 Right. Well, I hope you're all doing well. So, welcome everybody. My name is Valerie Sloan and I work at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. My background is in Arctic and Alpine glacial history and climate history. And now I work in education, higher education, and I'm happy to have you here today. So, we are having a workshop on preparing an NSF graduate research fellowship program application. And I would like our speakers to introduce themselves. So start with you, Blake. Hi, everyone. My name is Blake. I'm a third year biological oceanography PhD student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I attended an RU program with Ami actually a few years ago. So really happy to be here with you all and to share with you about the NSF GRFP. Nice to meet you. Hi, and I'm Ami. I'm also a third year PhD student at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. I was a 2023 NSF GRFP fellow. And like Blake said, we did a research program together and we've conducted this webinar a couple of times and happy to answer any questions and share about the GRFP with you guys. Right, thank you. All right, well, I think I'll just let you take it away. So go for it and anybody please feel free to put questions in the Slido, or in the chat, we'll post the Slido link again. And so, take it away, Blake. Okay, so first we're going to just kind of cover what the NSF GRFP is. It's the National National Science Foundation's graduate research fellowship program. And basically what this fellowship is is it's your golden ticket to get into graduate school. And if anyone's had talks about how to get to graduate school thus far, hopefully, they have kind of covered that getting into graduate school is all about money. So if you get a stipend as a graduate student and in order for a lab to take you on, they need to pay you your stipend. So what the GRFP does is it basically pays you that stipend. And so if you get this fellowship, a lot of labs, if you tell them you have the funding, they'll let you write in, because you're able to pay yourself with a stipend and they don't have to pay you from a grant per se. So the other thing that it does is it covers $12,000 in tuition. So that that'll cover your course fees and everything to enroll in the university. You can get access to the NSF intern program through the GRFP and so they'll, you'll have like a program coordinator and they can help you with the application process for NSF intern. So altogether it's a really great package deal and it's an awesome fellowship to apply for if you're thinking about going to graduate school. So in the chat, I sent the link to the NSF website where you can find the program solicitation, it's 18 pages. The first thing you're going to want to do is read it all of it carefully. Here you'll find things like important deadlines, your eligibility. For example, if you're an undergrad, you can apply many times. However, if you're admitted to grad school, you can only apply once. There's also important details like application instructions and review criteria. So what you're going to want to include in your application, as well as other information such as like the topics that are covered. And here you can see this is from last year's GRFP solicitation, or a couple years ago. They're different deadlines so they're staggered so all of these details are founded program solicitation. Alrighty, so we're just kind of going to go through the different components of the application. The application itself requires a personal statement that's three pages and it requires a research statement that is two pages. The GRFP is very, very focused on, I guess actually the National Science Foundation in general, when you apply that they're very focused on two sections of your applications that you need to complete. The first is intellectual merit and the second is broader impacts and we'll go over what that what each of those mean, but they want you to be very, very explicit about how you're answering and addressing those two sections of the application. And the other thing that they require is three letters of recommendation. So that's kind of a lot but you want to make sure you're asking people that really know you and can speak to your to your character and can also address the intellectual merit and broader impacts that you bring to the table. So, without further ado, let's go into what those two things mean. So, intellectual merit is the potential to advance knowledge. This can do anything in cover topics such as like your previous research experience, or how your research is valuable to society, and how it contributes to the greater impact of what you're studying. And that's going to look differently based on your personal statement and your research statement. Next is broader impacts which is the potential to benefit society and contribute to the achievement of specific desired societal outcomes. You can also look differently based on the two statements so broader impacts are how you conduct yourself outside of an academic setting such as your inclusion or your involvement in any outside organizations or any outreach that you participated in or volunteer work that you've done. And this is also going to look differently for both two statements which we'll get into. Alrighty, so first let's kind of dive into the personal statement and what kinds of things you can include in that personal statement. So, this is, we just kind of threw this in because there is kind of a formula for how you apply to the gfq and there is a website that you can look into and just want to see if I have that copied. But that's okay. I mean would you mind posting the link for Alex Lang's website when you get the chance. So that link that army is going to post is website from a guy who got the gfq like many many years ago and on that website he actually has kind of like a step by step how to apply and at the very bottom he has a bunch of pdfs of successful personal statements and successful research statements. So you can kind of look through those and read through and you'll start to see that all of them kind of look very similar. So let's go through what what that secret formula is going to be. So for the personal statement, you need to include kind of like a background or an introduction just to who you are. But you want to study, then you're going to dive into intellectual merit which is basically all of the research experiences that you've had and the things that you've contributed to science as as an undergrad or if you're applying as a first year graduate student, or second year graduate student. And then you include a broader impact section which is all of the involvement you had outside of just the lab per se. And then the last thing that they asked you to address in the solicitation is your your future goals. And I always suggest to people when they're writing this kind of come up with a theme for for who you are and what you want to study. So just for example I've always been really interested in conservation research and a lot of my my undergrad research experiences had to do with tropical Pacific Islands. And so I'm, I was proposing to do a project at the University of Hawaii so my theme throughout was conservation around tropical Pacific Islands. So I want to think about what kind of theme can connect all of your research experiences, even if they're all across the board. So the first part of your personal statement should be your background like like said, it's kind of serve as an introduction, and this is the place where you can set up your theme. So that's who you are. You can showcase your identity and what identity that you relate to like matters to you so for example, being from a Pacific Island, I'm from Guam, I made that very clear like off the bat. And then you can talk about some topics about that you're passionate about. This includes like conservation efforts or your involvement on any particular organization or group that you really drives your goals. So you can include that in your background, and you can also add what unique perspective do you bring to STEM. And this is really good because it ties in and it sets the stage for what you'll be talking about and how your past research experience sets the scene on what you'll be doing at grad school and what motivates you. Alright, so moving into the intellectual merit section. This is where you're going to address your past research experiences that you've had. I'm assuming most of you are in an RU program since you're attending this webinar so that's a great one to throw in there. If you were assisting with any projects in undergrad if you were helping a graduate student. If you did like an honors thesis those are all really great things to mention in the intellectual merit section. And in this section, you really want to highlight the skills that you learned from that experience. So I always kind of recommend in that that section if you can give like a one sentence summary of what your project was, and what you