It turns out I was fortunate enough to receive the Sir Henry Fellowship from Wellcome Trust. This is a four-year international fellowship that will allow me to spend some time at UC Davis, California as well as University of Oxford, focusing on interdisciplinary investigation of diabetic arrhythmogenesis.
It was certainly an interesting and person-developing experience (obviously viewed more favourably given the outcome). I had the advantage of working under/with highly successful people who gave me valuable advice about the process and requirements. I am quite sure that I would not have gotten the fellowship without the support of Profs. Manuela Zaccolo, Blanca Rodriguez, and Don Bers, to whom I'm deeply grateful. However, not everyone has such nice and investing-in-you supervisors and beyond very generic advice, there is very little information on the internet on what the process of applying for junior fellowship entails [1]. The aim of this text is to share some findings I made (or was told) along the way in case they are useful to students and other persons applying for such fellowships. The rough structure is: 1) selection of fellowship, 2) preparing the CV-side of things, and 3) a little bit about the fellowship project proposal. More subjective and personal views are given in italic.
Disclaimer 1: This text is by no means exhaustive (e.g., interview preparations are not really covered, given that there was no typical interview this year) and may be quite specific to UK funders such as Wellcome Trust, MRC, Royal society, etc.
Disclaimer 2: I obviously do not have experience sitting in a grant committee, so this has to be read as a subjective experience with possible parts of the big picture missing. In general, while I hope the tips are useful, there is no guarantee that following them will result in success.
0 Fellowship selection
Before starting, you have to select the right fellowship to apply for. I provide this obvious statement because I almost failed that [2]. It is good to make a table of fellowships that are available and relevant, what are the submission deadlines, etc. Beyond googling and asking supervisors, your university may have a grant/research office and they can give you advice on what to apply for.
In my case, with 2-3 years of postdoctoral experience, I felt I was in the slightly uncomfortable zone of being borderline too “academically old” for the junior fellowships, but a bit too junior for intermediate ones. In the end, I was mainly looking at Wellcome Trust (Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship; 4 years) and Royal Society (Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship; 5 years). I initially wanted to apply for British Heart Foundation junior fellowship, but I was too old with a bit over the threshold of 2 years of postdoctoral experience (thanks, COVID :/). I also considered the Novo Nordisk fellowship associated with the Oxford university, but this is quite short (2+1 years), and I would have to severely chop down my project which is realistically 4 years at least. Slightly more remote options were BHF intermediate (not good given BHF underfunding, my juniority for that, but at least there aren’t limited attempts unlike in MRC…) and the Diabetes Society RD Lawrence (also sounding kind of intermediate).
After
picking the fellowship, give yourself some time to prepare the application(s) -
the common range I have heard is 6 (IQR 3-12) months. I agree that to polish
the application sufficiently, this sounds about right – and count not just your
writing, but rounds of review with your supervisors. However, to prepare the
foothold for the application as such, decisions from the start of your PhD and
during it will play quite a big role too – more on that below.
[2] Before applying for the WT SHW, I also wrote an application for the MRC Career development award: Transition to independence. I read the table of requirements: https://mrc.ukri.org/skills-careers/skills-needed-to-win-support/ and thought I was fitting that reasonably well. The deadline was near, only about two weeks to write the relatively extensive application. Given that I had an idea of the project design, this sounded like a good idea. Of course, it was not. First, it is an intermediate-level fellowship, and second, even 2 weeks of mad rush are not enough to develop an application enough.
1 Developing the CV
A fellowship differs from a project grant proposal in that it is not just the project that is funded, but also (probably 50/50) you as a person. Consequently, the CV and academic background needs to have certain parameters. While you can affect some of these parameters in the half-year of preparing the application, a lot of it needs to be built during your PhD and/or postdocs. For an overview of common requirements, I found this MRC table to be an excellent resource that should be quite relevant across funders – yes, it is for an intermediate-ish fellowship, so not everything has to be ticked for a junior fellowship, but I think it’s a good template nevertheless, and it gives you a picture of what will be expected of you in the next stage. My comments on the points given there:
show
productivity across past appointments and an upward trajectory
This means
having papers, basically. And this is where your PhD/postdocs are so important.
