/doe_csgf_applications

Example applications for the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 InternationalCC-BY-4.0

CSGF

Example applications for the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. Applications typically due in January for awards starting in September of that year. First cohort was awarded fellowships in 1991.

How To Contribute

CSGF fellows and alumni can open a pull request and/or email if they are willing to publicly share their application materials. Files should be sent as PDFs, named as <year>_anonymous.pdf or <year>_<last name>_<institution>.pdf depending on if the submission is mostly anonymized or not. The <year> should be the calendar year the application was due (equivalently, the year the funding started). The <institution> should be the "preferred doctoral instituion", which, for fellows who were awarded the CSGF before enrolling in a PhD program, may have ended up having no ties to the applicant.

The CSGF application format has changed throughout the years, but it currently consists of 16 sections, with the most important ones spanning:

  • CV-esque biographical information
  • multiple research statements
  • the program of study (POS)
  • 3x letters of recommendation
  • transcripts (GRE scores were dropped sometime after the 2014 cycle)

Examples of the first three will be the most useful for prospective applicants. Krell maintains its own custom application system; a printable version of a completed application in PDF format should have been generated upon submission. Ideally a redacted version of this is what should be uploaded to this repo, but even partial contributions in any format (e.g. just a PDF of the essay statements) will be accepted.

It is recommended to at least remove the section from the first few page(s) of your PDF application which typically contained an applicant's mailing address, email, phone number, etc. It is up to your personal comfort level if you want to manually redact other demographic and identifying information (e.g. in the research statements) and/or names, specific publication titles, etc. Phone numbers and email addresses of your reviewers and department chair should be redacted to be compliant with GDPR rules. Consult online guides for proper techniques for redacting PDFs.

Any contributed application will be licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license.

Future

  • Have Krell link to this repo from the CSGF website?
  • Consistent format for partial submissions of just research statements, etc.
  • Disambiguate applications for the conventional Science & Engineering Track from those for the newer Math/CS Track (either in file name or subfolder). What year did the Math/CS Track start--- announced fall 2018, or fall 2017 for 2018 incoming cohort?
  • Add examples of unsuccessful applications? Currently, for the majority of applicants it is possible to apply to at most 2x cycles. Previously, it was possible to apply as a second year PhD student, so 3x cycles.
  • Add folder containing practicum preproposals and full proposals, or create a new repo containing these and other resources useful to current fellows.
  • Get examples from as many cohorts as possible
  • Truly anonymous contributions of successful applications would be largely useless, since it would be simple to cross-reference with the Krell fellow and alumni directory and any publication info, so nearly everything would be redacted. But if we add examples of declined applications, might be useful?