found. And then in the second sentence bold this and say, from this experience I learned X, Y, and Z skills that I that I hope to either apply to a graduate project or build on in a graduate project. So you're basically telling them why you're ready to go to graduate school. So that's that last point what makes you qualified to go to graduate school and you can really highlight that through your past research experiences. So here's some ideas of skills that you can list. You can say that you learned how to design a project, you learned how to conduct field work. You learned how to do certain lab procedures, maybe you did like molecular techniques or something. You learned how to analyze data, maybe in a coding language like are you learned how to visualize that data to make graphs, you might have learned how to write like a model, or yeah models and data. So that's some sort of writing component to it maybe you went out into some academic writing to write a report. If you publish that's awesome mentioned that you have publications. If you went to conferences that's another great thing to mention. And if you've done any education and outreach you can mention that here. Education and outreach can also go into the broader impact section. Okay, so we wanted to do a little bit of an interactive activity with you all. And if everyone could take a moment and think about the specific skills that you gained this summer in your internship and write them down that would be awesome and then in the next slide we're going to ask if anyone would mind sharing. So we're just kind of doing a practice of that, can I get a sentence of what my project was what the major findings were if you have them already. And then lastly what what major skills got out of that. So go ahead and take a minute and kind of think of through that and write it down and then we'll we'll share out and then the next slide, and I can go back to the example skills. If you want to create a list. So let's take like two or so minutes to do this. If anyone like to share a bit about their project and what skills that they've learned this summer, feel free to unmute. And I don't know if Blake and on me if you can see the chat. You can let me know. And Maria has said she said, I've improved, I improved my coding skills, and I learned how to read scientific papers successfully. Both difficult things good for you. So both skills necessary to succeed in grad school. So it's a really good way to lay the foundation. Chris also said during the summer internship, I gained experience working in GIS software and utilizing current technologies, such as the way these and GNSS receivers I gained skills that I would like to expand upon an area such as hydraulic modeling. So that's a really specific example, and it segues into like any future paths that you want to do in graduate school. Another one row. Some skills I've developed during this internship include developing my own research methodology based on existing literature lab procedures and data analysis for you be the spectroscopy and then the more and furthering my understanding and how to tie in data to my experiments. Yeah, these are all great. So these are little snippets of what you can talk about your research experience and these are specific examples and skills that can be translated into graduate school and definitely details that you can add into your GRFP application. And actually being as specific as using visual spectroscopy and MR like they'll, they'll be looking for those specific words and phrases, just so that you show that you're qualified and that you've had this experience so these are all really great examples. Alrighty. So we can move on to the broader impacts section of that personal statement. And this section is really about tying your academic research into the broader community and how you're applying your science. So, the first point we have here is how has your previous research impacted broader non stem communities. Are you going out to classrooms and are you helping students understand some of the research you've been doing. Are you bringing your your research to policy are you going to meetings that that kind of thing. And also list what clubs and organizations you've been a part of and within these how you interacted with different components of society to help improve it. Just for an example, I'm gay. I identify with the LGBT community and we were part of a group called out in stem and undergrad and we would bring in queer professors, just to talk about the research and talk about their experience and science and how they got to where they were. We were creating like a mentorship program for queer students and we also had your graduate student mentors as well. So that was a club and an organization that that helped really solidify our identity in science and helped us to to move forward so these are clubs and organizations are something that you can you can mention. I want to mention how your previous research and involvement promoted diversity and inclusion in stem. If you identify with an underrepresented group and stem and you're part of organizations that helped increase the representation of those students that's that's another great thing to mention. For example, if you were part of like sadness or or another. Yeah, if you're part of any any group like that that's a great thing to mention in this broader impact section as well. And the last part of the personal statement is the future goals section which takes up about half a page, you're going to want to talk about your career goals for post graduation. After you get your graduate degree, and this can either be like industry jobs if you want to stay in academia and become a professor. You're going to want to talk about those details and what motivates you for those specific goals. You're also going to talk about your personal goals for post grad like do you want to start a lab do you want to stay involved in the organizations that you talked about previously in your statement. Do you want to mentor students. In the position that you choose to go to, after you get your graduate degree, and how will the gfp help you attain your goals. So, will this funding help you secure graduate school will it give you like the scientific or the freedom to like pursue your specific scientific research interest. And these are all that you can talk about and kind of sum it up in your personal statement. This is also a great place if you if you know about NSF intern and do your research on that you can show them that you've done your research into what this fellowship can do for you so you could say oh this, this fellowship might also provide me with an internship with a governmental organization like NOAA for example or USGS or, and it'll help you explore other career options to help you get to that post grad goal as well. So this is just an example of this is actually my personal statement but just to show you kind of how you can structure it so we've got that background or introduction that's maybe about a quarter to a half a page. This is my intellectual merit section you can see that I've kind of bolded what the projects I did were and then the skills that I got out of there. So the intellectual merit was about, you know, one page. You can see the broader impacts is down here. I talked about different clubs and organizations that I was a part of. We did some education and outreach stuff so I mentioned that in there as well. This is the paragraph on OSTEM. And then this last section right here is this that future goal section where you really talk about what you want to do in the future. And then if you have any references like if you had any publications or anything you can list those in the bottom so that they can look up your publications. Oh, you can also put a conference presentations those kinds of things can go in the references as well. Yeah, so at this time, we'd like to take any suggestions tips or questions about the personal statement feel free to type it in the chat or unmute. And on me, could you talk a little bit about your, your personal statement and where you what you put in and where you put it. Yeah. So, like Blake, I also identify with LGBTQ community. I'm also Chamorro from Guam so I come from an underrepresented minority group in STEM and those are very strong. They're very strong parts of my identity and I made sure that was clear from my background, and then I tied in how being a Pacific Islander and working in ocean conservation was very important to me and how we are usually not at the forefront of marine research and how, like my involvement has basically been an example of like what I want to see, especially in Guam with local students and local professors like leading the way and research rather than looking for outside resources and that was a very strong theme for me. So that's basically what I talked about. I'd be happy to share more about my personal statement if anyone's interested. I see a couple questions in the chat. Is it suggested to