NSF GRFP
I applied to the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) during the 2024-2025 cycle and was awarded a fellowship in spring 2025. That was the year the NSF halved the number of awards granted (from 2,000-2,500 to 1,000) due to budget cuts imposed under the Trump administration.
Organization
Below are three free softwares that I use to structure my work flow. Clicking on an icon will direct you to the download page.
Zotero: citations manager
Notion: project management
Obsidian: note-taking
Academic Writing
For immigrant students whose first language is not English, students who have only ever attended public schools, and first-generation/low-income students, the formal language of academia feels unfamiliar and unnatural. This reflected my own experience as a 1.5-generation Filipina and formerly low-income Head Start kid who had only ever known public schooling systems until I entered college.
As a child, I used to stay up until midnight reading novels I borrowed from the library with a thick purple dictionary next to me. Every time I encountered an unfamiliar word, I would look it up in the dictionary and hand-write the definition in a spiral notebook. I consider books my first companions in the U.S.
It does take work to be an effective writer (I am still working on it), but everyone need not painstakingly hand-write the definitions of English words. 🙂 Below are button links to free resources I’ve recommended to students when I worked in academic communications from 2021 to 2025. Hopefully they make the learning curve of academic writing in English feel a little less steep.
Another great resource:
Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Birkenstein. 2018. They Say I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. 4th ed. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.
A resource in a different sense:
“More and more colleges are increasingly open to lower-income students. But just how wide open are they? Let us not forget that Princeton, despite introducing this change in financial aid policy, remains one of the thirty-eight universities that have more students from the top 1 percent than the bottom 60 percent. Lower-income students may be entering elite colleges in greater numbers now than they were fifty years ago, but these campuses are still bastions of wealth, build on the customs, traditions, and policies that reflect the tastes and habits of the rich” (Jack 2019:8).
Jack, Anthony Abraham. 2019. The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.