the fellowship as a senior undergrad. My field was: “Comp/IS/Eng - Robotics”. Here are my essays:

• Personal Statement
• Research Statement

Sometimes I cringe when I read my past writing.

4.2 Sources of Information or Tips

• While not exactly for the NSF-GRFP, I thought this was a good resource about how NSF evaluates proposals based on same two criterion: Chapter III: NSF Proposal Processing and Review
• Perhaps the best source of tips is a blog post by Alex Lang. It also contains many past essays from award recipients going all the way up to 2022.
  • Here is the google sheets doc of those past essays.
• The official solicitation is always worth reading.

Good Luck!

You can find my personal website here