emphasize things in bold and to arrange them in categories in your actual statement. Yes, this is, this is highly recommended, it makes it easier for the reviewers to like pick out what's important so for my personal statement, all of my REUs that I've participated in I made sure that they were bolded or something to really stand out so you can fully see in the paragraph you're also going to want to bold the intellectual merit and the broader impacts part, just so that those two sections are clearly defined and clearly stated. And then you can also like bold your skills that you've learned if you know a coding language you're going to want to build that if you've worked with a specific methodology. If it's useful and impactful you're going to want to build that. And any award or publication you're going to want to bold so it's really just highlighting like things that are highlighted in your CV or your resume you're going to want to bold and make sure those stand out because you don't. You want to ensure that your reviewer like takes those achievements and those accomplishments. And it's really just shown in front of them they're not you're not going to want to make them look for it on the page. And I'll just add to that we have a slide later down for the reviewer criteria which is what they look for as they're grading these applications, and I just want to point out that these reviewers are reading like 50 plus applications in a row. So if you bold it they can really just easily go back and say, Oh yeah, what did the students do the student had really great coding experience they written are you program they did a ton of education and outreach. Yeah, excellent. Okay, moving on. So, holding it really helps to organize and give that structure for the reviewers so it's definitely recommended. And if you look at Alex Lang's website and look at all of the successful personal statements you'll notice that most of them do the same thing as well. So we do recommend that. The second question from Christina I see is that my clubs that I was a part of stopped meeting during COVID should I write that my personal statement. This is a huge, like great point to make is that our generation is kind of the coven generation and they know that so they know that you have had some hindrances with your research opportunities with clubs and organizations, broader impacts things so it's a great thing to acknowledge and what they really want to see is adaptability. So if you're able to say, you know my club stopped meeting due to COVID but we continue doing things online, just to try to keep facilitating that connection and building that community. That's a great thing to mention. They really like to see that you were adaptable and how you dealt with COVID and how you still were able to succeed despite over interacting in person functions. Do you have anything to add on me. I know when we participated in the are you during COVID it was all virtual, and I made sure to include a line and there that said like due to COVID 19, like, a lot of research programs were canceled, however, like, we had this wonderful opportunity to like do this pop up and so it's really just like changing that narrative and shifting it to see like like said how you can be adaptable and what what work you've got done maybe not like if you didn't have any opportunities during COVID you can even like segue it and be like, Oh, now that things are like kicking back up, I'm like active in STEM and these are the things that I'm active in so it's really just like addressing that and then like changing the narrative on this is how I was proactive and these are the like things that I've done to like sort of stand out during this time, but you can still acknowledge that it was a difficult time. I have another question from El Dico sorry if I mispronounced your name. I've had a difficult time connecting with students STEM organization since most of my undergrad experience was remote and I'm currently taking a gap year after my graduation. Are there any organizations that you would recommend seeking out that have online meetings. So this is this is really interesting I think if there's groups at your undergrad organization that would still let you be a part of them they're great place to reach out to and see if they adopted and have online meetings. So what you do is start a group or an organization. If you want to I see that you're in marine biology so if you're interested in connecting with, let's say with with classrooms there's a program called Skype a scientist so you can kind of zoom in and you can talk about maybe your undergraduate experience and how you got there and how you involved marine biology into that that's a remote group. That's a possible one to look for but yeah just kind of look around you can Google you can look at your home institution if there's any graduate schools that you're thinking about applying to you can see what they have on their websites. You kind of just got to do some digging. And if they don't have any then create your own and really take the initiative and put that in your personal statement that you did take that initiative. Yeah, in fact start one now and then you can put it in your. You know if you do something now like ask a professor if you can do research in their lab a few hours a week, then you can write about how you work in this research lab same same goes for what like was just talking about starting some kind of initiative. Yeah, and some organizations. Sorry. No go for it. So organizations they don't have to be like just at your collegiate level, they can also be like outside mentoring, there could be also outside outreach maybe volunteered with like at the library or any like mayor's office. There's different ways that you can like be active in your community. I'm assuming. There's also like organizations that you can find like on Twitter for different STEM affinity groups that do different sorts of mentoring and other activities so there's definitely other places that you can look. Put in a list of like organizations such as SACNAS ACS. These are all national organizations that they may have a local chapter but you don't have to like necessarily be a part of the local chapter. Be. Blames is another one. That's all online. Yeah, so just looking for these organizations like, and kind of thinking creatively outside the box I know some. I know one friend, she runs a blog and that is completely like a soul gig she doesn't need an organization to do that. You can log if you run a scientific Instagram account or a Twitter account, you can also talk about that so that's definitely not activities that are just like they're not just college club activities you can like include anything, any involvement in STEM that you've done. That's great. Yeah, the Instagram and Twitter is a great one to do remotely. Yeah. This is from Steven that says is it possible to defer the funding like if I wanted to take a gap year. Unfortunately, no, the year that you apply if you are awarded you have to take it and you have to start graduate school that fall. The interesting thing about GFP is graduate school if you're doing a PhD is going to be a five year program and GFP gives you three years of funding. So you can kind of cherry pick which years you want to do. If you come into a lab that has a grant for you for that covers you for two years, you can defer. And it's called being on reserve rather than being on tenure so you can be on reserve for your one reserve for your two, and then be on tenure to get the funding for years three four and five. So there is some like flexibility with when you take the funding but if you're awarded you can't take a gap year, you have to start in the fall. Otherwise you need to reapply next year. So if you if you get it take it because it's a great, it's a great opportunity unless you have extenuating circumstances. Nancy said, would it be worth to put in a paper that's currently under review or should it be published to include it. Do I take that one on me. I would definitely include that it's submitted and it's under review. That's a big accomplishment, especially as an undergrad. So I would include that I would also include any like conference awards, or any other award recognitions that you've received throughout your undergrad and it doesn't have to be papers so these are all things that will help contribute. And this would be added in your intellectual merit portion of your personal statement. Absolutely. And one other piece of advice for that one is if you're the first author brag about it. Say I have a first authored paper that's under review and x y and z journal that we're hoping to have published by December, or something like that. Humble brag, humble brag. Another question is, would being a peer mentor in a STEM scholarship fall under that umbrella. I believe the umbrellas broader impacts, absolutely. Yeah, being a mentor in a STEM space is absolutely something that you can include in your broader I was going to say I was an online