Graduate Fellowship Guide: Research-based Master's

A master's at a private school is really expensive. I was going to be extremely broke but now I'm only going to be kind of broke when I graduate thanks to NSF GRFP!

Fellowships I Applied To

• Hertz Fellowship
  $38k stipend + full tuition for 5 years
• Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship
  $25k stipend + $20k tuition for 2 years
• National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP)
  $37k stipend + $16k "cost-of-education allowance" for 3 years (According to the NSF GRFP Administrative Guide, your school is not allowed to charge you tuition while you are receiving your fellowship!)
• National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship Program (NDSEG)
  $48k stipend + full tuition for 3 years

All of these fellowships are very competitive and are great prestige-wise and not-being-broke-wise.

I also applied and won a Korean American Scholar Foundation (KASF) scholarship worth $2,500. But at this point in my life, this kind of amount is definitely not as significant and less worth the hassle of applying. The whole reason why I'm here is to focus on research, isn't it?

Wow Did I Really Write All Those Words?

I'm a slow writer. I had zero research productivity for 1 month because I was dedicating all my time to writing these applications. Thankfully, my advisor was really supportive.

There's a lot of advice online on how to write that definitely helped me, and I even reached out to some people who were in my field that won the fellowships and got advice from them. (I was pretty nervous and desperate.)

Go online! Lock yourself in a dark room for weeks! Find people! Try your best to not doomscroll forums and fail!

Letters of Recommendation

If there's any real advice I can give, it would be to be nice to your letter writers! Their words probably matter more than yours do. I made a "Reference for my Letter Writers" document which I shared with my recommenders that had a description of the grading criterion for the fellowship, example letter, and specific things they could write about me.

Notification Timeline

• November 2024: I didn't get an interview for Hertz. I imagine that being a Master's instead of PhD student put me at a disadvantage, and plus my track record probably didn't strongly paint me as the "independent researcher" and more "she did this and those programs" since I hopped around a lot of places since community college.
• January 2025: I was notified I wasn't selected for P&D Soros. There were 2,617 applications and only 77 finalists, so it was definitely a tough year. I was proud of what I wrote though, you can read it here: New American.
• April 2025: I got an honorable mention for NSF GRFP. The Trump administration budget cuts to NSF meant that they could only select half the usual number of awardees.
• April 2025: I never got an email from NDSEG but I checked the portal and it said "Not Selected"...
• June 2025: I got another email from NSF GRFP that I've been awarded the fellowship! I guess they requested the funding back and they were able to award a bunch more people. (Still haven't gotten reviews back though.)

If you are applying and would like to see my application materials, feel free to reach out to me!