There are all sorts of reasons why one’s publication output can be low, such
as:
- A very senior supervisor who does not need more papers, so they do not push their students to publish.
- A relatively junior supervisor who micromanages the student excessively, making them focus only on a single project (that the junior supervisor needs to survive to the next stage of their own career). This is likely to give you focus on papers and energy of your supervisor (good), but the overt focus on one thing may be limiting with regards to article count. Also, too close management is not good for development of intellectual independence.
- Bad luck
One good thing is that you
apparently do not need to have a first-author Nature/Science/Cell paper anymore
(as evidenced by me), which is something that may have held at some stage in
the past to some degree. In certain funders’ committees, the importance of
impact factor is minimized, with a focus at the actual work the applicant has
done. It definitely helps to have at
least one reasonably “major”/”highlight” paper, but it doesn’t have to be in a
toppest-of-top journals (which is good, given their bias for certain fields). I
heard from several people that the number of papers does not matter, and it is
about the best of them only, but based on my reviews, it can have a positive
impact. That said, having a good number of papers is a bonus on top of
having the major paper(s) published; it cannot replace them.
For the point of bad luck – the
advice is to diversify the risk. I was fortunate enough to have supervisors who
would allow me to go into all sorts of collaborations (provided I did meet the
main targets, obviously). I maintained a mixture of long-term
projects with short-term image processing/data analysis ones. This spreads the
frustration nicely [3] (when the main PhD project sucks, you can get a quick reward from something
else [4])
and generates more papers and research contacts. Also, if your main project
becomes really hopeless, you have something else to potentially switch to (for
me, the main PhD project started as a spin-off of the original topic). Of course, you need to have a supervisor that
allows you to branch into more directions at once. To build such trust, it is
absolutely critical to never ever make a sideproject derail the main
project and/or to commit the ultimate sin – miss a deadline.
Having a number of projects can help to bridge otherwise arid periods. After my postdoc in the Rodriguez group, I had a child born (which is an amazing transition, but long work hours at full energy became normal work hours at best, at reduced energy), several projects which lead nowhere, and then everything became messy with COVID-19 (both catching it, and the resulting disruptions). Moving overseas to a new lab also does not help short-term productivity [5].
[3] Obviously this can – and likely will – end up with all projects sucking at once at some stage. But this is only temporary and I think the pain from this is not that much worse compared to your main PhD topic sucking alone.
[4] This is field-dependent - when you do data analysis, it can be easy to have 6-7 projects at once, whereas for a purely wet-lab person, this might not be necessarily realistic.
[5] As a bonus, we had to postpone the moving multiple times given the COVID restrictions, including shifting the paperwork needed, shifting daycare agreement, shifting rental agreements etc. etc. – an insane amount of time was spent on this and given that we were waiting for the move to become possible all the time, neither me nor my wife were in the mood for starting new projects.
demonstrate clear plans to establish own research ‘niche’.
AND
be
able to explain plans to establish their intellectual niche and their own
research team that will enable them to become an independent research leader
This is a tricky one. It appears that one is supposed to find a
relatively narrow niche that is not yet investigated (e.g., a particular angle
of investigation of a disease, signalling pathway, etc.), but is at the same
time interesting or clinically relevant. At the same time, it has to be something that
you have appropriate background for, but it has to be clearly distinct from
your prior work. Easy, right? In the end, it is not a total oxymoron, but it gives a super-narrow window of operation. For me, it
worked to base an application largely on my prior cardiac simulation experience
combined with experiments, but applying this to study arrhythmia in diabetes
I have to
admit that while having to focus on a niche can be frustrating, forced, and is
not necessarily natural, it makes some sense at the same time. If you don’t
carve a niche and enter a populated field, you have to be ready to get scooped.
A lot. If you are not in a powerful big lab that can produce results quickly,
you will be likely scooped by such big labs more often than not. Even if you don't get scooped, guess who will be reviewing your papers? Big labs, of course, for whom you may be unwanted competition. Ultimately, if
you do not get scooped, you probably scoop someone else, making them
unhappy, which is not great either.