math tutor for students in low income areas during COVID should I put that in, even though it isn't something related to my research. Yes, you should, because this is include this is, this is a part of, of increasing visibility and diversity and I think one of the things if you are helping underrepresented groups by providing a resource to help them progress in their STEM careers that is absolutely something that can be put in broader impacts. And I think, highlighting that it's during COVID. That is something that shows that adaptability as well. So definitely have that be like a whole paragraph in your, in your broader impacts. So you've got. So you can bring up a paper, even if you just submitted it rather than it being accepted, yes, you would just say that it's under review. And, and a lot of the reviewers they're all scientists they'll know kind of what that process looks like so they'll know that you're in the revision stage and they'll know that there's probably a good chance it's going to get accepted if you're under revision. Any questions everyone. Do you all have any more questions. Abby says I'm getting a master's degree before going into a PhD program should I wait until I'm about to start the PhD to apply. Mommy do you want to take that one. I would say you should definitely take advantage of applying as an undergrad just because you do have like, essentially an unlimited amount of chances to apply. I know people who applied as an undergrad, they're planning to do their masters and then they're going to save the GRFP for their PhD. So one friend who like just got awarded and that's her plan. So that can definitely be an avenue that you're looking in, especially if your master's degree is already funded. If not, then you can essentially also just segue into getting a PhD directly. So if your master's degree isn't funded you can either choose to use your GRFP towards your master's degree or save it. If you're starting your master's degree and let's say you aren't awarded this year. When you're in your master's degree you only have one chance to apply after that because once you're enrolled in grads graduate school you can only apply once. So it's definitely like being very like tactical and strategic about how you're applying so as an undergrad I would recommend just to apply every year and like as a post baccalaureate student I'd recommend to apply. As many chances as you can and then as a master's student that's kind of when you're capped out your one application and then you have to be more strategic on like whether you're applying as a first or second graduate student. Yeah, I think I think it's really good to talk about the chances you get to apply. This is all in the eligibility section of the solicitation if you're looking to read through it yourself but basically kind of like on me saying if you are currently an undergrad or you have not started graduate school yet so you're taking a gap year or you're doing a post baccalaureate program or something like that. You can apply as many times as you want so let's say I'm a senior and undergrad I can apply. Let's say I don't get it the next year I'm taking a gap year I can apply again. Let's say that you're after that I mean like I'm just doing research like in a normal job before going to graduate school. I can apply again. You have as many chances as you want to apply until you start graduate school like on me was saying once you start graduate school whether that's the first year of your master's second year of your master's first year PhD second year of your PhD, you only get that one chance to apply and then you're done. So like on me was saying I would recommend that you apply as many times as you can before you start that degree. Okay. Are there any more questions on my math. Okay, ready to cover that one. Okay. Cool if there's no more questions we're going to go ahead and move on to the research statement component. All right so the research statement is a two page statement and again you're going to address the intellectual merit and the broader impacts in that section. And here's kind of like a general outline for a quarter of a page will have the background and the introduction but for your research projects so if you're thinking about like a paper. We have that introduction and background section so it's it's similar but it's kind of like a shrunken down version of that. You'll get into the nitty gritty details of how you're going to assess or conduct your project, and then there's intellectual merit and broader impacts within that as well. So for the introduction for your research statement, it's going to look different from your personal statement. The introduction is going to serve. You're going to set up like what your study system is and why it's so important. For example, I wrote about coral reef ecology and so I did just a short introduction on like why coral reefs are important. I'm studying coral recruitment and so the knowledge gap of that I addressed it in that first paragraph, and then I also posed what are my research questions and how will I test them which includes like my hypotheses, where my aims and objectives for my research plan. I'm going to move into like the next portions of your research statement. So the nitty gritty section sorry I guess that's not a super clear title but we'll just kind of go through what the nitty gritty is here in this section they want you to basically list your aims and your hypotheses very very clearly and I definitely bolded those in my, and my research statement. So just so they know that you know how to formulate like a really like nicely designed hypothesis and how you can test it. They want you to know what methods you're going to use to answer those questions so if, for example, the person before was talking about NMR. If you use like molecular techniques, I work with isotopes. So if you're using those tools they want you to kind of outline what, how you're going to use those and what your results would tell you about each of your different hypotheses. So the criteria for the evaluation criteria in the solicitation is how will you determine successful evaluation of your research questions. And that's almost like a, it's like, if I see this then this must be true if I see this then this must be true. So how are you going to evaluate that you actually answered the question that you posed. That's a really important piece of the research statement. And then lastly, is your project feasible. In other words, can you complete your research project with the resources available at the university you proposed and with the lab that you propose to work with. This is another just kind of logistical thing. When you apply you have to say which school you intend to attend, but if you are awarded the GRP, you do not have to go to that institution, you do not have to go to the lab that you propose to work with. You just have to put that but you're not tied to it by any means. You're also not tied to doing the research project that you propose to do, but you can. So this is more just for them to see that you can formulate a research plan. They're not funding the project that you proposed they're funding you as an individual. So in the next section, it's going to be intellectual merit. So this will be how your study advanced scientific knowledge in your field so you're going to want to tie it back to that knowledge gap that you talked about and clearly define out how it advances your field of study. You're going to also want to talk about what makes your research novel or cutting edge like if you're sequencing something being like oh maybe it hasn't been sequenced before maybe it's in new method that you've developed. Maybe this is new technology that you're working with or maybe like no one's ever studied the specific study system that you're looking at, and you're going to want to say that out like explicitly. And lastly, will your findings contribute essential information that lays the foundation for new exploration so you can go into like what other questions that you can explore from this research project or what future directions you can see it going. So this will be setting the stage on why the science is important and how it's going to advance the field and how it's going to be beneficial to other people in academia, and it's relevancy. Okay, so moving on to the broader impact section again this is how your science is going to impact society. So how will this study benefits society in general. Let me just throw out an example if you're studying. If you're studying bees, for example as as pollinators and be conservation that's going to have an application to agriculture and to all sorts of things you can list how those are going to generally benefit society for coral reef research maybe that's helping preserve the coral reefs for for cultural identity for fishing for all sorts of things like that so how can you tie your research findings in the society. How will you make your study widely available and most importantly