Although they may give out a "rubric"; this is just a smokescreen. In most places, Grad School Fellowships are basically awarded based on 1) whose advisors are hotshots and 2) whose advisors are willing to play politics for them. Very little else matters, unless your essay is a steaming pile.<p>If you strongly desire a fellowship, I recommend researching which professors' students have gotten them in the past. Then, make sure you are on good terms with your PI, that the PI thinks you are a hard worker (whether or not you actually are), and write milquetoast essays that hit all the science buzzwords and PC stuff ("I'm interested in mentoring minorities"[0] - whether or not you actually do any of that).<p>[0] I actually did mentor minorities and didn't write about that in my essays, taking a more frank approach about what I thought was wrong with minority recruitment, and I lost out on a fellowship to a guy who now is a professor and has exactly zero nonwhite nonasians in his lab. Let's just say they don't really care about honesty and followthrough.<p>Incidentally, this student also had a research project where all of the data presented in the primary paper were artefacts of the preparation method (It didn't affect the overall conclusion). I confronted the student about this and even went through the process of repeating the experiment with a better prep, resulting in data that actually made sense. Some of the figures were completely invalid, and one of the subsidiary conclusions was wrong. I suggested that he issue a correction and at least stop talking about the subsidiary conclusion, but he continued to present it at several conferences afterwards, and as far as I can tell, the data have not been corrected in the literature. But he did get that fellowship. And now, is getting NIH grants. Your tax dollars at work.