The Unofficial SMART Scholarship Forum

I just recently was told about the smart scholarship and I am pretty interested in applying. I am a tiny bit worried about my overall competitiveness though. A bit about me, I am just starting my 3rd year in graduate school studying microbiology and molecular biology. My graduate GPA is pretty good a 3.8 but my undergraduate is meh at 3.3. My GRE scores are also only ok like 67% or so. I am worried this will hurt me? I have pretty good scientific presentation history and should have my first main author paper submitted this winter. I have been in contact with NIH researcher and really like the idea of working for the government so this program seems perfect for me so I feel can be very genuine about my reasons why I want to be part of this program.

My second question is I have a decent amount of awards such as winning best talk/poster and have had a lot of experience training people under me. What is the best way to cite this. From the website sounds like providing contact info for that person is best? Should I just do something like this "Person Name, trained for 1 year brief description of training , their email address"?

Last thing I am getting my PhD in molecular biology so I think that still fits well under bioscience. My top 3 placement would be 1st Usamriid (which I would love to work at even if don't get into program because I work with a pathogen right now and is a big interest to me .) Second is Edgewood chemical biological center. Last is US army public health. From my own research it seems that biosciences aren't as needed as much as say a engineer but seems less apply for the program too. Are my 3 choices reasonable and a good fit for my background?

Thanks in advance for any advice can provide.

Those are all valid places to work.

My advise is to find a researcher who works there (pubmed or Web of Science) and talk to them.

Thanks for the response Larry. I know of a few researchers at Usamriid that are doing work that is very interesting to me. I work with Brucella right now and would like to either work with it or maybe move into Bacillus anthracis.

Would you suggest I contact them now and let them know I am interested in their work and going to be applying for SMART scholarship. It would be a little bit premature for me to start contacting labs about post-doc positions and if I understand it correct seems the application process for that is a bit different then compared to academia.

Any other tips or advice that you have would be great, because you seem very knowledgeable about this scholarship.

If you know a researcher there, I would absolutely contact him. Now is an excellent time to grease the skids. In a perfect world you'll have a dialogue about science and then get around to scholarships and post employment. The SMART scholarship is paid for from a centrally controlled pot of money, so it's free to them. They just need to have permanent billets (not trivial these days) to allocate to new hires.

I would also recommend finding out what conferences they might be attending (they have to know 90 days in advance due to travel restrictions), or if you can make it to Frederick, MD (or whatever site you are interested in) you should offer to visit.

If you are working on a Ph.D., they will have the time to talk to you.

Good luck!
Larry