Criteria for Success
- You have checked the most up-to-date solicitation to make sure you are eligible for the Fellowship (i.e., you are not proposing to pursue an MD-PhD; you are not proposing research about a particular disease or clinical practice).
- Your personal statement convinces a panel of academics that you are qualified to receive the Fellowship, especially with respect to the NSF-specific “Intellectual Merit” and “Broader Impacts” criteria.
- You show only those skills and experiences that demonstrate how you fit those criteria.
- The skills and experiences that you show are concrete and quantitative.
- Your personal statement meets the formatting and page limit criteria.
Structure Diagram
Note that the Broader Impacts sections can be woven through the rest of the experiences as well as highlighted in separate sections. Sizes of sections are approximate.
Formatting Requirements
The NSF has official, strict guidelines for page limits. These limits include all references, citations, charts, figures, images, and lists of publications and presentations.
Always check to make sure you are following the up-to-date guidelines of your application year. The current guidelines are outlined on the GRFP website, which also has Word document templates available to assist with formatting.
Identify Your Purpose
Your personal statement is a key part of an application package that should convince the selection committee to award you this fellowship.
At a high level, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) aims to recognize and support “outstanding graduate students pursuing full-time research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. GRFP was established to recruit and support individuals who demonstrate the potential to make significant contributions in STEM.”
The GRFP website (as of Fall 2026) expands upon this with: “Keep in mind that NSF does not just seek to fund scientists and engineers; NSF seeks to fund future STEM leaders. Use the statements to show leadership potential, self-starter capabilities, and the ability to work well with others (scientists, students, people in the community, etc.). Show passion, motivation for a STEM career, and initiative in your past research and other experiences.”
For the GRFP, your personal statement (technically, the “Personal, Relevant Background, and Future Goals Statement”) is the only part of the application where you get to lay out the experiences you’ve had, the goals you intend to pursue, and how those experiences and goals qualify you for the Fellowship. This means that your personal statement should build on and go beyond what you would put in a resume/CV; it should also explain the motivation and meaning behind your experiences.
Analyze your Audience
Your entire application will be reviewed by “disciplinary and interdisciplinary scientists and engineers, and other professional graduate education experts” (as stated in the Fall 2026 solicitation). These reviewers are historically academics, usually from your broad area of science (e.g., biology), but not from your specific area (e.g., polymer biomechanics). They will judge your application using some combination of (a) the NSF’s official criteria for the Fellowship and (b) their own ideas about what makes good science or a good scientist.
The people on the committee read many, many applications. Make it easy for them to be on your side by:
- Avoiding jargon and making sure the language (particularly when describing past research experiences) is understandable to a broader audience. The GRFP website also emphasizes this: “Don’t get bogged down in specifics, or be overly technical. Instead of elaborate details on theory, focus on the rationale for your studies and the existing literature as it supports your proposed work.”
- Referencing the NSF’s Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts criteria so that it’s obvious that you are qualified for the award. See the following section for more details on these criteria.
- Using formatting, like bolding and underlining, sparsely and strategically, to make the keywords/phrases more eye-catching.
Depending on the year, the NSF may also favor research proposals from specific disciplines. For instance, in the 2020 solicitation, Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Information Science, and Computationally Intensive Research were emphasized as “high priority research areas.” Make sure to check the current solicitation for any specifications on this front. If there is an emphasis on proposals from certain disciplines, consider whether you can frame your research proposal and application to align more closely with the agency’s priorities.
Skills
Create a personal narrative that reflects alignment with the NSF’s Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts criteria
Unlike a grant that funds a specific project, the NSF GRFP invests in the professional and scientific growth of individuals. Specifically, the program aims to “identify, select, recognize, and financially support early-career individuals with the demonstrated potential to be high achieving scientists and engineers.” Regarding how exactly these individuals will be selected, the Fall 2026 NSF GRFP solicitation says (emphases added):
“Reviewers are asked to assess applications using a comprehensive approach, giving balanced consideration to all components of the application. These include the educational and research record, leadership, outreach, service activities, and future plans. Individual competencies, experiences, and attributes such as creativity and initiative are also considered. The aim is to recruit and retain a strong cohort of early-career individuals with high potential for future achievements, contributions, and broader impacts in STEM.”
