June 13, 2025
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!
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?
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!
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.
If you are applying and would like to see my application materials, feel free to reach out to me!