How to write an NSF GRFP personal statement

The personal statement can make or break your application.

The NSF just released their call for applications for the Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). Applications are due between November 10 and November 14, 2025, depending on the field of study. So, students have a little over five weeks remaining to prepare their applications. This is not a lot of time. To make things a little easier, I’m providing here a couple of tips and considerations for writing a personal statement. I note that in addition to the personal statement, students also need to submit a research plan. If there is interest, I may write a follow-up post on how to prepare a research plan.

The intended audience for my post is undergraduates and first-year graduate students in the US applying for an NSF GRFP. If this is not you, there’s no need to continue reading. However, some parts of the post touch upon general thoughts about personal statements and grant applications, so even if you’re not in the US or not a student you may find some of the remainder useful.

The instructions for this year’s application are available on the NSF website. If you’re planning to apply, read these instructions very carefully, from beginning to end. No matter what I say here, if at any point my advice disagrees with what the NSF writes the NSF is correct. It is ultimately your responsibility to adhere to all the requirements spelled out in the application guidelines.¹

When you read the guidelines, you will see that the two main documents you have to prepare are a personal statement and a research plan. Of those two, the personal statement is the more important one, for two reasons. First, it is substantially longer—three pages instead of two. That in itself tells you it is more important. There is more space to say something interesting or to make a fool of yourself. Second, I believe² that reviewers put more stock into the personal statement. Here is my reasoning: Most students receive more help and feedback for their research plan than for their personal statement. As a consequence, many of the submitted research plans are pretty good, and reviewers can’t use them to separate the absolute best students from the only very good students. And also, if a research plan is truly excellent, reviewers will worry that the ideas came from the student’s supervisor rather than from the student themself. So, an excellent research plan with a mediocre personal statement suggests the student got a lot of help but isn’t that strong when on their own. By contrast, an Ok research plan with a strong personal statement suggests the student may be able to punch above their weight but didn’t receive as much coaching when preparing the application or may not yet have a lot of research experience. Therefore, all else being equal, I expect most reviewers will weigh the personal statement more than the research plan. Of course, the absolute best students will have both a strong research plan and a strong personal statement, and you should try to achieve this level of excellence.

Now that you know why the personal statement is important, let’s discuss specific strategies for making it good.

Approach the personal statement with the right attitude

Let’s begin with the overall attitude with which to approach your personal statement. Your application will be reviewed by established scientists. What they’re looking for is a peer, somebody they can treat as a colleague from day one—not a student who will need a lot of hand-holding.³ So your personal statement needs to convey you’re this type of student. Think about what a scientist would tell other scientists about themselves. Would they start their personal statement with something like the following?

As a teenager, I was fascinated with the natural world, and in particular with insects. I would observe ants as they were building nests, and I would collect butterflies. My high school science teacher Ms. Smith was a beekeeper and one spring she showed us how she maintained the hive and harvested honey. It made me wonder why the bees always stayed with the hive instead of flying away. And also, when bees leave to forage, how do they manage to find their way back home?

The answer is most likely they would not. They would not because they all have a similar origin story. In high school, they were all weird nerds nobody wanted to hang out with and who could geek out for hours over obscure topics.⁴ None of your experiences in high school differentiate you from the other applicants with those same experiences, and those experiences are also not relevant for your likely success or failure in graduate school.

An established scientist would simply lead with their science. They would lay out a grand vision of what they’re trying to accomplish, and then describe in more detail what they have done so far along this route, what successes they have had, what stumbling blocks they may have encountered, and so on. For example, if I had to write a personal statement for the NSF GRFP, I might write something like the following. (But note that for the NSF GRFP, you probably want to stay away from an emphasis on biomedical research. I emphasized biomedical research here so if you’re working in an area similar to mine you aren’t tempted to just copy my text and paste it into your statement.)

I am a computational biologist and data scientist. I use mathematical modeling, computer simulation, and machine learning to address questions of biomedical relevance. Much of my work focuses on disease-causing agents in humans, and my overarching goal is to use computational tools to speed up the discovery of disease mechanisms and design of therapeutic agents. I currently have active research projects developing antibacterial agents, identifying novel molecular or genetic targets for antiviral treatments, and designing inhibitors of gene-editing enzymes.

You may not feel comfortable presenting yourself in this way, as an established scientist who has already accomplished various things and knows what they want to do going forward. You may feel that this is not you, at least not yet. But I can assure you that there will be applicants who have this down, so find your inner scientist and try to bring it to the fore in your own application. Importantly, note that how professional you come across is not determined by how much you brag about yourself (you shouldn’t) but by your selection of topics. Write about your research. Don’t write about your experiences in high school science class.

Provide your readers with an abstract

Write the first paragraph of your personal statement as an abstract. Write six to eight sentences that cover all relevant components: Who you are, what you currently do, what your research is about, what your future goals are. This is a general writing trick when preparing any sort of proposal or application. Even if (or in particular if) the instructions don’t ask for an abstract, write one. But don’t label it “abstract.” Just turn the first paragraph of your document into a summary of the whole.

To understand why I’m giving this advice, put yourself into the mind of your reviewers. They have ten or more applications to review, and they don’t want it to take all weekend.⁵ So they would like to figure out quickly which applications to rank at the top and which at the bottom. If you can give them a single paragraph that allows them to envisage your entire application, you’re already on their good side. The worst thing for a reviewer is when they’re reading page after page and have no idea what any of this is about. You won’t believe how many personal statements I’ve seen where I’m two pages in, we’ve finally made it out of high school and into freshman year in college, and I still have no idea where any of this is going and what the applicant wants to tell me.