Like many awards or job offers, there are explicit criteria that show if you qualify for the Fellowship and reflect the program’s goals and values. For the GRFP, reviewers evaluate applications based on the two NSF Merit Review Criteria of Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts. These criteria are specific to the NSF and are used to evaluate all NSF grant proposals, even beyond the GRFP. They are broadly defined as:
- Intellectual Merit: The potential to advance knowledge.
- Broader Impacts: The potential to benefit society and contribute to the achievement of specific, desired societal outcomes.
What is factored into assessing Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts may shift year to year. Read the program solicitation (updated on a yearly basis before each application cycle) to learn the specific Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts criteria that the selection committee are using to judge your application. In particular, do not just make up your own ideas about what “Broader Impacts” means. The NSF has specific lists of activities that constitute Broader Impacts.
With the specific criteria in mind, your personal statement is thus your opportunity to show the selection panel that your personal goals (e.g., mentor undergraduate researchers) align with the program’s goals (e.g., “improve STEM education in schools through outreach and mentoring”). Tell a narrative about yourself that is honest, that you’re excited about, and that shows this alignment. Use this narrative through your entire personal statement, weaving in references to the specific criteria (e.g., show examples of your ability to “work as a part of a team,” “interpret and communicate research,” and “take initiative”). This should help you avoid writing a personal statement that is just a resume in essay format.
Note that the NSF currently requires Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts to be explicitly addressed under sections with individual separate headings. Applications prior to 2018 did not have this formatting requirement, so be sure to follow the most up-to-date guidelines, especially if you are referencing older examples.
Concretize and quantify your experiences
Your experiences are the “what” of your essay. Which experiences led you to develop your skill set and passions? Where have you demonstrated accomplishment, leadership, and collaboration? Research, teaching, and relevant extracurriculars are all relevant. State concrete achievements and outcomes like awards, discoveries, or publications.
Quantify your experience or impact to make them more concrete. How many people were on your team? How many protocols did you develop? How many people were in competition for an award? As a TA, how often did you meet with your students?
Describe your actions rather than changes in your mental or emotional state; your personal statement is not a diary entry.
| Vague experience | Concrete experience |
| During this project, my mind was opened to the possibility of using different programming languages together to create code that is faster to run and easier to understand and modify. | During this project, I collaborated with other group members to develop a user-friendly Python wrapper for a 10,000-line Fortran library. |
| I showed initiative in my second project in the lab. | Frustrated with the direction of my first project, I consulted with other faculty and proposed an entirely new project. |
| During my first year, I became a more curious and capable scientist. | I explored the literature and proposed two alternative procedures to make the experiment efficient. |
| I won the physic department’s Laser Focus prize. | I won the physics department’s prize for top student among my cohort of 20 students. |
| I learned about the role of enzymes in cancer. | I quantified the kinetics of three enzymes implicated in cancer onset. |
Explain the meaning of your experiences
The meaning of your experiences is the “why” or “so what” of your personal statement. It’s good to have quantitative and concrete experience; it’s even more important to attribute meaning to those experiences.
Every set of experiences should speak to one of the requirements that the NSF GRFP solicitation lays out:
- How has this experience prepared you to seek a graduate degree?
- How will it help you contribute to research, education, or innovations in science and engineering?
- How will your graduate experience prepare you for a career that expands scientific understanding or benefits society?
The connection between your experiences and the NSF GRFP’s goals may feel obvious to you, but you should make these connections explicit for your audience: this will make it easy for them to put you in the “yes” pile.
In terms of writing style, use statements about the meaning of experience as transitions between experiences. Try to “wrap” meaning around your experiences. Putting the meaning at the beginning and end of a paragraph makes it easy for a reader to understand what they should be taking away from the details in the middle.
| Experience only (schematic) | Experience and Meaning |
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This CommKit article was originally authored by Scott Oleson with contributions from many other Communication Fellows over the years. It was last updated by Communication Fellow Ellen Kan, with help from Victoria Chen, in Sept 2026 to reflect the changes in the solicitation/criteria in the 2026 cycle.
Resources and Annotated Examples
Annotated Example 1
This personal statement was part of an MIT BE graduate student’s successful NSF GRFP application. 13 MB