The Unofficial SMART Scholarship Forum

The first thing I’ll say is that unless you NEED the SMART scholarship to pay for school don’t apply. With your accolades, I don’t imaging that locating funding would be a major problem. If you are really interested in places like DARPA, look at applying to their “student” programs directly, and avoid SMART. If you want to do that level of R&D you might be better off looking into state or specialized labs in your field. You need to understand that the facilities listed by SMART don’t all look at the application pool. If you can find the list of past awardees, look at which ones are actually participating. I have yet to meet/hear from another cohort that is doing real research. Secondly, the application may have changed since I filled it out, but it didn’t care about any volunteer activities iirc. Also, “lab” experience only really affects the PHD applicants from what I can tell. Your recommendations were also required to be from an employer that could vouch for your work in the field you’re applying for, or from a professor of the field you’re applying. Generally, the only military reference that would boost your chances are veterans preferences (you are the vet). As I said, they may have changed the application since I applied, but that’s the way it was when I completed it.

First of all, congrats on all your accomplishments.

One thing that I think you should know, that many people do not understand, is that this scholarship is not a typical scholarship where you get graded on how great of a student you are or how intelligent you are, and then you do or don't get the scholarship. It is a service for scholarship, so, as you already alluded to, the need for your major is a HUGE component as to whether or not you get the scholarship. That is not meaning that your grades don't matter, because they do. But good grades and intelligence alone don't guarantee a spot. There has to be an anticipated need, at the time you are estimated to be graduating, for someone with your talents.

Also, they want people who want to serve their country by using their talents. I am in the cohort of 2011 and one thing they stressed at orientation was the importance of "The Mission." In fact, there's a slogan of "Mission First, People Always" within the Air Force.

That being said, if you apply, make sure you emphasize the items such as your volunteer work, and what you want to do for the US, assuming you do want to use your talents for such reasons. You are correct that you're area is one of less common occurrence (at least from listening around here).There's no way to tell you if you have a good chance though, because none of us (I'm assuming here) have a good idea of what is or isn't needed at any of the SF's. However, you'll never know if you could have gotten it if you don't apply. And anyone willing to give you a good recommendation can't hurt your chances.

Good luck if you choose to apply.

PS: I think it would be a good idea to mention your experience with programming, because Computer Science experience is generally a good thing. Just my 2 cents there.

Hello SMART community,

This is my first post, I was actually informed of this program through a friend via mass e-mail. I checked out the website, and I was heavily interested in the program, I even did research on the certain facilities, statistics, general application procedure, etc.

I am a double major in Bioengineering and Mathematical Biology. I have a 4.0 (might drop to like 3.8 after finals week....). I have no heavy duty research experience, but I volunteered in some labs, and I read a lot of books and have a lot of interests that have garnered attention from other scholarship faculties, and have gotten me some scholarship money for ideas and access to professors and research labs this fall. I have a huge imagination, and I get patterns really quickly and I love logic, puzzles, etc. I'm going to be heavily involved in both a biophysics group and a group that does mathematical modeling on biological systems at my university. I also have a personable relationship with one of my Linear Algebra professors, and we're going to do computational linear algebra for imaging purposes this fall. Mathematical modeling on biological systems is my big thing that I'm very good at. I know C++, Python, and some FORTRAN (hella old, I know, but they use the 2008 edition in some modeling applications at my university...)

For the record, I'm not using my major to be Pre-Med, or doing some yuppie ecology environment research...I want to get a PhD in Mathematical Biology or Bioengineering and work in research. I would LOVE to work at DARPA, which is kind of why I really want to get a head start and get a taste of the general environment...

On the website, biosciences is said to be a viable major for the scholarship, but I'm not too heavily sure on how common a biosciences major is to get in. I know a lot of the big things are electrical, civil, mechanical, computer science, etc.


I have heavy interest in infectious disease, biological warfare defense, mathematical modeling of disease proliferation in a population, computational imaging of RNA Viruses/Bacteria to understand their physiology on a molecular basis, mathematical modeling of protein networking to design high quality fast generating skin grafts for those that have burns, or wounds, analysis of heavy duty sound wave/radiation on pilots, immunology, and a whole host of biological applications to the human body.

I have ~100 hours of volunteer work at hospitals, and I've had three jobs in my life, all official math tutoring jobs at either learning centers or collegiate institutions.

There was also a math competition on campus in which I was a finalist in.

I have two professors who are both Vietnam Vets willing to write me letters of recommendation. These vets weren't on the front line, but did STEM-esque work for the government (one was an biochemist who did analysis on the forests and was behind the scenes in eradicating a lot of the rainforests in the terrain through chemical agents, the other was a physicist who did work on lasers, but wasn't clear in exactly what he used the lasers for in the government).


Although the biological sciences are not as heavily sough out in this scholarship, do you think I have a shot?