I've finally decided to create a professional website, and will be putting these things on there to make it easier to share with others. My out-of-order tips would be:
- Start early (preferably 2-3 months before the deadline)
- Set your goal to make a competitive application, not a winning application (you don't get to choose your reviewers so you can't control that element of chance). Your goal should be to write an application that isn't perfect, but one that you're pretty happy about. Whether it wins anything or not, if you accomplish that, that's the best you can do.
- Be your authentic self. This isn't just some new age advice, it works for the NSF GRFP as well. When I made my first draft, I wrote what I thought would win, and what the reviewers would like. I wrote clichéd stuff about science and how I'm fit to be a good scientist and blah blah blah, and it boring and plain. Once I started to be my actual self and tell my actual story (such as talking about sports, not even about science at the start) my application sprang to life. Moreover, there isn't a format to follow to win, you can't just check boxes with your writing. If you look around, a wide variety of applications, writing styles and organizational styles have won before. Keep this in mind, and BE AUTHENTIC.
- Decide what your strengths are and focus on those in your application, either ignore your weak spots or if you have a good excuse, talk about that. For example, if you notice one reviewer commented on how my undergraduate grades were weak. I had no good excuse for that so I ignored grades and coursework in my application. My strengths were in research and outreach, and my whole application is about that.
- OWN your application. Yes ask others to look at it and give comments, but you must decide what comments to keep and what to ignore. Don't give yourself the option to think that you don't know if you should include this or that in your application. Think long and hard and you will know, you don't need anybody else to tell you. I did this in my application, and it really comes off as a "me" application. Nobody else could have written this, it is fully written in my style. That's what you want.
- Not everyone edits in the same way. I didn't realize this before I started, but some people you ask to look at your application are better at fixing small details and some are better at big-scale organization. Ask the people better at big-scale organization to look over your application first, before you correct every last detail. I didn't do that, and spent numerous hours making a paragraph perfect before someone else came along and pointed out that I should change the ordering of my paragraphs, messing up the transitions I had worked so hard on. This happened a number of times, don't make the same mistake.
- Conversely, if you need to make wholesale changes, be easy on yourself and make them. Don't feel bad about all the hard work you're throwing down the drain. I did this a few times, and it certainly improved my application. The application I submitted contained fairly different ideas and a different focus than my first draft.
- Make bold changes to your application, and save them in a new version. A number of times I got frustrated and angry with my application, and make a bunch of wholesale rash changes. The next day when I had a cooler head I would review the changes, sometimes they were quite good and sometimes quite bad. Since I had saved old versions, I could simply go back and revoke bad changes.
- Set a regular schedule to work on your application. The thing that helped me most was a friend had agreed to look at my application each week for the 8 weeks until the deadline. He would give comments and I would make changes each week. This kept me focused and working on my application, and by the end of the 8 weeks, there was little left I could change. This made submitting the application pretty easy, as nothing was left until the last minute.
- Listen to yourself, you know best. A senior and well-respected graduate student I know told me that when he wrote his NSF, his first draft was better than his final draft, so he advised me to not ask anyone else to look it over, since that would only degrade the quality. I thanked him for his suggestion, but knew that I needed others to look over my application to make it better. In the end, I was right. A similar thing happened with some edits I received on my application, they were well-intentioned but I knew they didn't fit with my writing style, so I politely did not heed those comments. If I had heeded every comment I received, my application would have been a mess.
- Organize your application well. Organization is not my strong suit, and due to poor organization, I spent longer on my application than I needed to. Spending some more time planning out what I wanted to say, what ideas I wanted to get across, and what I wanted to focus on in my application would have saved me time in the long run.
- Keep working on your application even when it feels hopeless. Throughout the course of writing you will feel like there is no chance you will win and you will wonder why you are spending any time on this at all. This is normal. Go get yourself something to perk up your spirits (for me it was boba and walking around outside) and get back to writing.