The Unofficial SMART Scholarship Forum

The reason is based in the fact that NPS is prohibited by law from hiring non government affiliated civilians. It's considered anti-competitive. The way NPS used to get around that four or five years ago was to actually hire SMART finalists as US Government employees right away. About two years ago though, NPS went through an IG investigation that resulted in the President and Provost being fired and several mandated changes being made. One was to institute a hiring freeze until the Navy could figure out how to deal with the way NPS was staffed. Consequently, since NPS can't hire people they can't bring SMART finalists onboard as employees and SMART finalists have to have a USG job before coming to NPS.

BTW, it used to be that if you were a spouse, you could get a temporary job at NPS and were allowed to take classes at NPS for free. NPS employees can still take classes for free, but the hiring freeze, which as of today (Feb 2015) is still in effect, makes it tough to pull this off. I have heard of some spouses getting temp jobs but it is very small in number.

The SFS program is controlled by Dr.Irvine in computer science and funded by a grant from NSF. It used to be you had to work on her projects in information assurance if you wanted to be an SFS but I heard the IG reprimanded her and forced her to let some students work with other faculty. You still have to major in information assurance though.

NPS has previously populated some of their academic programs with the "best" SMART applicants who were not awarded. This may be the reason for the rule, in a round about way.

Hmm... I can't recall seeing anything in the statute that would preclude it, but I wouldn't use the fact that it was done in the past as a marker of acceptability (anything can change).

I do know that NPS now has a number of "Scholarship for Service" programs advertised on their website:

http://cisr.nps.edu/

I haven't dug deeply but I'm guessing they got an NSF grant to enable these (but that's a guess).

Does anyone know why only current government civilians are able to attend NPS through SMART? For my particular situation, NPS would be perfect (my wife is active duty and will be attending at the same time), but I've been told that I'm not eligible to attend because I'm not already employed by a DOD lab. The only amplifying information I was able to glean is that current "legislation" prohibits it, although it was done in the past.

As any of us with government experience know, there are rules, and then there are "rules" which really just mean you need to talk to the right person, so I'm curious if anyone might know if there is any potential work-around or waiver (okay, honestly, this is mostly directed at Larry. Larry, you seem informed and interested in helping. Thanks for that, btw).