The
establishment of your own team does not really apply for the junior stage of
fellowships, which tend to fund only the applicant’s salary.
have
their own research plans/ideas which do not significantly overlap with their
current group leaders’ or proposed sponsors’
This is a
critical requirement, and it is something where it can be hard to tick the box.
Selecting a project that fits this can take a lot of time – I had to scratch several
fellowship project ideas before the diabetic arrhythmia. There are clear merits
of such a requirement: 1) By forcing you to go into a new area, you develop (on
average) a lot more than when doing more of the same. 2) It bypasses potential
problems with competition between yourself and your past/new supervisor that might arise if you
continued working on the group’s theme. I.e., when finding an appropriate topic of research works, it is very good – it is
just that making it work is tricky.
A related
way of phrasing this requirement is “could the fellowship be done as a
postdoctoral project in one of the labs” – if yes, it is not great. In general,
multidisciplinary projects involving two specialist labs are a good pattern. Another
useful pattern is to take a technique that you learned in the PhD/postdocs and
apply it to a new problem/disease. In this way, you differ from prior and
future group leaders sufficiently.
Again, while
this criterion seems like something made to torture innocent junior researchers,
it is a protection against PIs getting “fellowship” money for cheap postdocs.
Also, when you do find a good project that takes you further from what you have
been doing before, it can be pretty awesome.
However, I think the system would benefit from a bit more diversity in the degree of independence required (especially with regards to previous research groups). What if you affected your group’s research direction? What if you discovered something there, published a first paper on it that opened new vistas… and then you are sort of pushed to move to something else? That does not sound right. (by the way, this is not about me, but based on the experience of someone else I know)
Side-thought: while I understand why having independent research plans is essential for such fellowships, I don’t think the current academic system in the UK sufficiently supports researchers who want to do science for living, but not become principal investigators. I can imagine strong merit of systemic/departmental support of research specialist who have 20 years of hands-on experience in experimental or computational techniques. These days, it feels like such people have to survive as senior postdocs and pray that their PIs have stable enough funding to afford them. Therefore, a lot of primary science work is carried out by PhD students and postdocs – often people who are learning the techniques on these projects. When they become experienced and highly consistent, they are pushed to become managers and group leaders, rather than reap the benefits of their training themselves. I have doubts about whether this is the right way of doing things… Of course, this is more of a general thought, rather than suggesting that these particular fellowships that are discussed should switch their focus. It is more about whether a new type of expert-specialist grant wouldn't be sensible, and/or whether it wouldn't be sensible for departments to maintain expert specialists for common enough techniques (patch-clamping, image analysis, ...) who could have a stable employment without the pressure to lead a group?
have
a network of research contacts, independent of their current group leader,
including appropriate collaborations nationally, internationally and across
disciplines.
This is
another topic which you can develop during the PhD and postdocs, rather than in
the ca. 6 months you have for the application writing.
If you are
lucky (and productive), your supervisors may put you in touch with other
researchers and help you with this. But a lot of it is down to you. Be active
at conferences (talking to people at poster sessions is my favourite), try to
meet people with whom you can collaborate and ask whether your skills are not
interesting for their projects. This will gain you both research contacts and
papers. Also talk to your supervisors about which conferences are useful and you
get to talk to relevant people – for example, the GRC format is amazing in my
view.
Beyond conferences, just e-mailing the right people can do the trick. Me e-mailing Dr. Jordi Hejman resulted in a huge change in my DPhil and probably career overall.
