I was awarded a NSF GRFP in 2021, after applying as a first-year PhD student. Yay! I am a firm believer that most of us in grad school are great candidates for this fellowship, but we typically think too big and struggle with getting the application together. If the NSF survives into the future and continues to recognize the potential of early career scientists, then I hope this can help you in your writing process. Keep reading for my take on what made my proposal successful!

Get straight to the point
  • Your research idea may be really specific, but you have so little space to write about it! Structurally, each new idea should follow up with a "why" statement -- why are you doing this specific method? Why is this experiment going to provide an insight? Why is this an important question to ask? Write as much as you can, and then cut, cut, cut. This will allow you to get to the core of the idea and provide the reader with the solid bones of your dissertation, so solid that they can imagine you in the lab, doing the work, analyzing the data, and reading your published work.
  • Similarly, your personal statement should have a logical chain of events. Key word here is logic. You need to explain yourself to the point where your reader can imagine themself in your shoes. Some people like to tell their life story and share deeply personal details, while others write about their recent accomplishments and overcoming barriers in their science journey. There's so many ways to approach the personal statement, but keep in mind that you should provide examples and explain why that was an important experience for you. Remember that the ultimate goal is to convince your reader that your science career has huge potential. Ask yourself why you started liking science, why you want to study a specific topic, and why you spend all your time and effort learning, failing, and creating knowledge. Write that shit down!! 
  • Don't be afraid to use hyperbolic language. Don't lie, but don't be shy about expounding on your accomplishments, your impact, and your future impacts. Take ownership and be proud of what you've done. I know that it's difficult to write about yourself, that you see all of your flaws, and that you feel like an imposter. Put that in the back of your mind and just let it all out -- you can tone it down later.

Follow a consistent essay structure
  • Topic sentences, people!! Every paragraph should start with one. Give the reader an idea of what you are about to say. It doesn't have to be too specific, but you have to announce the next idea.
  • Consistent semantic/sentence patterns are also nice for a reader. It makes everything feel cohesive and easy-to-read. For example, you can present ideas or examples in threes, using and reference the same metaphors or analogies throughout your essays, or break up a wall of text with whitespace or dashes. See, I just did it (examples in threes)! Just don't overdo it.
  • Formatting can help or hurt you. Consistent bolding of titles, aims, and/or ideas you want to emphasize are also nice for the eye to take a break. Italicizing, underlining, whitespace (again), etc. can be useful, but can also get annoying. These formatting changes are meant to draw the reader's eye towards specific parts of the page, but if you use them too much, your reader can get frustrated because the page looks wayyy too busy.

Write with your audience in mind
  • Think deeply about your concentration area. Your field may be huge, or it may be pretty small where everyone knows everyone. Does your project fit into that specific concentration? Is there a different concentration that could also fit? This all impacts what kinds of scientists will make up your jury. You may be in or looking to join a biochemistry lab, but your research interests are more in the intersections of biochemistry, biogeochemistry, and microbial ecology. Thus, you could think about sending your proposal to the Biochemistry, Microbiology, or Ecology concentrations. Each of the three will have very different pools of reviewers. Maybe you're interested more in the interactions of microbes with each other and their environment, and how they chemical signatures of microbial communities change. You might send your proposal to the Ecology concentration then. Or maybe you're interested in how structural changes in microbial signalling compounds are recognized by other members of the community. Your proposal might be more well-suited for Biochemistry. Make this decision early on, so that you don't end up in a spot where you need to rewrite your proposal!
  • You'll hear this a lot, but try and avoid jargon as much as you can. Your readers will be scientists who are constantly reading academic journal articles for sure, but they more than likely will not be in your specific subfield. They might be familiar with some of the seminal findings or papers in your subfield, but also have spent their life working on projects that are, at best, parallel to your proposed work, and at worst, completely orthogonal. They will try to understand what you give them, but there's no guarantee that they'll be able to understand every single detail! Furthermore, they have a whole bunch of these proposals to read. Make it easy for your reader to quickly get the gist of your proposal, and use vocabulary that any scientist can understand. However, if there are specific terms or ideas in your field, take the time to explain them. Jargon is okay as long as you don't use too much, and you set up your reader to understand its specific uses in your proposal.

Read the solicitation
  • There is so much juicy information in the GRFP solicitation. Make sure that you read the one that is current, since all of them going back some 20-30 years are available online. Some highlights include the sections on eligibility, formatting, and fundable projects. 
  • Formatting is one of the ways that the NSF automatically disqualifies your proposal. They use an AI screener (I think), so if even one thing is off, your proposal is never even read. Don't try to cheat and get a bit more text in by fudging with fonts, font sizes, margins, etc.
  • You absolutely need to include two sections in each essay: Broader Impacts and Intellectual Merit. Most essays that I've seen have these as headers so that the readers can explicitly judge those sections on whether they meet NSF criteria. All essays are scored according to a rubric (to reduce bias!), and the rubrics specifically ask for whether the proposal sufficiently addressed these two criteria. Broader Impacts, of course, is changing in our current political climate, but it still appears to be a part of the proposal and a central tenet of NSF activities. Make sure you have them both.

Get as many eyes as you can on your writing
  • Feedback is so important. You don't know who is going to read your proposal, so you need to make sure that anyone with a reasonable science background can read it. Get your PI or potential PI to read it, other PIs in your life, postdocs, grad students, and undergrads. Get your friends to read it and tell you what is confusing, what is hard to understand, and what is extraneous. Get people inside and outside your subfield to read it.
  • In terms of asking for feedback, I generally like to ask for people to look for a cohesive storyline and gaps in logic, and to point out words and phrases that are jargony, confusing, or appear too many times. If someone can help you edit or revise certain parts, you can ask for things that you can cut, things that should be added, edits to figures, etc. Its 100% better to get a draft back with red pen all over it even if it feels bad, than for someone to say, "Looks all good!" Everyone is going to perceive your essays differently, and you want to incorporate feedback from a diversity of perspectives to be able to anticipate how your readers will see your essays.