How to apply for fellowships
About this guide
These are the musings of a sometimes successful (yay!) and sometimes unsuccessful (nay!) applicant. My advice is to be taken with a grain of salt, since everyone’s application journey is different. If you ask for advice from three applicants, you will get four opinions. So speak to as many people as possible about their fellowship applications. Ask them about their learnings from unsuccessful applications as well - regrets are often more informative than successes. Distill all the advice down to some common themes and let them inform your application, but don’t be tethered to any single way of doing it.
Timeline
The timeline really depends on the funder. For some smaller, internal fellowships a few months/weeks of preparation time might be enough. I wrote my first fellowship proposal within a week after the internal funder extended the deadline and I decided to apply on short notice - it ended up getting funded. But this was a rather small internal fellowship and I had a very good idea of what I wanted to do. For bigger, external fellowships (e.g. the Wellcome), it’s good to start the process a year in advance. I began thinking about applying to the Wellcome Early Career Fellowship in Summer 2023 for a submission deadline in February 2024 (with the earliest fellowship start date in August 2024).
⚠️ Pay attention to internal deadlines! For external fellowships, you will need to go through an internal approval process for your host department. This can take several weeks to a couple of months. This internal deadline will be your ‘real’ deadline. You can likely change some things after the internal review, but the major outline and scientific ideas will have to be pinned down - not least due to the finance officers having to finalize your fellowship costing. You can find information on internal review processes from the department website or ask your mentor at the host department.
My timeline:
- August-September 2023: Spoke with mentors about application, throwing around first ideas. Reached out to potential collaborators.
- October 2023: Wrote a few paragraphs about my ideas, proposed experiments and expertise. Received feedback from mentors, collaborators and friends.
- November 2023: Drafted first full research proposal.
- End of November Sent first full proposal to 5 close collaborators & friends.
- December 2023: Revised proposal according to feedback.
- End of December Sent proposal to those people from the first round who had agreed to see a revised version and to 5 additional collaborators who were happy to review a close-to-final version. Drafted a budget.
- January 2024: Received new round of comments and revised. Wrote other sections of the application (scientific contributions statement, cost justification, patient involvement and public engagement, etc.). Finalized budget with department’s finance office.
- January 14th: Submitted the research proposal to internal review.
- February 2024: Heard back from internal review committee and revised proposal according to their comments. Received final round of comments from collaborators early in February. Sent off application a week before the funder deadline to the department.
- February 15th: Department submitted my application a few days before the deadline.
- May 2024: Received notification from Wellcome that I was shortlisted for an interview in early July. Panicked. Regrouped and reached out to previous awardees for interview advice. Started to put together slides for the presentation.
- End of May: Reached out to everyone I knew to ask for mock interviews. Put together mock interview timetable. Had first six interviews and received feedback on presentation. Revised presentation.
- June 2024: Had an abysmal amount of mock interviews. They were mostly online due to location differences. Heavily revised presentation. Researched answers to most commonly asked questions and rehearsed delivery of answers.
- July 2024: Had final few mocks. Memorized presentation to the point that the words sound odd.
- July 9th: Interviewed at Wellcome collection.
- August 2024: Heard back from Wellcome on 5th August that my application was funded. Celebrated! 🎉
Proposal
Writing your research proposal is daunting, but it can also be fun to think deeply about the kind of research you have always wanted to do. How you write your proposal will heavily depend on the type of fellowship you are applying to. I applied to the Wellcome Early Career Award, which emphasizes innovation, boldness and creativity combined with high quality methodological approaches and scientific rigor. Here are some steps for writing this kind of blue-sky proposal and tips for making your application strong:
1. Talk to people
Before you write anything, talk about your ideas to people you trust to give you honest feedback while not crushing your creativity in the process. This person should be able to throw around ideas with you without getting hung up on details. They should keep you grounded, but not crush your vision before you have even begun fleshing it out. Talk to several people to get perspective. Also ask them what is missing in your vision, what they see as major flaws.
2. Pin down ideas
Write down a few paragraphs with your main research question, some concrete experiments to answer this question, and why you are the best person to do this. This document will be useful for reaching out to collaborators you want to have on your fellowship.