Obviously,
all of this requires you to have a supervisor who is ok with you being active
in this way. Not all of them are, unfortunately, but you can greatly increase
the odds by strict adherence to deadlines and project milestones. I would ask
them about this topic when you are considering them as PhD/postdoc supervisors,
just be careful not to sound like “is it ok if I do my stuff instead of working
on your project?”
demonstrate
potential to lead independent research, for example by having collaborated with
teams in other departments, research organisations and/or other disciplines, or
by having won small amounts of independent funding [6]
Two points
beyond what has been written above:
First,
co/corresponding authorships. If you had a significant intellectual input into
conception/conceptualisation of a paper, consider asking your supervisor for a
shared corresponding authorship. Corresponding authorship is, along with last-position-authorship, a way of recognising high-level intellectual input/project leadership (at least
in my field) and many progressive supervisors will be happy to split the
corresponding authorship if it is fair. Some will not, unfortunately (which may
be not necessarily them being mean, it can be just that they do not see what
benefit there would be for you in a co-corresponding authorship). Beyond
possible CV boost from co-corresponding authorships, you are more likely to get
e-mails about people interested in collaborations, which is a big bonus in
itself.
Second, it
is worth applying for the mentioned small amounts of independent funding (e.g.,
the “spark” funds), which is another way of recognising research leadership at
a junior stage. I failed in one such application at the end of my PhD due to
inexperience at the interview – good experience nevertheless.
[6] The inconsistent use of periods at the end of the bold blocks is present already in the source table.
be
starting to show evidence of recognition and leadership in the community on an
international scale, for example through citations to their publications,
invitations to seminar/conferences.
AND
show
an understanding of how to influence their research field and awareness of ways
to influence the wider research agenda. For example, through experience of
participation in peer review, invitations to give lectures/seminars,
participation in internal committees.
The
citations are a natural consequence of your publications, but there are ways of
modulating the citation count/output. A major modulator is how well established
your group leader is, as well as the group itself. Possibly the institution you
work in as well. If the group leader is a senior figure who is well known in
the field and who has been through several journal’s editorial boards, it will
be much easier to get into higher-ranking journals and through reviews (I do
believe that if reviewers see something is from an established group, they are
more likely to trust it, even if subconsciously). Established supervisors may
recommend your work to their circle of contacts, sharing it further. So this is in part the reason for why I
suggested checking out the potential supervisor’s publication output above.
Now, the issue is that if you have a super-senior and recognised supervisor, it may happen that you will not be supervised by them primarily, but by a postdoc in the group who may be inexperienced and there are all sorts of uncertainties associated with this (they may be also the best supervisors you will ever meet, it’s more about the risk rather than this being a bad thing). For the PhD, I would focus at picking a group where you can learn a lot, grow, be happy, and which also publishes decent-or-better papers, rather than aiming for papers and renown alone. Supergroups with less clear focus at people management and development can be just as well visited for a postdoc, giving you the experience when one is a bit more mature.
Another relatively simple thing to raise awareness and improve the odds of being cited is going to conferences and disseminating your work there. It is especially nice if you enjoy travelling. I do not, unfortunately. I have also seen people being very successful at spreading their work using social media such as Twitter, but I do not have much experience with that (I filled my Twitter profile only a week or two back).
With all of
this said, I never consciously optimized for citations – it is not something that
is necessary. Trying to have fun and write as good papers as we could was good
enough. If you do not like traveling to conferences, pick an institution like
Oxford, where people from across the world go for symposia and conferences
instead of you having to go see them all the time.
With regards
to getting involved in peer review – it may happen that your supervisor will
ask you if you do not want to help them with a review because they are too busy
– GO FOR IT. Doing reviews is important, you get to contribute to the field in
a different form than your own publication, and you get bonus points for the
CV. It is also useful to see the review process from the opposite perspective.
I think
internal committees and invitations to seminars etc. are probably more for the
intermediate stage applications or for postdoctoral years, rather than PhD. I did
not have any such experience (one invited presentation at an internal seminar
came of course soon after the fellowship submission deadline). If these
opportunities arise, it is good to be aware that you can score points there, so
go for it. The fellowship application process is highly competitive and any
edge you can get and any disadvantage you can nullify will count.
have
identified, and where appropriate, pursued opportunities for development, such
as time in a second research centre within the UK or overseas, or time spent
within industry, or learning new skills
Here the
key thing is to show that you are not a single-purpose hyperspecialist with a
tunnel vision who has worked in one group for the whole of their life. Mobility
between institutions is well known to be near-mandatory.
