One constant concern throughout grad school is funding. You could take many routes to secure funding, but fellowships are a popular option. Fellowships are typically merit-based awards to support a graduate student’s personal, academic, and/or professional development. They usually contain two parts: a personal statement and a research proposal. The former details your academic and research journey. It aims to describe how your past experiences have shaped you and prepared you for the research that’s to come. The latter details your research aims and execution plans. 

 This blog assumes that you’ve decided to apply for a fellowship and are just starting the writing process. Nonetheless, navigating fellowships and their applications can be overwhelming since they differ significantly from undergraduate or grad school applications. There are specific ideas to remember when writing a fellowship application to ensure that you successfully and effectively share your research project vision and aims.

To unearth some common best practices, I interviewed several graduate students in AeroAstro to learn from their experiences in applying for fellowships: 

Interviewed AeroAstro Graduate Students: 

Jake Olkin 

Jake is a third-year PhD Student in the Model-based Embedded Robotic Systems (MERS) Lab. His proposal on goal-directed adaptive sampling for autonomous exploration was recently chosen to receive the NSTGRO 2024 Fellowship.

Harsh Bhundiya

Harsh is a PhD candidate in the MIT Aerospace Materials and Structures Lab. His research interests lie at the intersection of spacecraft design and structural mechanics. Harsh has been awarded funding from NSTGRO and MathWorks

Allegra Farrar

Allegra is a PhD student in the Model-based Embedded Robotic Systems Group. She completed her SM studying autonomous control optimization and uncertainty quantification to realize crewed spacecraft entry on Mars. Allegra is now channeling those skill to work on real-time modeling and actuation techniques to improve remote sensing satellite ability to target dynamic climate phenomena generating tropical cyclones for her PhD. She has obtained the NSF, GEM, and MIT Presidential fellowships

Amy Phung

Amy Phung is a PhD student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program, advised by Richard Camilli. Her research on opti-acoustic perception for underwater manipulation is funded in part by the NASA FINESST research grant, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and the Link Foundation Ocean Engineering and Instrumentation Fellowship.

General Fellowship Advice

It can be challenging to understand how to approach a fellowship application. Oftentimes, they are approached as graduate school or college applications, but that is not the best strategy. When writing your personal or research statement for a fellowship, you do not necessarily need to tell a heartfelt narrative. Instead, you are trying to sell yourself as a researcher and convince the reader why you are the right student to invest in.

  • Allegra: “Many people think there is a time limit for applying for and obtaining fellowships, but fellowships can be more helpful later in your career. At that point, you’ve had time to adjust to your project and have clearer, formulated goals.”
  • Jake: “At the end of the day, fellowships aren’t gamified the same way college apps are. The people reading your fellowships are reading it and trying to answer the question, ‘Can we exchange our goods for your services?’ They are analyzing whether you have the skills and credentials to follow through. You’re not just trying to convince them to give you the money but selling yourself and your project.”
  • Harsh: “Fellowships are more about recognizing the audience and what they’re looking for. Grad school applications are more about yourself and why you want to attend grad school.
  • Harsh: “Focusing on implications and not so much on details of the proposed work.”

Getting Started

Getting started on organizing your ideas and writing a fellowship application can be overwhelming. From conducting a literature review to understanding the context of your research project to understanding how to communicate your technical ideas, there is a lot to balance. However, here are a few helpful tips to keep in mind.

You can also check out our blog on getting started on your writing for even more advice.

Learning to Identify the Broader Implications of Your Work

  • Harsh: “Learning to sell yourself is important. With fellowships, people tend to describe exactly what you do, but it’s more important to describe why and the implications of what you’re proposing to excite the readers.”
  • Allegra: “When writing more technical applications, those reading your application don’t want you to have all the answers. If you’re talking about a project, the biggest thing they want to know about your work is why you feel it’s important. They want a sense of what you can bring to the table with your contributions and how the work contributes to a larger audience.”
  • Allegra: When reading papers to understand your project’s field, “Start with what you’re interested in first without seeing others’ work, so you don’t copy them. When doing the literature review for your project, knowing which papers are helpful can be overwhelming. To start, only read the paper’s intro, discussion, and conclusion/future work sections first. It’s important to acknowledge that there’s work in the field, but acknowledge your unique take and build upon that. A literature review doesn’t always have the answers but can help validate your ideas.”

Strategies for Research & Writing the Fellowship

  • Allegra: “The key to writing is to get a messy draft done first. It’s important to write it, put it away, return to it, and read it with fresh eyes. This way, you’re reading it as a reader, not a writer. This will help you to catch things that aren’t clear. It’s also helpful to have someone who’s not in your field read it, and if they understand the technical aspect, then someone in your field will, too. You don’t always need to go into such technical depth, but you must ensure you’re telling a story and using reasoning that makes sense. Those reading your application need to be convinced that you know what you’re talking about and that you’ve done the work for them to invest in you.
  • Amy: “The writing process always starts with figuring out who the funding source is and what they care about. Once you have that, you want to figure out the story you want to tell that satisfies those gaps (research you will do or research you’ve done depending on what they’re looking for) to tailor it to what they’re looking for and find the intersection between these two things.
  • Amy: “Be aware that some fellowships read more like grants, so instead of talking about what you’ve done, talk about the research you’re proposing and what you plan to do when appropriate. ”
  • Amy: “Be as specific as possible in your application. All organizations will have their own vocab set, and you want to make sure what they mean so that you can write the phrases all over your statement. Sometimes, it’s helpful to use the common vocab and abbreviations within the field to build credibility within your audience.”
  • Amy: “Get someone else to read your app! This helps determine which parts of your application sound like you’re just bragging and which ones sound interesting. Usually, things come across as sincere or interesting when telling a story about something you worked on instead of just describing its outcome.”

Writing Personal Statements

The personal statement is a crucial part of the fellowship proposal and application. While there are slight differences in language and terms, overall, you should write it carefully to ensure you are utilizing this precious real estate to further convince the readers why you deserve the fellowship. While each fellowship is different, at the end of the day, here is some advice : 

  • Jake: “Write it knowing that you are proposing a specific research project and not just to show that you are competent but that you are the researcher for this project…the point is to sell yourself as an effective researcher in the context of the project you’re proposing.”
  • Allegra: “Try to give a hook or lead that you’ll refer to throughout the statements and wrap up at the end. Something that gets woven throughout the statement. It depends on what they’re asking you to say, but with the statement of purpose, take it very literally. Make your statements super clear at the end so that you validate all the stuff you’ve said throughout the statement.
  • Amy: “When talking about your experience, you don’t need to talk about everything you’ve ever done in chronological order. Instead, you can assign varying amounts of your piece to talk about most relevant items.”

Concluding Message:

Everyone’s fellowship journey will look different depending on their personal research goals. However, the core of the writing process and what should be communicated remains the same. 

If you decide to apply for a fellowship, I hope this blog gives you a helpful perspective on organizing your ideas and better communicating your strengths and experiences! Also, realize that these communication and writing skills aren’t only applicable to fellowships. As a whole,  “Learning to sell yourself is important. With fellowships, people tend to describe exactly what you do, but it’s more important to describe why and the implication of what you’re proposing because what you propose might not end up” – Harsh.