The Unofficial SMART Scholarship Forum

From my experience, they don't look closely at your resume. They look at your major and how far you stand out against others in it. If your major aligns with what they hire, that's good enough for them. It's not like they're trying to offer you a job that fits what you're good at. Oh and a note abou...

Asking a student to de-anonymize themselves on a public forum is a bad idea.

Can't you instead share a way for them to contact you?

I'm with "anon" above. Don't continue spreading propaganda for this indentured servitude program to others, please.

Not a full sample essay, but this answer I wrote in the last thread will help you.

I wouldn't recommend it. Unless you're doing a BS/MS, they're going to treat the degree programs separately and won't fund you. Here's the truth. Any other advice is just wrong. SMART is a program about procuring the future government workforce. Their number one goal is to recruit you into working ...

Submit applications: Fall Hear back on decision: Spring Funding starts: the following Fall Your answer is Fall 2021. Note that SMART is only capable of starting funding on a Fall semester. If you graduate off-cycle in the Fall and want to continue onto grad school the next semester, they'll shut you...

I hope someone from your field can weigh in, but I'll throw this out there again about the PhD process---SMART does not play well with PhD applicants. There's a hard limit on funding. If you don't finish your research by then, you're in default with them on every penny given to you, including intern...

Sorry to bump an old thread, but I'll add in the FEVS , which is a governmentwide survey of federal employees. In the 2019 summary, they report on page 41/45 demographics related to age. Out of the 560,000+ who responded, only 7,269 were <= 25 years old. To really drive it home, they break it down b...

SMART moves brutally slow. I've been in a Phase 2 position since January but I haven't even gotten a Phase 2 letter from SMART yet.

Edit (2020-07-27): Turns out SMART silently dropped it into the Scholar Portal on 2020-04-14 without telling me.

It's just an interim until they finish their investigation and grant you the clearance for whatever you were put in for. You retain the clearance for as long as you're still with the government, basically. If you already hold the clearance when you leave to go back to school, they might swear you ou...

Sisyphus, one of the forum's mods, runs a Discord server for SMART debtors. They've shared several stories, documents, and advice about this process on there and it's the single best place to find the information you're looking for. That's not to say you can't find some of the same information on he...

I found this post , which seems to discuss what you're asking about. It looks like some had it start in August---I'm thinking they continue the BS payments until the next award cycle...? You might find more if you search the forum for "SAAR" like I did. I'm waiting on SMART too. I graduated in Decem...

My take on it is also, probably, "no." SMART really only looks at their scholars as an investment. Period. Their program office has said to people in the past "we deserve to get what we paid for" [too lazy to cite this thing that's all over my posting history, it's there if you want to find it]. The...

Thanks for continuing the visibility of this information and volunteering your time to perpetuate it. I hope it continues to help more people.

But, this is about a future Aerospace Engineering major. A lack of funding and equipment is not really a thing in that field. Engineers are in high demand with the SMART. Yeah, that's why I was selected...computer scientists are engineers (at least, according to my degree issued by the College of E...

Dan, some people get lucky. Perhaps they actually get to work on things like lasers or the railgun. The rest of us end up paper-pushing and supporting old equipment that's older than almost every applicant to SMART. You'd be ignoring the large number of horror stories on this forum. People that get ...

I would personally advise against applying to SMART, especially with your strong resume. SMART, at best, will hinder you---you'll be working with antiquated equipment for years to come, not really learning much from it. SMART, at worst, will hurt you---there are lots of people who are very upset wit...

Have you had personal experience with this? How screwed am I? I don't have experience with that, sorry. Try using the forum's search engine or try asking some of the other past scholars who have left SMART. There's a Discord server here for those who are paying back SMART right now: https://discord...

Works for some. You can search "Masters" with a couple other keywords and there's a number of stories I've found in the past. However, SMART doesn't like prolonging education. They want people out in their workforce as fast as possible. If you're like me, they say yes and then say no at the last sec...

Oh I see.

Has anyone else noticed the great fluctuation in scholar coordinators recently? Under Navy (during LMI..), there have been announcements of:

2017-12-02: Monica S.
2019-06-07: Pam B.
2019-08-16: Magen S.
2019-09-18: Katy T.
2019-09-18: Magen S.

What's been going on that they can't keep people lol?

That's something you do on the portal to make an award change request, since they'd have to modify your service agreement contract.

My experience: they don't like extensions.

What they're really telling you is that there's few reasons they'd waive your internship. Not having a clearance in time is about the only reason, bar a few related to family or medical emergencies. This is a scholarship-for-service program. They pay you, you pay them (with work). If you're looking ...

a) Most likely, yes. They mostly care whether you're a full-time student in a STEM degree program. However, they also stick fast on their 5 year funding cap. If you're thinking about getting a PhD, I don't recommend this program. b) No. You're required to work for a Sponsoring Facility during the su...

I've heard a number of various things about this and am wondering how they're filing taxes too. I paid quite a bit using the instructions for being an independent contractor, so I'm wondering how people are getting refunds when we don't have taxes taken out to begin with.