🎙️ Podcast Link 🎙️

#Fellowships are a particular type of grant funding opportunity with particular considerations to keep in mind for anyone thinking of applying.

In this new video 🎥, I unpack what fellowships are, and a number of key concepts to consider when applying for them, ranging from writing to the risk aversion level of the funding scheme, to scaling your fellowship pitch to suit the seniority of the fellowship you’re applying for, to providing evidence of your impact on the research community, industry and beyond.

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Complete topic list and timestamps:

📌 (0:00) Writing Compelling Fellowship Applications
📌 (0:06) What’s Special About a Fellowship?
📌 (0:18) Potential Teaching Relief and Career Prestige
📌 (0:31) Fellowships Are Particularly About You
📌 (0:47) Being About You Has Multiple Aspects
📌 (0:50) Your Capacity and Capability
📌 (1:14) How the Fellowship Supports Your Career
📌 (1:43) Different to Job and Promotion Applications
📌 (2:00) Fellowships Need to Stand Out
📌 (2:34) Balancing Novelty With Career Alignment
📌 (2:50) Write to the Risk Aversion Level of the Scheme
📌 (3:23) Alignment to Capabilities and Passion
📌 (3:48) Try Presenting Your Fellowship
📌 (4:08) The Environment is Critical
📌 (4:36) Impact Statements
📌 (4:53) Evidence of Impact in the Research Community
📌 (5:10) Real World Examples of Impact
📌 (5:32) Track Record Benchmarking Considerations
📌 (5:45) You Have Some Choice Around Metrics
📌 (5:58) Impact: Research Community and/or Industry
📌 (6:20) Whatever Metrics You Use, Be Consistent!
📌 (6:30) Calibrate Your Reviewer: Provide Context
📌 (7:18) Track Record Relative to Opportunity
📌 (7:35) Be Careful Not to Double Dip
📌 (8:11) Leadership Beyond Your PhD Supervisor Days
📌 (8:36) Achievements Scale with Fellowship Seniority
📌 (9:12) What People Capacity Have you Helped Build?
📌 (9:35) How Have You Shaped the Research Field Culture?
📌 (9:56) Justified Interdisciplinarity and Collaboration
📌 (10:26) Writing Style: Quiet Confidence, Not Arrogance
📌 (10:47) Wrap Up: Bigger Picture Considerations
📌 (10:55) Your Career Plan Shouldn’t Depend on Fellowships
📌 (11:31) A Fellowship is a Chance to Reconsider
📌 (11:57) Not Compulsory But Worth Considering

