Just accepted! Ran super good, got into 5 schools, will be going to Caltech in the fall!

grats dude!! That's great news. What's on tap for the summer?

Congrats

geek.

No, wait....

Care to share who you flipped the bird to?

In before "hookers and blow" ldo.

Hoping to do something fun before I start, orientation is the last week of September (quarter system). The big determining factor is when the paper I'm working on gets done. Once we have a better picture of when we can submit it I will try to put some random debauchery together for a few weeks before classes start.

Bird flipping was localized to:
Stanford, Yale, UCSF, and Johns Hopkins. They were all awesome programs but Caltech had the best mix of a focus on applied math and really cool biology. Even though it is a tiny school, there are at least 6 or so faculty I could totally see myself working with.

That's cool. I know Stanford and Yale have some really really good evolution folks; don't know about UCSF. Hopkins doesn't believe in evolution, only medicine.

I've been getting more into the whole systems biology/regulatory network stuff, so might end up doing research in evolution of highly conserved networks and things like that. Yale does awesome evolution stuff but much more on the classical biology side than math/modeling.

You're gonna end up as on of those Santa Fe Institute weirdos aren't you?

Ahhh congrats furyshade! You seem like a really good dude so great to see you get into dope places. Best of luck!

And +1 to hookers and blow for summer

Congratulations, furryshade! Given those schools, Caltech does seem like the place to go. Stanford probably wouldn't've been bad. In any case, that's a heck of a good set of options to have. Nice work!

Thanks everyone! Can't believe I started this thread like 5 years ago. One day I'll have to go back and read all the comments I made back then. Thanks for all the advice too, you guys were a huge help along the way.

Congrats furyshade! Gotta be a great feeling when something you set forth to accomplish five years ago comes to fruition.

How many years is too many to ask for a letter of recommendation (lets say for a NSF grant later this year). I haven't been in contact with my professors in undergrad for nearly 2-3 years now (closer to 3). Is it looked down upon if I just get all my LORs from my graduate institution?

Congrats Furyshade! That's like hitting a royal flush.

Thanks dudes, felt awesome to see everything I did since I started college start to come together. As a bonus I should get a really solid first author paper in a physics journal out of my current research, should get submitted before I leave. Also I get trashed last night with housemates, climbed a street light, and managed not to seriously injure myself, so there's that.

I'm teaching my first class today of an honors undergraduate discrete structures class of about 20 people. I'm scurred.

My friend got an NSF Graduate research fellowship last week. Just curious:

-How prestigious is this exactly? I can tell it's a big deal, but is it equivalent to a perfect score on the SAT or a 4.0 GPA? What percentage of applicants actually get the fellowship?

-He was getting paid a small stipend and tuition coverage for his phd beforehand. Since NSF is giving him a 30k/year stipend, what happens to the previous money he was receiving from the school? Does he get the nsf money plus the school stipend?

It's a big deal. I dont have numbers but they should be public. Keep in mind you're up against rockstars to begin with. NSF is better IMO than a 4.0 or a 1600 because its not a measure of raw intelligence. It's a prediction of how well you'll do and an investment in your future. Someone is actually betting on you more or less.

The $$ question depends on your friend's situation. If he's teaching for his stipend and tuition waiver, for example, now he won't have to teach. But if there are classes available to teach, he can probably teach once a year or so for extra $ from the school. But he can't teach all the time or he'd be in violation of his contract w NSF. But they're ok if you teach a little because its professional development and very clearly part of your education.

I think it'd be hard to justify getting pd as an RA though while you're on an NSF.

If you're on an NSF fellowship you have to petition them in order to be able to do any additional paid work. This is because the premise of your fellowship is that you will be working fulltime on your NSF funded research. My impression was that its not too usual for that permission to be granted, and almost certainly not just for a normal TA. He can probably do a little teaching for experience, but he won't get paid extra for it. This also kind of sucks if you want to do a paid internship over a summer, because I think you can only suspend/defer your funding in one year blocks. But I guess you can't really complain too much since the extra stipend over three years will probably be a lot more than you'd make from an internship.

I do know someone who was getting outside funding (not NSF) and full internal funding for his first semester. He was international and didn't realize that's not how it was supposed to work. They stopped it once they found out but he didn't have to pay anything back.

Having NSF is hugely helpful for graduating in a reasonable time frame. Basically you don't have to teach/grade, and you can essentially devote all of your time to your thesis work, without having to worry about too many tangential assignments dictated by your advisor's funding. Its definitely looked upon very positively in academic circles. If you want to go into industry it probably won't get much notice on your resume, but it can be a good thing to bring up and explain in interviews.

I had a fellowship that was like NSF (federally funded) and I taught for $ from the u while I was on fellowship (2 of 6 sem) and had good paying summer employment. Maybe I wasn't supposed to, but oh well.

I think a lot of these restrictions are relatively recent, they also made it so you can't get two fellowships at once like you used to. I think a lot of people found work arounds on the system so they had to make it so the fellowship is the only source of funding for NSF. I don't remember seeing that rule on the DoD or DoE websites.

Also getting any of those this year especially is impressive because the sequester hit grant agencies pretty hard across the board. NIH had some laughably low % of funded R01 grants this year.

regardless, obviously a *very* nice problem to have

Congrats furyshade!

Thoughts on pros/cons of taking Real Analysis II over the summer?

I'd have time to focus on just that class, though it's condensed so would only be 6 weeks...(meets 4 days/week for 1.5 hrs?)

Might be nice since I could refresh myself on Analysis I beforehand and get a jump on the material...

- I think it's a bigger deal than having a 4.0 or a perfect SAT. The graduate programs that have a lot of NSF fellows are generally in graduate programs at top research institutions (Harvard, Stanford, UCSF, UC Berkeley, MIT, Caltech etc) that are filled with students who had 4.0's or perfect SAT's, and generally way less than 20% of people in those programs will get an NSF or comparable fellowship. I did not have a 4.0 as an undergrad, and I would not trade my NSF for one if I could.

- Depends on his school. NSF covers tuition, so that's gone. NSF is his new stipend, so that's covered too. What I am aware of that varies is when people are paid separately for teaching. At least at UC Berkeley, we're allowed to keep that money on top of the stipend if we are on NSF and teaching in the same year.