It is also
terrible for starting a family. I wish there was a better and more
family-friendly way of doing things, or at least a more substantial support and
subsidisation of nurseries. But this all costs a lot of money, so we have
advice leaflets instead…
have
identified opportunities to access career development support, such as
mentoring and professional training development, and relevant training courses
that will underpin their future career ambitions
This can be
a bit of a cringey area, involving getting training in leadership, soft skills,
possibly academic writing. I am of course open to having my opinion changed,
but the experience I had with these courses was that it was a near-complete
waste of time. It may help people tick boxes and create some jobs, but is there
any actual benefit for the trainees in the way of developing their skills? I
think that unless you have a bad supervisor, probably not (and if you have a really
bad supervisor, you will be so incredibly disadvantaged that these courses will
not save you; besides, in that case you probably hate academia, are not applying for fellowships, and aren't even reading this).
I have been
through 3 or so courses on academic writing (mandatory, if you ask why) – all
giving the same advice (which was not bad but taking you only a small part of
the way), but in none of the courses was there any example of us writing and
getting feedback. On the other hand, some course teachers did give us very
concrete and good feedback on our reports, making this immediately more useful.
Of course, writing papers with PhD supervisors and having your beautiful pieces
of writing torn down and sprayed with red ink like in the lawnmower finale of
Braindead is even better and that is where the bulk of learning happens.
More or less the same holds for the "leadership" courses - I learned infinitely more from my supervisors and from doing normal academic activities than from the courses. It is possible that if someone has a not-that-great supervisor, these courses can fill the most glaring gaps, but it does not guarantee anything - I do not see a good reason why such courses should be considered when rating a person's fellowship application.
I have no
doubt that there are good courses on writing and leadership, but it won’t be
the two hours of slides plus “divide into groups and discuss”. In fact, I think
the tutors in the courses I went through did a very good job maximising the
potential of the format of the course, raising the most important topics. But
if the whole format is wrong, even making the most of it can be in vain.
The scary thing is that I have heard from more than one person that these training courses are becoming increasingly important for the grant committees, which, if true, is heart-sinking. I suppose it is a problem of “how to measure leadership” – “doing a course in leadership” may be absolutely irrelevant, but it’s simply measurable, unlike trying to assess actual leadership at the junior stage of our careers. The issue is that once these training courses become a set requirement, there will be no way back and precious hours of researchers’ time and brainpower will go down the drain. I see my salary as a gift from people whose relatives suffer and/or have died from a cardiac disease and they gave me the money indirectly to make the situation better. Wasting this in unproductive courses just to tick a box seems not appropriate.
Mentoring on
the other hand is a very important thing, which can be either formal or
informal. I was always surrounded by amazing colleagues and supervisors from
whom I learned a great deal – I would be nowhere without this experience.
However, if you do not have the privilege of having informal mentors, formal
mentoring schemes can be beneficial. This is about 1-to-1 conversations and
sharing experience, not ticking boxes.
show an
ability to identify and maximise potential in others. For example, through the
day to day support of masters and PhD students, or early career scientists.
I do not think this is required for the junior fellowship stage, but if you can co-supervise master or PhD students, it is beneficial. Perhaps supervising summer projects or getting involved in programs such as In2science (a fun and rewarding experience in itself) helps too.
have excellent communication and interpersonal skills
across different audiences, including academic and public, for example through
presentation at scientific conferences and public science fairs
AND
show how research outcomes will be communicated and
disseminated within and outside the research community.
It is certainly important to go at least to some
conferences, seminars, and symposia.
The second part is communicating science to public, which I
have heard is becoming increasingly appreciated by the committees. I do enjoy
this a lot and seeing the interest of people in your research at public fairs
and such events can be a highly motivating and “out of the box” experience.
Also, when people pay us to do research, it seems only fair to give some effort
into explaining how we are using their money.
If you are shy and do not want to challenge yourself with
public fairs etc., there are also science magazines/websites through which you
may disseminate your research (or an interesting story from the research field)
to the public [7].
