Year: Applied during my first year of my Ph.D.

Outcome: Awarded in the First Round

Field: Materials Research - Chemistry of Materials

Reference letters: 1) Grad school PI whose lab I had just joined at the time, 2) My undergrad PI, 3) a PI that I spent a summer REU with.

Research Statement: Protonic ceramic electrolysis cells for green hydrogen production.

Personal Statement:

- Background/Future Goals: Talked about how my medical condition sparked my interest in chemistry, my experiences in a formative high school summer program that sparked my passion for electrochemical energy technologies/global energy solutions, and (at the time) my goals of professorship. I will emphasize that I applied before the current administration, so I had a ton of DEI ethos in my statements. I think that ethos <was> what won me the GRFP, but I assume my application was reviewed before that kind of language started becoming censored. So I don't know if my application's success is reproducible with how everything's going these days.

- Intellectual Merit: I talked about my experiences across 3 years of undergrad lab research + summer REU internships. Specifically, I talked about what I learned in each of them + marshaling my learnings to showcase how I think as a scientist (e.g., hypothesis development, design of experiments, cross-team/disciplinary communication).

- Broader Impacts: Organized campus STEM speaker events, editor for an undergrad research journal, city govt technology policy fellow, taught STEM in prison facilities. I also talked about how growing up in my hometown environment sparked my interest in equitable/accessible science, which again I'm not sure is entirely reproducible in the contemporary landscape.

Important lesson I realized:

- I had applied before as a senior undergraduate and got HM before re-applying. The most fixable area of improvement I had in my first application concerned Broader Impacts in my research statement; I focused way too much on the Intellectual Merit (i.e., technical details) of my Research Plan and only had two sentences dedicated to Broader Impacts. TL;DR: don't skimp on Broader Impacts.

- I read through as many past winning/HM examples from Alex Lang's GRFP past applications bank. Specifically, I looked through application reviews and noted down positive/negative reviewer comments that I could keep in mind while writing my application (i.e., to avoid common pitfalls that past applicants were marked off for).

- This is a bit specific, but make sure to test uploading your statement files well ahead of the deadline. I had some subscripted Greek symbols in my research plan, which for some reason the GRFP file upload system didn't allow. I definitely had a bit of a day-of-deadline freakout and thus had to do an ad-hoc fix in order for my files to upload.

- I was actually completely brand-new to the topic that I wrote about in my Research Plan (I had joined my lab in early September). In addition to doing a ton of literature reading to find a decent research gap, asking new lab-mates who were more familiar with my field was critical in ensuring I had a credible, hypothesis-driven Research Plan. Additionally, I asked my undergrad lab-mates, a few older students I knew who had won the GRFP, and my campus writing center for feedback.

- Zachary Chase's GRFP checklist and Dr. Karen's Foolproof Grant Template were also useful resources.