I won an NSF fellowship for graduate school this spring, and someone asked me for advice on how to apply. The NSF Graduate Fellowship gives you a stipend of $30k for three years of study, and also contributes $10.5k to your school for each of those three years. The NSF gave out ~40 fellowships for economics last year, and they were split between 1st- and 2nd-year students is some uneven proportion (I think you’re move likely to win one for 1st year).
The application has three essays: personal statement, prior research, and research proposal.
My prior research and personal statement were fairly boilerplate, and I wrote about what I did during UROPs and summer jobs. I’m not sure what they like for the personal statement, but from what I found online, I did what you’re usually not supposed to do for college entrance essays: list a bunch of stuff, talk about why it’s important, link it together with what I enjoy about economics and what subfields I’d like to do research in. Don’t be too poetic, I don’t think it’ll be appreciated.
The most important part of the NSF application is the proposal for future research, and you should spend the most time on this. Choose your topic wisely; one of the main criteria they look for in an overall application is “broader impacts”, so choose a topic that could be construed to have a tangible “broader impact” that you can talk about. You won’t want to do, say, finance theory here. My proposal was an extension of work that I did for a UROP that was itself an extension of my 14.33 paper about the relationship between crime and homeownership. I weaved in some material from 14.15 about network effects and described my ideal dataset.
You also need three recommenders, so think about who you want to recommend you for grad school apps and ask them for the NSF too. Final thing is that there is some geographic distribution to the awards (once you have high enough ratings, they distribute awards by some opaque rule that involves geography). I was helped since my home state is Missouri; if you’re from somewhere that doesn’t produce many PhD economists, be sure to put that down as your home address.