[7] I would however personally steer away from companies
like Research Outreach that create a popular-science article (and share it on
their social media) on your research for a fee… “mere” 1000 - 2000 GBP or so. I guess
this business model evolved as a parasite in the world where researchers are
used to paying such sums for open access, and they know that funders want to
see outreach, to which this may be an answer? Maybe someone has spare grant
money, so they actually go for it? I don’t know – I think if a magazine has
quality, people will pay for it – and this should fund the team, not grant money
of researchers who also provide them with content…
2 Setting up a project
I do not
feel experienced enough to give any sort of comprehensive advice and the
project writing will be unsurprisingly highly project-dependent, so I below are
just several independent thoughts.
Basic
project parameters
As
mentioned above, the operating window of what is a fellowship-friendly project
can be rather narrow [8].
One aspect is novelty, where you have to be right between “there is not
enough preliminary evidence” and “the project lacks in novelty” (if you have
one reviewer saying the former and another saying the latter, you are kind of there).
An associated concept is field population, where both “nobody cares
about this” is just as bad as “this is already a populated field”. The former
can be a major problem with massively innovative research, where you first have
to persuade everyone there is a gap in knowledge that needs filling in addition
to designing a project that aims to fill it. Finally, your team has to
predominantly [9] involve people you did not work with, but at the same time, jumping on a
boat on a 4–5 year fellowship sail with people you don’t know is a massive
leap of faith. It is best if you know the people ahead (e.g., via collaboration
– as long as you don’t have too many papers together, which could be read as
“this person will not learn from a new environment”). Alternatively, discuss with
your supervisor/mentor what are good options for collaborators.
While basic science does get funded, it helps to have
something with translational potential in the project, or at least show that
you consider this or possible societal impacts somewhere in the application.
The project
should have a clear theme [10] and should be ideally split in roughly 3-5 goals (which may or may not
correspond to years of the fellowship), with the first few goals being pretty
straightforward and last 1-2 goals being possibly a bit more exploratory and/or
risky. From the point of risk assessment, do not have the whole project depend
on a risky goal 1. If it is absolutely necessary, offer an alternative in case
something does not work. In fact, a good risk assessment of the project/goals
overall is a very important part of the application – you need to show that you
have thought about what happens if something does not work. This can be in the
form of risk mitigation, as well as about offering alternatives if something does fail completely.
Example:
In my project on diabetic arrhythmia, I am proposing in Goal 1 to update the calcium
handling of my recent computational human ventricular myocyte model before we
use it for further research. This probably sounds quite benign to people who
don’t work on this, but in fact, it brings cosmic horror to the hearts of
people who do. Simply put, updating calcium handling in a comprehensive way
that I want to do is hell. I know from the zero-eth hand, given that I failed
to achieve some of these things when making the previous model. Hence, I wrote
that if we encounter unsurmountable obstacles with this, we will use a simpler
phenomenological model as in already published paper. Furthermore, the whole
project would make reasonable sense even without any of these updates just
using my previous model, so there is a fall-back option. Providing safer
alternatives that do not invalidate the project is important also for your
internal confidence – it would be no fun to find during the work on your Goal 1
that it is genuinely impossible and that you cannot make a dent in the other
goals.
Finally, consider twice if you are going into a topic that is generally controversial. I think you can survive one negative reviewer (out of 4-5), but not two. Don’t count on people being fair – quite many people will be happy to tear down your ideas just because they don’t feel good about them [11]. Or, even worse, because they do not like your previous supervisor.
For the issue of potential controversiality, I kind of abandoned by PhD topic of post-myocardial infarction border
zone innervation and its role in arrhythmogenesis. Before my “main”
experimental paper on this was published (in Frontiers in Physiology), the
paper was rejected about 4 times by “big” cardiac journals. I was pretty
confident it had the potential, but it just didn’t happen. The problem was not
that we wouldn’t get excited reviewers who appreciated the work – we did get
them. The problem was that in all the review processes, we also got one pretty
negative person. Particularly in one journal I felt the process was extremely
unfair, as we addressed all the negative reviewer’s comments well (and it did
improve the paper), but then we were rejected with “the reviewer was not
convinced”. Zero arguments, zero transparency. I think we were ultimately
pretty unlucky (if the pools of positive and negative reviewers aligned better,
giving us one full-hate round followed by full-love round, we’d have been
through). Of course, in these journals, one negative review pretty much equals
no luck. While I was licking the wounds after that, I realised that if I want
to write a fellowship on this (which I wanted, originally), I will have to go
through the exact same process with fellowship reviewers. No, thanks.