digestible for the public. Are you planning to do education and outreach with your study. Are you doing science Twitter or Instagram are you doing that podcast, are you going to classrooms to to share out. Are you getting involved in like city council meetings those kinds of things that in your research statements since you're probably not doing it already, you can propose that you're going to do those things when you get to graduate school. And lastly, can your findings be applied directly to current problems in communities government policy, etc. And an example of that we have a native wine fish pond here in Hawaii and there's a lot of graduate students working on projects in the fish pond, and all of those projects are going towards basically sustainably managing an ecosystem that's a food resource for the entire island. So a lot of their research is directly applicable to to food accessibility. And here's just an outline of what that that research statement can look like. You'll see up top we've got that introduction section. So here's to do the questions you want to answer. Here you can see there's the aims, or basically the research questions I bolded the hypothesis the methods. These are the different resources available at the university that I propose to work at. And then here's just a little section with the intellectual merit and the broader impacts. And lastly, if you cited any papers in your introduction which I would recommend you do just to show you did your background reading. This is the references section that we have a lot of here. If you need to take any suggestion tips or questions about the research statement. Again, feel free to unmute or type it in the chat. There are rules on citations any suggestions on ways to save space. That's a good question, especially because you have such a limited page count for the research statement. There are no rules on citations as long as you have like the main author the year and maybe where you can find it. And then if there's a long author list you can just put at all. You can also, you don't have to like indent after each citation that you have. So, yeah, those are ways to save space. I think it's better to talk about a research project that you have already started, like in an are you or something completely new that you would start in graduate school that's a great question. I think that really depends on your familiarity and like confidence in that research plan. And a lot of what NSF is looking for is just whether it can be thought out, but I've also heard some feedback on like, Oh, this project sounds like it's been completed already, which there's a little bit of like a 5050 on a gamble on what you're proposing. So for graduate students in grad school, they usually write about something that they're already working on, but as an undergrad, I think Blake can talk about his experience and how he applied. Sure. Yeah, so I think I think a lot of people do actually write about their undergrad research just because that's what they're familiar with like only said, I think a little bit of a different approach. I think I did end up doing the project that I proposed, and I don't know coming up with a graduate research project is really really difficult. We had some other workshops kind of on how to formulate that but kind of my process was my are you advisors introduced me to a lot of people that worked at NOAA they introduced me to a bunch of other graduate students and we just kind of talked through kind of what I was interested in and then from there, where could that field go. So a lot of really great advice from those people that I talked to and specifically the people that worked for NOAA we're interested in. We work on like logic predators and how much they rely on coral reef for food resources. That was a huge knowledge gap that they wanted to address so that's what I wrote my, my research statement on. So, again, it's kind of to you with the familiarity of what you're familiar with and I ended up talking with those scientists a lot and they really helped me flush out the research statement so yeah getting as many eyes on this as possible is really, really helpful. So yeah, totally up to what you want to write about. The next question is, would you recommend getting in contact with the potential advisor at the proposed lab university for their help planning this proposed research. I definitely would recommend this, especially because some graduate professors, they, they won't accept you or like you have to find out whether they're accepting students at this time. So if that's a part of the process and like getting in contact with a graduate advisor, I know it deco you said you're in marine biology and usually in the marine biology field. You have to contact that advisor directly to see like whether they're taking students. And when you apply to graduate school it's usually into that specific lab and not a program. So by getting all these details via email and talking and reaching out to these professors before you can get like information on the resources that you'll include in your research plan, like what access, what equipment they have access to what research they've done before prior to so these are all like things that will help that you can iron out in your research plan like such as the resources. So recommend getting in contact with your advisor and then also like, it also goes to show like if you're thinking about the gfp that really is like a point in your favor that you're at least thinking about funding and that you're prepared and you're preparing this application for it. So it's also like a point in your favor because they'll see that you're being like proactive with graduate school applications. I totally agree with everything on me just said and something additional to that is if you reach out to these professors, you might get varied responses but in your initial reach out email if you say, I'm applying to the gfp I'd love to meet with you to talk about the my personal statement and research plan. You'll get varied responses so I had one professor that I was talking to who totally like read my statements we met he was like read these papers and you know incorporate these and these sections and he was really instrumental to helping me apply to the gfp. The advisor that I'm actually working with now I had sent him the statements and he said I don't have time to to read those right now I'm so sorry. You might get a varied response depending on the professor that you reach out to but it doesn't hurt to ask. And again if you can get as many eyes on this paper as possible like that will really really help you. Make sure that you're concisely and clearly going through the project and the goals and making sure that it's understandable for everyone. People who grade this will generally be in the field so for example if you apply to marine biology, the reviewers will be marine biologists but they might not be for example coral reef ecologists, or they might not be, you know, stable isotope geochemists. So you need to make sure that you're you're really elaborating on the processes and making it digestible for for anyone broadly. Next, is it possible to cook this up on your own or do the folks like at the store generally already have contact with the professor they want to work with for grad school. It's definitely possible to do this, like without a professor's help. Like is emphasizing like the more eyes you have on it, the better like it doesn't even have to be a professor that you're applying to maybe you have a really good mentor at your home institution who can look over the application you don't have to commit to working with them but if they can read it over maybe a grad student that you're working with can read it over those edits will be very beneficial just because there is like a certain way that the GRFP should be written or like is recommended to be written that usually gets funded. But if you can like work with the professor that you're thinking of applying to graduate school for that's even better. You also don't have to like necessarily commit to that professor that you're going to work for so I had a couple professors in mind who I wanted to work for but I just committed to one project and one like institution that I committed to writing my GRFP to. And that's how I approached that and I didn't really commit to that graduate school yet but in my application I like said that this is where I wanted to go and laid it all out. So I ended up writing in my application that I wanted to go to the University of Hawaii and then the professor that actually helped me write the application was from Rhode Island. So he knew that I had written this application as if I was going to another institution, but he knew that if I was awarded I could still take that money to his lab to his lab. I see a question from Sam what if you have multiple research experiences, are you in home institution but separate projects. Is it better to focus this statement on one