Your statement doesn’t have to be in chronological order

Continuing on from the abstract, you want to lay out your specific argument for who you are and why you deserve a fellowship. This argument does not have to be arranged in chronological order, starting with grade school and ending in the present. While the majority of personal statements are arranged in chronological order, this arrangement often makes them long-winded and tedious to read.

For example, when you describe your prior research experiences, don’t arrange them in the order in which they occurred unless there’s a good reason to do so. Instead, organize the material such that it most supports your overarching story. If that results in a chronological ordering, fine. But if not, also fine.

Think about the various research experiences you’ve had, and for every one identify one particular achievement, insight, or observation you want to highlight. Then arrange them such that the sequence of events maximally engages your audience. For example, maybe you first present a success you’ve had, then you present a failure where you’ve learned an important lesson, and then you talk about how the lesson you learned will shape your research approach going forward.

Separately address intellectual merit and broader impacts

You are required to write separate sections for “intellectual merit” and “broader impacts” in both the personal statement and the research plan. This is stated in bold in the application preparation instructions. If you don’t have those sections your application will not get reviewed. As an undergrad or first-year graduate student, this may be the first time you’re seeing these two terms, and you may have no idea what they mean. They are NSF-specific terms and it’s best to start with the definitions the NSF provides:

Intellectual merit: The potential for the proposed project to advance knowledge and understanding within its own field or across different fields.

Broader impacts: The potential for the proposed project to benefit society and contribute to the achievement of specific, desired societal outcomes.

Intellectual merit is the significance of your project, the why. Why should your project be done, and why should anybody care? Ideally you have some knowledge gap or unsolved scientific problem that your research is going to address, and closing the gap or solving the problem is the intellectual merit of the project.

Broader impacts on first glance may seem similar. Isn’t it also the why of your project, only a bit broader? This is a common misreading of what broader impacts are. Experienced NSF investigators know that broader impacts will generally describe a distinct activity that is carried out, separately from the actual research, and that often involves some form of education or outreach (see also my next section). The NSF has a page dedicated to explaining broader impacts, though even that page has to be taken with a grain of salt. What the NSF says broader impacts are and what reviewers score highly on the broader impacts category is not necessarily perfectly aligned. In case of doubt, ask somebody with extensive experience of receiving NSF funding and sitting on NSF panels to evaluate your broader impacts component.

Develop a broader impacts activity

A competitive application will typically propose a specific activity that results in broader impacts. It is not sufficient to just talk about how the proposed research is important and may have far-reaching societal consequences. Instead, you need to be actively doing something that is not research and that can be clearly described as broader impacts.⁶

Here are some examples of what broader impacts activities could be: (1) You’ll be organizing a club for students with similar research interests to yours. Part of the club’s goals will be to help interested undergraduates find their way into your research field. (2) You’ll be reaching out to high schools and visit classrooms and tell students about your research or research in general. (3) You’ll be giving public lectures. Or, you’ll be organizing a public lecture series where you connect an interested public with accomplished scientists. (4) You’ll be developing or maintaining some widely used scientific or educational software, or develop some other resource that will benefit society broadly.⁷ In the past, activities that would increase diversity of the student body or help underrepresented minorities were highly valued in the review process, but in 2025 I would stay away from any activities that require you to write these words to describe them.

Whatever you decide to propose, make sure it is credible and feasible. You increase credibility by providing specific details. For example, simply saying “I will reach out to local high schools” is not very credible. If instead you say something like the following the added detail conveys that you’ve thought this through and know what you’ll be doing: “I will work with high schools XXX, YYY, and ZZZ. I have already talked to Mr. Smith who teaches science classes at XXX and Ms. Miller who teaches at YYY. Ms. Miller will also connect me with teachers at ZZZ.” If you’ve already done the same type of activity in the past, even better. Include some concrete examples in your statement.

In principle, you can describe your broader impacts activity either in the research plan or in the personal statement. The NSF instructions don’t provide guidance on this choice. However, I believe the personal statement is the better option. For one, you have an additional page, and the research plan is going to be tight already. Also, it fits better thematically. Placing the broader impacts activity into the personal statement underlines that it’s separate from the proposed research.

In conclusion

Take your personal statement seriously. Chances are it will make or break your application. Ask mentors or friends to read it and give you feedback. Do they find what you wrote compelling? Are they confused by anything? Do they have concerns that something you’re proposing is not feasible? It is Ok to ask family members who are not academics to give you feedback, but realize they will likely not know what a personal statement should look like and may give bad advice. Their feedback can be helpful in terms of clarity of writing, grammar, sentence structure, and so on, but they’ll most likely not be able to judge whether you’re saying the right things in the right order. If you can have an experienced academic review your personal statement that’s always a better option.

1. I’ve had grant proposals rejected without review for overlooking a minor point in the instructions. Grant-proposal guides have to be taken seriously and read cover-to-cover.

2. But of course I can’t know this for a fact.

3. The reviewers will not work with you personally, so why does it matter? It matters because that’s the thought process they apply. They are looking for the types of students they would want to have in their own labs.

4. I’m writing in the third person here but obviously this includes me. I was that kid.

5. This type of work always happens on the weekend, or in the evening, because reviewers are busy people and have regular day jobs during the week.

6. And even better if you already have a track record of doing exactly this activity going into the application process. Yes, it’s a tall order, and many students will struggle to come up with a convincing plan for broader impacts.

7. But make sure what you’re proposing is separate from the intellectual-merit component of your project. There can be thematic overlap, but I would expect to see a distinct activity that I can label as “broader impacts” and that is not already included in the proposed research program.