[8] The term „operating window“ is based on the narrow temperature window in which the F1 Pirelli tyres work and where missing the window by mere few degrees of Celsius means a significant drop in performance and/or tyre wear.
[9] I believe it is ok to involve a small number of previous supervisors, but they shouldn’t be in prominent positions (host/co-host/key collaborator), unless they are literally the only person worldwide who can be in such a position.
[10] That said, it’s not like it has to be homogeneous all-around. E.g., for my project on diabetic arrhythmogenesis, there is model development in single-cell and 3D (involving human clinical data processing), there is collection of experimental data for distinct signalling pathways, etc. – but it all is under the umbrella of “diabetic arrhythmia”.
[11] If you suspect someone would give you a hard time in an unfair way, do list them among the people to be excluded from the review process. If your funder does not have this section in the application, consider e-mailing them and asking whether they would consider your suggestions to exclude certain people.
Hypothesize,
rather than just characterize
It is very
easy to write “In goal X, I will characterize the role of ABC in XYZ”. The
issue is that “characterize” or “explore” is not too sexy and it sounds better
if you present a concrete hypothesis [12].
It makes sense to think ahead about what the implications of your
“characterization” would be. If you do this, it becomes suddenly much
easier to formulate the goal as a hypothesis. Also, as forced and artificial as
the “I hypothesize that” can sometimes be, it gives the reviewers/panel an idea
of what to expect as an example of possible outcome. They may not always be
experts in in your subfield, making it easier for them to understand the
implications of your research.
Fortunately,
I think one does not have to go to the total extreme of having a hypothesis in
every single goal… but if you can have them there, go for it.
Also, do
not stop at the point of hypothesis – try to be maximally specific about how
you will try to test it (within possibilities of the word limit of course).
[12] It is an interesting question on how much writing and research as such should be hypothesis driven. A hypothesis may help one to focus at important questions and perhaps indicate methodology that is appropriate for studying it… but at the same time, focusing at a hypothesis too much may make one blind to alternative explanations and it may make one ignore counter-evidence that spoils the pretty hypothesis.
A note
on Teutonic vs Anglo-Saxon writing style
In academic
writing, there are three primary styles: Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, and French [13].
It is critical for grant writing in natural sciences to understand the essence
of the Anglo-Saxon style and use it, particularly when applying for funding in
the UK. Below I super-briefly describe the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic styles,
hoping it might help Teutonic-bred writers realize what they are doing to their
readers and to become a bit less Teutonic.
The Anglo-Saxon
style is by far the dominant style in natural sciences and it is crucial to
understand its rules and get used to it. Anglo-Saxon academic works tend to
have a relatively pre-determined structure: Introduction (giving background and
exposing the research question and/or hypothesis), Materials and methods,
Results, and Discussion/Conclusions. This can require twisting the substance of
your work in a certain way to fit this mould, but a) it makes it very
predictable for the reader, which is great, b) you get used to it. It tends to
use mostly short and easy-to-understand sentences without much jargon, and it
puts the important things first, so that the reader is captivated, and then
comes the explanation and/or necessary details. The author puts a great amount
of energy into making sure that the text is as easy to read and understand as
possible. Finally, the text is quite explicit in explaining why the
results/topics described matter to the reader, rather than leaving them to
figure out the importance on their own.
A part of
the readers may wonder “and how the hell would you write otherwise”… I present
to you – the Teutonic style! Incidentally, this is something I grew up in, and
even if natural science writing in Central Europe is shrugging off the Teutonic
heritage, I think it may still impact people’s writing to a certain extent.