experience over the other. I think this kind of goes back to what I was saying before which is whichever one you are most comfortable writing about that is the one that you should probably do, or if one happens to be more novel than the other like you're writing a new research technique or something like that. There's a lot of different things you can weigh there and I think talking to your mentors about which one to do would probably be helpful in deciding. Yeah, and when you talk about your multiple research experiences, you can flesh that out all in your personal statement and that goes to show like, these are all my experiences that I've covered but your research plan is like what you are proposing to do in graduate school, so they want something that like you can spend like a good chunk of time on they want to see it be thought out like Blake mentioned in the details like how will you assess whether your project was successful. That's something that is very like you have to think that through. And so you're going to want to focus on one project. And going into like those details and those skills on like, Oh, I've, I've completed this methodology or I know this code and this is how it will be beneficial to my project you can definitely include that but sticking to one research topic on one research they're going to want to see that specificity in your research plan they're not going to want like a broad general umbrella statement or like a broad general question they're going to want to see like this is something that can actually be executed as opposed to like just a nice idea of a research plan. Another thing I just thought of is if, if you already did the project in undergrad, maybe don't write about it, like the exact same projects because they'll know that you wrote about it in your personal statement but if you can add dimensions like we answered these questions in my undergrad research but now these questions come up came up that I want to address in graduate school. So that way you can kind of like on me was saying make sure it's like fleshed out and is a project that you could kind of go through as a graduate project. Any questions. Anyone wants to unmute or put in the chat. I had a question that I wasn't really sure how to phrase. So I didn't put in the chat, but I go to like an undergrad only school. So, if I wanted to like write my application like with an advisor there, like it's not like I'm applying to work with this person because is that like approach that can even like work for this, this project proposal or is it like not recommended to do that. I don't think it's recommended because I think you have to like say that this is where I'm going for graduate school they can definitely help you like read over your draft. Like check the signs but maybe they have like recommendations on like what labs to start reaching out to for who you can specifically say that you're going to work with or like what institutions you can start looking at to like hone down your ideas. But yeah just because you have to like say this is where I'm going to do this research. And if like there's no graduate program to facilitate that then you can't do it there. Okay, thank you. The program that you list that you're going to attend. Again, you're not beholden to that at all. So, yeah, just pick a program that it looks like this would be feasible that you could do this project in this lab and then write about it and then that that mentor that you have in the undergrad program can absolutely help you with the application and write it as if they were going to help you I'm sure most of your mentors went to graduate school and have that experience that they can help you write about as well. Okay. So please feel free to unmute or put in the chat. And let's go ahead and we can talk about the reviewer criteria. Okay. So as we've kind of mentioned throughout this, this presentation, the very first criteria is the intellectual merit and the broader impacts. So we kind of went through those definitions before but again intellectual merit is the potential to advance knowledge and understanding within its own field or across different fields, and the broader impacts is how to benefit society or advance desired societal outcomes. The reviewer criteria number two is to what extent do the proposed activities suggest and explore creative original or potentially transformative concepts. So this is that intellectual merit to another level is is how novel is this is this research and what are you doing to science. Revere criteria number three. Again, these are all from the solicitation is is the plan for carrying out the proposed activities well reasoned well organized and based on a sound rationale. Does the plan incorporate a mechanism to assess success. So really just fleshing out a project that seems feasible that can be done and you just want to show them that you really thought it out and know how to start a project or complete a project start to finish. The question is how well qualified is the individual team organization to conduct the proposed activities. So like make sure you do your homework and say like, these are all my resources this is a feasible research plan that can be executed and done successfully. That's important. And then lastly, are there adequate resources available to the PI either the home institution or collaborations to carry out the proposed activities. So I think we forgot to mention this but you can say a home institution but if they have partnerships with other institutions that can help with your research plan. That's also good to flush out. And so you don't have to just stick to one institution like for example, my lab works with different organizations at various like island nations so that was really important to me especially broader impacts and so I made sure to include that in my statement. If a lab like works with other NGOs or other like local organizations you can definitely include that and how it will serve you. There was a question after applying how long will it take back to hear from NSF. That's a great question you usually hear back around April. And so you apply in October and then you find out your results in April. Now I just want to say that's like totally nerve wracking is like, for me, a lot of the labs that I was reaching out to, they didn't have funding, and so they were like, you can come if you get the gfp so in April. I didn't know if I was going to graduate school or not, which all my friends had known where they were going if they had jobs that kind of thing so it is it is a little stressful to hear back from them but just be patient. It might pay off little. Yeah. So, anyways, it does take a while for them to get back. Okay. So the next thing that we pulled together for you is this is from Alex Lane's website these are examples of the reviewer comments that you can actually see on the different statements that were given. So I just wanted to go through and kind of point through some of the things that the reviewers mentioned so you know what to look for, and what to emphasize in your statements. First of all, this is the rubric. They first address intellectual merit, and then they address broader impacts so this is for an intellectual merit on an ecology review. They saw that the research that was proposed was novel and interesting. They had considerable experience in ecology in their personal statement they had a lot of research experiences. Again, in their proposal they had a deep understanding of ecological theory that they showed through the background section. For broader impacts, they really highlighted outreach and science communication. They mentioned very well that they wanted to work with foreign scientists and develop conservation. They wanted to work with foreign scientists for development and conservation agencies. And then lastly the student had publications in review and in preparation. The GFP kind of places a lot of emphasis on publications. I'm not totally sure why and I, I have an issue with that because it's kind of like a privilege and an access thing to be able to publish but if you do have publications or they're in review that's a great thing to to mention. I think this is for astrophysics. So again, for intellectual merit, they looked at all their numerous research experience so you're going to want to list that out and fold it, as well as several presentations and as well as publications. They also took their reference letters into consideration talking about drive and independence, and for their broader impacts, their involvement with student organization activities, also public outreach so any volunteer work that you may be doing and engaging with the public so they really like to see that you're communicating your science and you're communicating it effectively. These are all really good signs of like a good GFP application. And this one is from biological oceanography. They said there was a very clear background and motivation for the research there were clear aims and