This assignment is required for both BME 100 and BME 200, but those who are taking both courses need only turn it in once (for BME 100) to get credit for it in both courses.

Your task is simple: find a graduate fellowship that you are eligible for, and fill out all the application materials. For this assignment you need not actually submit the application (though it is a very good idea to do so).

There is a fairly good list of fellowship opportunities at http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/centers/cbe/gradfellows.html
There is also some information on graduate-student funding in the UCSC catalog: http://reg.ucsc.edu/catalog/graduate.html#fin, though most of these fellowships are ones that you apply for when you apply for admission to UCSC, so current grad students are generally not eligible.

When I [Kevin Karplus] was a grad student, I had an NSF grad fellowship and a Fannie and John Hertz Foundation fellowship (not at the same time). I've also done reviewing for NSF fellowships and for NIH post doc proposals. I believe that this experience will be useful in providing good feedback on your applications. The students that we accepted into the UCSC bioinformatics grad program all had very strong records---all should have an excellent chance at getting a fellowship. Note: there is always some randomness in any selection process, so you are better off applying for several fellowships, rather than just one.

For the foreign students, finding a funding source may be more difficult, as most of the US universities only keep track of domestic funding sources. You should try to find a funding source for which you can apply though---either a private foundation that does not have US residency requirement or a source from your country of citizenship. You might want to investigate http://www.edupass.org/finaid/, http://www.edupass.org/finaid/databases.phtml, and http://www.iefa.org. If you cannot find a funding source you are eligible for, then you must give me a list of at least 40 sources that you examined and do a dummy application for NSF or NIH.

For the re-entry students, particularly those with doctoral degrees already, you may not be eligible for some of the standard grad student fellowships, since they want to avoid funding perpetual students. If you are changing fields drastically, you may be eligible for standard fellowships, but be held to stricter criteria. You may, if you wish, write an application for a postdoctoral fellowship, which is longer and requires a more detailed research plan.

Those who already have fellowships should share the secrets of their success with others in the class. They should also turn in the technical part of postdoctoral fellowship application---a research plan.

A good fellowship applicant must be well-prepared for the graduate program they are proposing entering. Good GRE scores and grades are also useful, but almost everyone applying for a fellowship has at least decent scores, so you won't stand out just on test scores. Having undergraduate research experience, particularly experience that lead to publication, is a strong plus. The research experience need not be exactly in the field you plan for grad school---so for a bioinformatics proposal research in any of biology, chemistry, computer science, math, statistics, or biophysics would be quite relevant.

A specific research plan is also a plus. Seniors in college are not expected to have extremely detailed research plans (they generally don't know enough yet to formulate one), but they should have a pretty clear idea what they want to do. First-year grad students are held to a somewhat higher standard---you're a lot closer to having to pick your thesis topic!

Vague statements about winning the war on cancer or how exciting bioinformatics is are pretty useless. There is also little point in talking about how you always wanted to be a scientist or how some 6th-grade science teacher turned your life around. What the fellowship reviewers are looking for is evidence that investing in you will have a good payback---that you will become a solid researcher (or doctor or teacher, depending on the fellowship). They want to know what you will do in the future, and they want to know enough about your past to be convinced you can do it.

Letters of recommendation

Letters of recommendation, particularly from researchers who have worked with you closely, are extremely important for a real application. Real letters will not be required for this assignment, since the labor of creating them should not be imposed without reason.

Quite often, the way to get a good letter of recommendation is to draft an honest, detailed assessment of the work you did, and to e-mail it to the person you are asking for a letter. If you write the assessment in the third person, they can cut-and-paste it into their letter, editing out anything they disagree with. This saves them a lot of work, looking up your project, remembering what your contribution was, and coming up with descriptions of it.

It is a good idea to write up a quarterly progress report for each research project you work on, so that you have material readily available for such a request.

If you have done any prior research with someone you might want to write a letter of recommendation, write and turn in a one-page draft of the e-mail or letter you would send to the request the letter of recommendation.

Due date 29 Oct 2003

The due date for both classes is Wed 29 October 2003 at midnight. Students in BME 100 should use the submit command for assignment "fellowship" to submit two files: application.pdf and request-for-recommendation.pdf. Instead of pdf files, you may submit raw ASCII text files (application.txt and request-for-recommendation.txt), but Microsoft Word files will not be accepted.

BME 200 students should turn in paper copies to my [Karplus's] mailbox before 9 a.m. on 30 October. You should probably aim at getting it in before 4pm on 29 October, since if the door is locked, you won't be able to deliver the assignment. Papers left on, under, or in my door will not be accepted.

Note: this deadline is getting close to the real application deadlines. If you wish feedback in time for real applications, please submit your assignment very early, and send me e-mail asking for early feedback.

SoE home

Kevin Karplus's home page

BS, MS, and PhD programs

BME 205 home page

Karplus's lab page

UCSC Bioinformatics research

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