This style is less predictable in structure compared to the Anglo-Saxon style,
and while it also tends to have an introduction/conclusion parts, the sections
between are more likely to reflect the particular topic and are likely to
correspond to the author’s mind map. Rather than having the top-to-bottom structure
of “This work shows X, which means Y. This follows from A,B,C”, also giving
details of A,B,C in a supplementary material, it would often go bottom-to-top hurling
A,B,C and the supplement at you, then “synthesizing” it into X (and perhaps
explaining why it matters, but maybe not). Perhaps worst of all, the language
tends to rely on long sentences with many inserted side-sentences (and parentheses [14]).
Again, this works very well for the writer, who can use it to reflect and
capture their thought process rather naturally, but it leaves a lot for the
reader to figure out. Furthermore, in some subfields (mainly in social sciences
as far as I know), the text is very heavy on jargon and terminology. Perhaps this
makes the text (and the author) look more intellectual from outside, but I’m
not sure it adds that much beyond that. It is not unconceivable that the jargon
and formal difficulty of the text is sometimes used to obscure the lack of
intellectual substance at times.
A specific feature
of the Czech branch of the Teutonic style is what one might call the “author
modesty”. This manifests in both writing and oral presentation and you can see
it, e.g., in naming of articles, which can be in the form of “on XYZ” or “to
XYZ” (this is hard to translate to English; it is a sort of shortening of the
phrase “a contribution to XYZ”). This reflects the author acknowledging their
unimportance and being happy with making a small contribution to the knowledge
in the field. EXPUNGE THIS FROM YOUR MIND! You are the future (sub)field leader
with a clear vision of how to get there, and you will be the best in your
niche, period.
In short,
the Anglo-Saxon style puts the reader first, whereas the Teutonic style puts
the topic and writer’s convenience first [15]. People
reading your fellowship application are quite likely to be very busy and
overworked senior figures. What do you think they will prefer?
I am
writing this because I am probably a naturally Teutonic writer with regards to
text structuring and I think other people from the same region can go through
the same problems. I just love to give the full story to the reader and have
them figure it together with me at the end. I want them to appreciate and
experience the complexity of the problem. I naturally tend to (ab)use
parentheses and footnotes a lot – and it is something I retained for this blog,
purely because I made the conscious choice of sharing a thought process (that I
at least try to make seem relevant), rather than writing a maximally concise
and organised piece of text.
When I was changing
my academic writing style towards Anglo-Saxon, I felt like it is not
appropriate to “dumb down” the text for the readers and that it is a pity to
spoil the story to them at the beginning. Sad truth – if you don’t do this,
nobody will read the paper, because everybody is busy. And I was not
necessarily right when arguing with my wife that the “big” journals (Nature and
Science) are increasingly dumbing down the writing. When done well, it is not
dumbing down, but just putting the nitty-gritty in a supplement. Does it
sometimes happen that because of this, an important detail gets omitted?
Probably, but hopefully not too often. But it also makes the rest of the paper
way easier to understand. After all, the journals are also undergoing an
evolution in which they want to survive…
As a final
unrelated note – make sure that the section “lay summary” is truly “lay”. Do
not worry about not squeezing all key terms and technical details in there. If
a committee member from another discipline reads this and they don’t understand
it, they will not think “ah, I do not understand this, hence this person is
very smart and doing something complicated”. It is more likely to go along the
lines of “I cannot understand this, so I cannot judge it and I cannot give plus points
to the candidate”.
[13] I haven’t been exposed to the French/Gallic style and know little of it, so I will not go into it.
[14] And footnotes.
[15] It is like fees in journals – you have to pay a LOT to make a paper open access = easy for the reader, while publishing a paper behind a paywall is easy for you, but costs the readers…
3 Concluding remarks
Make sure you read the websites for your chosen funding schemes thoroughly so that you know the exact details of what is wanted of candidates. If you have questions about your project’s suitability or whether you’re in the right career stage for a particular award, do contact the funding body – they have been very helpful and open with me. Good luck and don’t be afraid to ask people around for help!
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