Full Video Notes

This video is about writing compelling research fellowship applications: and some of the key concepts to keep in mind when writing them.
What are fellowships?: funding grant that funds part of all your salary, to pursue a program of research other activities, as well as your normal research.
Why can fellowships be a big deal? If you’re an academic, fellowships may reduce your teaching load, and their prestige can help enable other opportunities too.
Not all positive: Can add extra performance expectations, pressure and get in the way of obtaining other funding.
Fellowships are particularly about you: moreso than most other grant or funding schemes, fellowships are much more about you as an individual, versus your whole team. Being about you has multiple aspects.
Firstly, about what you bring to the table: a significant part of the fellowship evaluation process will be about what you bring to the table in terms of the proposed program of research and activities, in terms of capability and capacity.
Secondly, about your development: fellowships are rare opportunities, so how they help in developing you is a key factor as well. At a junior level, helps you transform from PhD graduate to junior faculty member or your next career stage. At a senior level, it might be substantially enhancing your impact and legacy at a large scale.
Fellowships versus Org Specific Processes: fellowship applications overlap with but have some differences to job or promotion applications. What a specific organisation cares about doesn’t necessarily align with what the broader community that evaluates your fellowship proposal cares about.
Topic: Avoid Fishing Trips: Your topic needs to tread a fine line between sufficient difference to what you’ve already been doing, and being so different as to not benefit from any of your expertise built to date.
Risk Aversion: Many funding organisations, for better or worse, are risk averse. Convince them there’s a good chance of success, both with details on approach and how your expertise fits perfectly. Not so true for those schemes that deliberately target high risk, high reward research.
Compelling Career Story and Vision: strong fellowships draw upon a substantial fraction of your experience and skillset development to date, and tell a compelling and coherent (but genuine) story about how that all comes together for the proposed research. Your passion and excitement for your topic area should shine through everywhere in the proposal.
Practice Presenting Your Fellowship: most fellowship applications are written, possibly with an interview stage, but you can practice presenting your fellowship as a writing assistance tool. In presenting it you will discover many gaps in how you’re pitching the proposal and can hence improve it further.
Fellowship Environment: the environment is important. What equipment is available, what major research labs or centres or institutes are around to support your fellowship program? For junior fellowships, what mentors are in place to support?
Impact Statements: impact to date can be measured in lots of ways, and on lots of stakeholders. Research community impact may be new techniques, methodologies, datasets, algorithms, and can be evidenced by awards or citations. Real-world impact could include commercialization outcomes, deployments in products, quality of life improvements, impact on official policy, public profile and influence.
Selling Yourself and Your Capabilities: track record is a big part of fellowships, as well as potential for future work as part of the fellowship.
Consistent But Somewhat Flexible Benchmark Usage: some fellowship schemes will require reporting of certain benchmarks, but you also have some control over the narrative by choosing what metrics you focus on. For example, you might choose which, if any citation metrics to present in your proposal, and if none, to focus more on other metrics or indicators of impact. But don’t be inconsistent!
Calibrate Your Reviewer: Help reviewers outside your field understand the metrics you use. Relative metrics are particularly important e.g. if a conference has published 1000 papers and your paper is the 2nd most cited paper, that’s clearly impressive. For some fields, that might be 50 citations, for others it might be 5000 citations.
Track Record Relative to Opportunity: many fellowship schemes will evaluate track record relative to opportunity, which is intended to account for career breaks and other factors.
Avoid This Double Dipping Mistake: some fellowship applications will say something like, “I’ve been super productive for someone only 3 years post PhD, look at all my citations relative to opportunity” but then will count their citations to their entire track record of 20 years of publications produced in a previous role predating their PhD – don’t do this!
Identity Beyond PhD Supervisor: some fellowships schemes, especially some of the junior ones, will look for clear evidence that you have grown beyond your supervisor and have led the intellectual development of research yourself, and may even require metrics that report on your output separate of your supervisor.
Scaling from Junior to Senior Fellowships: a great way of thinking about this, is that it’s like the volume being turned down on the relative merit of your achievements. So local or national awards become less important, and international awards become more important. Internal organisational awards may disappear or play a smaller role. Same goes for media coverage or public interest in your work – from a local to national or global level. Same for invited presentations: local workshop versus international major conference plenary. Reviewing changes to senior editorial roles.
Capacity Building: what have your so-called academic offspring gone on to do: academic jobs, roles in industry, government? Especially important for many senior fellowship schemes.
Culture and Diversity: especially in some fields, what initiatives have you taken to improve the research culture, how research is done, and the general health of the field, including where appropriate, its diversity? What impact have those initiatives had?
Interdisciplinary and Collaborative Research: part of many applications, but don’t rely on buzzwords: what compelling rationale do you have for engaging in these?
Manage Your Reviewer: be confident but not arrogant – the language should reflect quiet assurance and confidence in both your achievements and the proposed program of research, without going overboard
Fellowships are usually highly competitive: a career strategy that relies entirely on getting one is not a viable strategy. You need a Plan B, and probably a Plan C, D and E, and yes, that can include leaving academia, but under your own terms: it’s most definitely not a failure.

If you get a fellowship, re-evaluate: it’s tempting to stay in the same habits you had pre-fellowship, but these are often wonderful opportunities to make substantial changes to how you’re doing things, especially around applying for further funding.