yeah, i'm last minute like that

i worked on my fellowship application until the deadline today. i've been working steadily on it since friday; before that i already had rough drafts of the essays. the rest of the application was a reasonable amount of online forms to fill out. filling them out was a useful form of procrastination when i was too worn out to work on essays any more. the topics of the essays: proposed research plan, previous research experience, personal statement, and societal benefit. the personal statement was to let them know how you ended up being a scientist, and probably also a way for them to screen applicants who they might be especially excited about, like underrepresented people of color, and in certain fields, women. biology is not a field they feel they need to increase the presence of women in. sorry about these miserable sentences, but i'm not going back to try to clean them up because it feels like torture to do that.

in any case, i started this entry to share part of the receipt they emailed me to confirm my application submission.
Application Received On: Wed Nov 17 20:00:29 EST 2004
for those of you playing along at home, that means my application was 29 seconds late. i'm not remotely worried that it will be a problem. i'm even a little proud.

this is a phenomenally nice fellowship. for three years, they pay your fees plus a $30k annual stipend, and it's a great resume item. last year i was an honorable mention, so i think i'm a strong applicant. there are a few parts of the application i can think of improving, but not many. basically, i think at this point it's a matter of luck. writing the application was very helpful for clarifying my thought process though, and mary gave me a lot of feedback on the essay and my planned dissertation project, so it certainly wasn't time wasted. holly put in a heroic effort to help me. it was really helpful.

ok, now i'm going to do some laundry. clean the house. pay bills. you know the scene.