3. Reach out
Start reaching out to your main collaborator (who will your be PI during the fellowship) and other collaborators. Great if you already know them or can get an introduction through another collaborator. But don’t be afraid to cold-email. It’s in the nature of many fellowships that you will do something different to what you have done before and with that comes widening your network. You will need to show independent thinking in your application. This fellowship should bring together a group of collaborators that would not otherwise work together, where you are the connecting hub. Look at your proposal critically: What expertise is missing? Who would you be most afraid of reviewing this proposal? Sounds like you need them as a collaborator. This is where imposter syndrome kicks in the hardest and you might question whether you should reach out to the stellar researcher you have in mind. But most scientists are very happy to collaborate on new, exciting projects and almost everyone can use a free postdoc!
4. Send it everywhere
Send your proposal to everyone and their mother. The more reviewers see your proposal, the clearer ‘big themes’ emerge: Major flaws in your approach or framing. You are basically collecting data on the quality and clarity of your ideas - so the more, the better. Make sure to ask people outside your field to review it, too. Sometimes people too close to our research are blind to jargony language or nonsensical conventions in the field. Send it to people at all career stages, above, below and at the same stage as you. Junior researchers often have a fresh perspective and can sink their teeth into the weak spots of your proposal that were recently criticized in their own work. Senior researchers often see the big picture and are less likely to be bamboozled by some novel, but unestablished method. Diversity is a strength.
5. Send everything
Make sure you are aware of sections in the application that deal with ethics applications, patient involvement or open science and data sharing. Reach out to your host university’s research officers and support staff early about these sections. Some departments have open science officers or patient and public engagement officers who are a fantastic help for drafting sections on robust research practices, patient involvement, etc. Asking them for feedback on your drafted sections can make a big difference and elevate your application. If your department doesn’t have dedicated staff for this, you might be able to find another researcher at the department who is heavily involved in open science or other areas. There is no need to send everyone everything and most of your reviewers have enough to do with your scientific proposal. But it’s good to have a second pair of eyes on other sections to make sure they are up to standard.
6. Send it early
Send your proposal to reviewers as early as possible to give them time to review. Rushing your reviewers will only lead them to skim your proposal and result in surface-level feedback. Just like you needed time to write the proposal, they will need time to understand it. Make yourself available for follow-up questions and meetings in case your reviewers would like clarification. Make this process as easy as possible for them, as they are dedicating valuable time to you.
7. Deal with feedback
Don’t get offended if your proposal gets heavily criticized. This is part of the process and a sign that you are on the right track. No one’s proposal came out perfect the first time. Don’t be afraid to majorly revise your ideas. Drop experiments, merge them together, replace methods, sharpen your hypotheses, change your angle. Everyone’s feedback is valuable, even if you don’t adopt all changes. When you disagree with feedback, you might be tempted to justify your approach to the reviewer, rather than take their feedback on board. Before explaining yourself to the reviewer, think about why your approach evidently did not convince them. Rather than telling the reviewer they’re wrong, tell them what you tried to do and ask them how you could have done this more successfully.
8. Know when to stop
As your proposal gets better, feedback will become more specific and sometimes even contradictory. To me, that is a sign that I’m oscillating around an optimal point, where my proposal is already strong enough that now we have arrived at a matter of ‘taste’. I will still attempt to satisfy reviewers at that point, but I know that no proposal can make everyone perfectly happy. Try to take feedback on board without rewriting the entire thing. In German, we have the wonderful word verschlimmbessern, which refers to making something worse while trying to improve it. You don’t want to do that.
Interview
Congratulations, you’ve been shortlisted! Now begins the real work: preparing for the interview.
1. Mock interviews
Most important for your preparation will be ‘mock interviews’ or rehearsal interviews. Have as many mock interviews as possible. Reach out to collaborators, friends, former supervisors, even professors at your current or host department you have only seen in the hallway but never spoken to. Send them a friendly email introducing yourself (if they don’t know you or remember you) and ask them to sit on your interview panels. You will be surprised how many will say yes, because everyone will have been in your shoes! Each panel should consist of 2-5 people. Less than 2 might make the interview not flow quickly enough and will not come close to the stress of interviewing in front of several people. More than 5 interviewers will make it tricky for everyone to ask their questions and give feedback. Try to mimic the real interview situation as closely as possible. For the Wellcome, that means 10 minutes of your presentation and 20-30 minutes of questions. Leave ample time for feedback at the end, but let people get back to their busy lives after an hour.
