Analysis: Why I failed. (Part 1)

So, a while back I applied for a grad fellowship through the National Science Foundation. I intend to go to the University of Hawaii at Manoa this fall to surf....ummmm... study tropical soil science and agriculture and hopefully, someday, get a master's degree, live out my days in a mud hut in Africa.

Now, for those of you who don't know (I didn't until I realized I wanted some money from them to go to school) NSF is a pretty cool organization. Here are some of the fun facts from their website:

1. Created by Congress in 1950 "to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense…"
2. Has an annual budget of $6.06 billion.
3. Funds ~20% of "all federally supported basic research conducted by America's colleges and universities."

Cool, I needed some dough.

Finally, a day rolled around in November 2007 when I--after what seemed hours-days-weeks-eons of laborious writing, thinking, reviewing my past, thinking, writing, looking into my future--finally produced something resembling an application for a fellowship to go to UHM, study this amazing plant called Jatropha curcas, and figure out how it could be better used in developing countries as a source of cost-effective, sustainable fuel for diesel engines, cooking stoves, lamps, and so on.

I submitted it to NSF, begged for some letters of recommendation from some of my favorite people in the world (a.k.a. the Cal Poly Soil Science Department), and waited.

And waited.

November to March is a LONG TIME.

Cruelly, on April 1, as I logged on to the NSF grad fellowship website, I saw the notice that the list of 2008 awardees was available for public viewing. I searched and re-searched the neatly alphabetized list about fifteen thousand times before I finally gave up, resigned to the fact that, no they hadn't just spelled my name wrong, I indeed was not one of the lucky ones getting that nice chunk of change. Suddenly, it wasn't going to be a walk in the park for me to leave my cushy California job to go be a student in Hawaii.

So where did I go wrong? I've been thinking about this a lot. I've got a few ideas, mostly having to do with 1) elitist schools, 2) the notion of good hard science today, and 3) the complexity of trying to mix respectable graduate work with a Godly attitude toward missions.

[to be continued]