methods. There were necessary resources to succeed in the proposed project. They mentioned an importance of science education and communication. They mentioned that they wanted to educate and engage with underserved school communities, the applicants should go to adaptability. So the outreach career influencing marine policy was an important thing mentioned in the application. And this is again from the letters they were described as passionate dedicated dependable hardworking independent and holding a power collection, powerful collection of intellect. All right. So that being said, are there any other questions that you will have or suggestions or tips that you'd like to share about the review criteria. Which is that it's, it's really pretty subjective. It's, you know, the panels, the people who review these things are different from from application application, maybe from, you know, day to day their outlook. It's really like braiding figure skating at the Olympics. Now it's pretty subjective or gymnastics. So, you know, don't don't get, don't get too down if you don't happen to get it. It's a lot of competition for it. I do think this is really good practice for grad school applications like writing statements, you know, you've kind of got a recipe now that is roughly what you would want to include in an application to graduate school. Next, we're going to talk about letters of recommendation. And so this is something that, you know, you'll need and you'll see from these clippings that there are, there's actually a lot of research out there about how how implicit bias and maybe overt bias effect. You know, selection of say graduate students. This also applies to promoting or hiring people in faculty positions and so on and these biases are are held by all of us we all have some biases. First, there were several articles about doing large, large studies like 5000 people in the study, you know, being looked at their letters and everything, and finding differences between the two between, let's say, male and female. I haven't seen anything yet that addresses non binary or trans or other gender identities. And one thing also with with names that sound English or Anglo and white tend to be selected more often than say names that sound Indian or Asian or black, because you know people make up in stories in their mind about oh they might not speak English properly or something like that. And so, some studies have found that people who whitened their resumes got more job callbacks. And I had to interns one summer who worked together in West Texas driving around actually think it was later in a job. Both were African American gentlemen and one had a very English name, sounding white name, John Braswell and the other ones name was African and he was originally from Canada, but is America, his name is lead meeting data. And they noticed when they're driving around Texas that john got more callbacks on job jobs. How you wait in it is, I mean, I don't, I think it's really sad that, you know, people do this or that they need to or feel any too but you know people put their initial sometime instead of their first name things like that. And this is kind of, you know, it's depressing, for sure, it's not great. So the kinds of things the differences between letters, say for men or and women, and this probably also qualifies for between white sounding names and non white sounding names is that the letters for men tend to be quite a lot longer. And they, they use, they focus more on accomplishments. And, you know, like they did this and they published that and they got this experience. And, you know, for women, it tends to be more like, Oh, she's really cheerful and she chips in at the lab. You know, she'll be a great team player. Similarly, you get more definitive praise, generally speaking, for men and more doubt raisers for women, faint praise like, Well, you know, she's fairly good at doing this, or if she only did that, you know, or I think you know some uncertainty. Now this sounds really kind of ridiculous, but I got to tell you firsthand so I've read a lot of letters for scholarships primarily but also for internships. And it's shocking when you when you start looking, it's like holy smokes. The differences like people will say unbelievably inappropriate things about people, you know, things like, Well, you know, if it weren't for her blue hair and her nose ring, you know, things that are just not relevant here. And so just to make you aware, this is a thing. And so how to how to help your how to get letters of red accommodation that are good and strong. So if we go to the next slide. First of all, think about who you're going to ask. And I believe in getting people who really believe in you. I got a big scholarship in Canada where I'm from. And it was no thanks to my advisor who didn't really believe me wrote me a super mediocre letter, but it was the other two people who really supported me and you know, like, you know, you know who believes in you. So, you know, it's debatable if you have to include somebody who like an employer or. If you can avoid picking people who are not supportive, do avoid it. Do what you can to help these people get to know you. So for instance meet them after class or email them or, you know, that kind of thing, go to office hours, they still exist, and talk about things in science that are interesting to you maybe things that you've learned from taking their course. So something that goes beyond their course if you are a student in a course and they don't know you beyond that it's really hard for them to write very much about you, you might get perfect grades. And you can ask for advice on grad schools. One thing I did was I went to two professors whose classes I enjoyed a lot and I asked them, I said I have these three opportunities for graduate school. One micro rills in snow and the Arctic. One is doing armchair research on river rivers, and one is doing glacial geology and in the high Arctic. And so the hydrologist said, Oh, I definitely would go with the one with the rills, the glacial geologist said he would pick that one and that's much bigger picture. And I thought, Oh, okay, that helped. It was like, Okay, that resonates with this person and his course resonates more with me. And help them write a good letter, it's really helpful it takes a long time to write a really strong letter of recommendation. If you happen to be in a school with very few professors they may have to write several letters. It's a big burden really, unfortunately for them. So provide them with as much information as you can about the opportunity or opportunities, like the schools you want to apply for scholarships. And give them your resume or CV. And then I would actually give them a list of your accomplishments, especially if they have never written a letter for you before, and sort of as they relate to the opportunities. And, you know, these are things that can be included in the letter where it's like somebody might be sitting there going scratching their head thinking well, I know they're really good but how do I show that. And then you know they look at your list and go, Oh, right, right, right. She analyzed this or they analyze this thing, you know, in our lab or in our class and did a really outstanding job with the team. So that's being prompted by this list of accomplishments. Again, it's, you know, it's a kind of squishy thing it's not particularly great way of people selecting people but what we try to raise awareness about it and I'm going to put two links in the in the chat. One is an article that is really intended for letter writers, but it's, I think it's a good one in that it, it helps you see what what, and I would share it actually with letter writers. In the day when people were in, in the office, I would sometimes leave these out by the photocopier machine in the department office so that people could see this kind of thing or pin it up on a bulletin board. I'm not sure if this link will work but let's see maybe so the first one is an article and the second one has, again, this is a bit for the people who write the letters and read them because guess what, the biases of those reading them are as bad as people writing one. Okay. And so we could I would, I recommend reading it I know it's kind of squished together but it's got a lot of good information in there and, you know, again share this with your department that kind of thing. Yeah, and talk to your potential advisors. Thanks. Well, another thing I just wanted to mention is that one of the main goals for the NSF JRP is to increase diversity and inclusion in STEM. So, I wouldn't say trying to hide your name from this application or hiding your identity that's that's not what we're recommending here but just for the something to be aware of that happens with the letters of rack make sure you're picking people who will identify will represent you really well in those in those letters is really important. So, I know we're getting close to time up here but we're