2. Prioritize
If you can, dedicate as much time as possible to interview preparation. Although you can still work on your other projects, interview preparation should be your highest priority. Have a conversation with your current PI about your focus for the upcoming time. A good mentor will understand that this preparation is very important for securing funding to develop your own research identity and launch your career as an independent researcher. But they will also expect you not to drop off of the face of the earth and balance your other commitments. Prioritize heavily and leave some work for after the interview, but make sure to not miss important deadlines for your PI or your students.
3. Prepare the mocks
Send around your proposal close to the date of your mock, to every member of your mock panel. If you have them already, include the summary of the expert reviews that the Wellcome sends to you shortly before your interview. Make sure you don’t spam people, but give them enough information to grill you properly at your mock interview.
4. Introduce the format
Have a slide before your first presentation slide that gives a brief background on the fellowship interview you are rehearsing for. It should tell your mock panel about the fellowship stage (Early Career / Career Development / Senior), the date and length of the interview and the makeup of the panel. This will let your panel know the level of feedback they should be aiming for. You can skip this slide for panels that are already familiar with the format.
5. Document
Have a big document in which you collect all the questions you have been asked after each mock interview. After a while, you will find questions that are repeating over and over again, from different people. Prepare these questions extra well. Write down your answers and refine them. Ask your panel members whether they would be happy for you to record the mock for your private use, so that you can transcribe their questions after and can focus on answering them during the mock. Obviously don’t record people without their concert and make sure to delete your recordings after they have been transcribed.
6. Research
Read up on topics where you didn’t have a good answer. If you don’t know the answer, you can admit to that during the interview, but give your best shot at answering it. Research the answer afterwards and reach out to collaborators who might know. It is better to be transparent about areas where you are uncertain and will need to have more information than to say something wrong with absolute confidence.
7. Rehearse
Rehearse the timings of your presentation by breaking it down into 1-3 minute chunks. Rehearse these chunks by themselves and then altogether. Time yourself over and over again and try out different talking speeds. You will likely be much more intelligible when you talk slowly, and the ideal speed will be slower than you think. Record yourself giving the presentation and assess your volume, intonation and tempo critically.
8. Be concise
One of the hardest things to master in answering questions is to be concise. Try to make only one point in your answer, and this one clearly. Offer more in case the panel is interested (“I’m happy to elaborate on this if you would like”), but let them make that decision. Don’t ruin a good answer with three tangential points that occurred to you at the end of your sentence.
After the interview
1. Document the questions.
Write down the interview questions if you can. If you are in no state to type after your interview, send a voice message to yourself detailing the questions and what you answered. I did this after my interview and transcribed the questions properly a few days later when my mind had calmed. This will be invaluable to you in a few days when you are trying desperately to remember any details from your interview. Your collaborators or future applicants might also be interested in them. Or you yourself will want to remember the aspects of your proposal the interviewers really cared about.
2. Thank everyone.
Shoot everyone a quick email saying thanks for helping you. You could not have gotten through this without your village. Thank all the people that read your draft, sat on your mock panels, agreed to collaborate on the proposal or listened to your complaining about the application process. Don’t forget to thank the administrators who helped deal with costings or other admin aspects of your fellowship.
3. Treat yourself.
This was a mammoth effort and you deserve a break. Try not to jump back into your work the same day (you won’t get much done anyways), but take some time to decompress. You will likely feel drained for a few days and it’s ok to give in. The post-deadline slump is a real thing. Avoid burning out by actually pausing for a bit.
Links
You can find a lot of resources out there to prepare you for the process of applying. I will link my favourites here which were mostly applicable to the Wellcome. You will likely find specific tips for specific funders out there (with some heavy googling).
Good luck with your application!