just going to go quickly through a sample timeline of how you can start applying. You all are just now, right at the right time to start this process, we would recommend starting by reading the solicitation that's on that JRP website that on me linked earlier. I would recommend that you kind of make an outline of your personal statement and what you want to talk about in each of your paragraphs I would break it up into that background intellectual merit rather impacts, kind of structure and future goal structure. Start brainstorming a research project for your research statement. Start asking mentors if they'll write letters of recommendation for you just to have it in the back their minds. So, in mid to late September, start writing the rough drafts of the personal and research statements. Reach out to your mentors and potential p is for help with research statements in mid to late September. Ask many, many, many, many people for the feedback on the personal and research statements. I even sent it to my mom, English teacher, just because if she could read through it and it made sense to her I knew it would make sense to anyone. So, make sure you have potential p is on research statements, and then around early October start preparing your final drafts, follow up with your letter writers and make sure they submit on time. And then this is from two years ago so this is not accurate but just to highlight that the deadlines are generally in mid October. And I think I'll be mentioned earlier they do stagger based on your subject. So, you can kind of get an idea of where you're applying, I think on me and I both applied under geoscience. But in mid October finalize your application and submit it and then follow up with your letter writers to make sure that they submit it on time. Another thing about the letters is, I think you have the opportunity to submit up to five and they'll read the first three. So if you only asked three people and one of them doesn't submit on time, maybe consider having a fourth that would fill in for someone who didn't submit on time. Okay. These are some general tips, the NSF GRP funds you and not your project and make sure you ask letter writers who know you well, those are both super important. So, with that, do you all have any final questions for us, or for Val, or, yeah, we're just happy to open up the floor and chat with you if you have any questions. And we will email you with, you know, various things, the slides be recording other resources. And I do ask if before you sign off, if you would please go to the link in the chat and fill out what is a very short survey about today's workshop. That would be really helpful gives us an idea of how to improve for next time. And thanks for you've been an amazing source of questions today everybody it's really, it's really satisfying when we hear a lot of questions and get a lot of questions because then we know that you know this is interesting to you are relevant and hopefully we can help you and it shows that you're engaged so thank you for all those questions. So there's a question another question a couple of them. Do you plan to release the slides so hopefully in the next few days. We'll put together a folder and include that and then link, send you that email link for instance. And then for all me and like any tips for people applying as a second year grad student. Yeah, I applied as a second year graduate student and I got it. And I was really lucky because my reviewers didn't comment that I had no publications out. So, like one comment specifically said, Oh, the student has really great potential publications will follow. And so, although like publications is usually really emphasized in the geography I think, like more professors are and reviewers are starting to realize that like not everyone can have a publication so early on in their career. So just highlighting like what you've done, especially if you're involved in like student organizations. That was really helpful for me and any outside involvement I also thought my theme of like being a Pacific Islander and emphasizing Pacific Islander and conservation was very like that was very. That was highlighted a lot in my reviewer comments. And so if you do any outreach work, make sure you emphasize that and any awards that you've give I. There's an award section where you can list all the awards you had so even though I didn't have any publications I did have a lot of like scholarships and awards that they did take into consideration and so like, make sure you like highlight yourself. It's very important, especially as a second year graduate student. I've heard that they're a little bit more critical just because like, you kind of have gotten in the groove of graduate school and so they're looking for like more refined skills. And so being as specific as you can and like going into detail as much as you can and showing that you actually like have the knowledge in the background to like support this statement is really helpful. And also another question, can you get letters of rec from graduate students that mentored you. You can I, we would recommend like you going to the actual professor who mentors those graduate students so maybe they can like, you can ask them to like help that help the professor write the letter or sign it, just because that holds more weight like having a letter of rec from a professor over a graduate student, even though you haven't worked with that professor it's going to hold more weight just because they have like PhD after their name. But that doesn't mean that you can't go to a graduate student be like well I really I worked well with you. Can you just like emphasize these skills or these experiences to your rec letter writer. And so you can like navigate those conversations that way. But if you only, if you know that that professor can't write a rec letter then a graduate student is fine. We just would recommend like a professor over a graduate student. Totally. And for me and my graduate students that I worked with an undergrad name was Natalie shout out to Natalie loved her. But she wrote me like a fabulous letter and then she actually like I didn't work with the professor hardly at all but she actually handed the letter to the professor the professor signed it and was the one who submitted it even though it was her words. So, that is, that is a possibility as well. It's actually discouraged formally, but you know, it's, it's person agrees with who it's in there it doesn't seem to be, you know, too problematic but but just be careful about. Yeah I guess for me it's just the, the professor didn't really know me well enough to comment so it was great that she had had all of those things so yeah I guess maybe, maybe formally in other settings it might not be encouraged but for us it is because for the they really take into consideration who's writing those letters. But maybe I misunderstood what I meant was that it's not recommended to have one person write another person sign it but I think you were saying the grad student was was writing it is that right. For me the God student wrote it and the professor signed it saying that's not recommended but I actually would recommend. Right no I'm sorry I'm a center stood and I was talking about like, you know, if you write your own letter and send it. Oh, no, no, no. Make it sort of letter like so. Yes. So I have uploaded I don't know if it succeeded but see if it has I uploaded the slides in a PDF format. And hopefully we can download them right now. And one other thing. Sorry, I just lost the tab that I was on but I have a sorry one second. Okay, here it is. This is, this is like a an application resource guide for the gfp. It mentions everything that we've said today, it has sample statements in there feel free to open that use it share it as much as you like, and then, if you like, I'm happy to meet with folks and just kind of outline statements if you just want to talk through what some of your research experiences were and kind of pulling out those, those essential bits and pieces that you would want to put in a statement like please reach out I'm happy to to meet with you all. Yeah, also happy to do that. I put my email in the chat. Please fill out the short survey that balsam in the chat. So let's give a hand to Blake and I made a phenomenal job. Thank you both. We appreciate it. All right, we'll have a good evening and have a good week too. Thank you. I'd love to stick around if anyone has questions to actually have to run but thank you, I'll thank you Blake. Thank you both. Beautiful job really loved it. And then we should maybe look at watch the recording sometime in the next six months and see is there anything that we should change. Yeah. All right. Thanks again that was great. Yeah, no problem. I'm having you both like bounce off each other to that was that was great. That's great. I honor Seara do you guys have questions. I think probably not. All right. Okay, well thanks. Thanks again Blake. No problem. All right. Bye.