Writing applications for large general fellowship programs can be a fool’s errand. This is not because the standards for getting such fellowships are insurmountably high. Plenty of early career researchers (ECRs) have good CVs, brilliant ideas, and can find departments and supervisors who will support them. Schemes like the European MSCA fellowship rate around three quarters of applications as good enough to be fundable, which is a testament to the deep pool of research talent in Europe and elsewhere.
The issue is that ultimately, only the highest-scoring 15% or so of applications get funded because the available money isn’t unlimited. The difference between funded and unfunded applications can be razor thin. Reviewers try to be fair, and I’m sure there must be internal controls to account for differences in generosity (like when all the essays I corrected got bumped up a grade because I was systematically a bit harsh… oops). Nonetheless some funders have acknowledged that the purported meritocracy of a funding system like this breaks down when hundreds if not thousands of applications are theoretically fundable, and have turned their functional lotteries into literal ones.
If applying for these schemes is a fool’s errand, then I am a very experienced fool. I’ve made six attempts across three different schemes, with one outright success and one waitlist position that got bumped up when someone else declined the funding. Another got a fairly good set of peer reviews on a full application but wasn’t invited to interview because the committee thought the scientific questions weren’t feasible. Whether you’re thinking “what a loser” or “what a braggart” will probably depend on your own experiences of rolling the funding dice, and what way your dice are weighted. To me it was worthwhile to keep trying but that was really only because I had plenty of time left on my contract. I am sure lots of postdocs with fundable-but-unfunded applications don’t have that luxury and exit the game rather than chase after sunk costs.
Quince: Marry, our play is, The most lamentable comedy, and
most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby.
Bottom: A very good piece of work, I assure you, and a merry.
— A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Bottom is an innocent and guileless Fool who has woefully misunderstood the nature of the text he’s working with. And so too was I, not the first time I took an unsuccessful run at the MSCA, but the second. Like a babe (or a Bottom) in the woods, I took the review comments from attempt #1 and addressed them one by one. Surely, I thought, by addressing all of the weaknesses and trying to further improve the strengths, I’ll score high in the funded zone — maybe even getting 100%.
As you can imagine, when I reapplied the next year I got a bump of around 8% but I did not get funded and I definitely did not score 100%. This is because I failed to read between the lines of the original reviewer comments. MSCA reviews are structured into “strengths” and “weaknesses”, individual bullet points that convey the reasons reviewers gave certain scores. Here are the numbers from my proposals’ reviews:
- Unsuccessful. 14 strengths, 6 weaknesses, 592 words.
- Unsuccessful. 25 strengths, 10 weaknesses, 1,107 words.
- Successful. 24 strengths, 5 weaknesses, 687 words.
What’s implicit here is that the first proposal just didn’t engage the reviewers very much. They might not have had much to say about it negatively — barely more than they said when they actually gave me the money! — but they saw relatively few merits to comment on as well. The first round comments were also quite generic, like they could have been pulled from a rubric. One concrete examples is that on attempt #1, I was told that I “[did] not sufficiently justify the research methods used and any possible limitations in reaching meaningful conclusions”. I was told basically the same thing on attempt #2, but the criticism was now split into two, specific comments — I needed to justify the use of MEG over EEG, and the use of cross-sectional designs over longitudinal ones.
My sense from the second set of reviews was that they saw potential in the work and they found something interesting in it, but they were not totally convinced and didn’t like it enough to score it as highly as they did other proposals. Nonetheless it made enough of an impact to effectively double the previous reviewers’ word count. The lesson here is to not assume that reviews on fellowships are the same thing as reviews on manuscripts. The comments are justification for marks given, and marks taken away, but cannot be expected to be a complete guide to scoring highly enough to get funded.
‘Better a witty fool, than a foolish wit’ — Feste, Twelfth Night
But hang on, you say, didn’t you just say that you only addressed the generic comments, and your score did in fact go up? To which I respond, who listens to a Fool? In reality of course I probably changed more than just what was written in the reviews or rewrote larger sections even if I didn’t change much content. The more useful comparison is probably between attempts two and three because I can actually remember a couple of broad aspects that I consciously resolved to change on that most recent attempt, rather than just the specific comments.
First, I tried to make the proposal easier to read and to understand. Nobody with a big batch of documents to get through wants to spend five minutes parsing one sentence. I especially tried to do this with the first section, and to use the first paragraph to make the project seem as exciting, timely and important as I thought it was. Projecting good vibes at the start would hopefully help the reviewers to be a bit more interested in the technical stuff.
Second, after reading someone else’s successful proposal, I realised that it’s OK to big yourself up. The reviewers probably don’t know you personally, so you have to convince them of how great you are. In real life, I have a habit of talking myself down under the assumption that people will know not to take it seriously. When they don’t know me, and the only information they have is what I say, how could they know that I’m being self-effacing? In a proposal, even writing about yourself objectively is a bit like talking yourself down. If you write “I have experience in X”, who cares? What are you going to do with that, why is it important, why are you better than the scores of other people with the same experience? A little bit of editorialising just helps the reviewer to see why your skills make sense in the context of the proposed work. Even something like “I’m well-placed to address this question, because I have unique experience in X which I can use to do Y” is miles ahead of copying in bullet points from your CV and expecting the reviewer to know exactly why they’re important.
These tweaks in presentation might seem a bit fluffy, but sadly I think they are a way to weight the dice in your favour. Once you’ve been told your research ideas are good enough to be funded, and/or your background and experience means you’ve hit some threshold of acceptability, what else can you do but tinker? There is wisdom in knowing that not winning doesn’t signal inadequacy and you don’t need to abandon good ideas, but rather to work on how they’re received. After all, Fools make their living by dressing up quasi-sophisticated ideas in a way that makes them digestible and enticing to their target audience.
‘The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be
a fool.’ — Touchstone, As You Like It.
While tweaks in presentation probably did help my proposal over the line, I also think that time — the extra years of postdoc work — played a role. In three years, more manuscripts moved from in prep/preprint to published. I left my wonderful but niche research institute, and started working at a university with big international name recognition. I moved back into a field that was relevant to my proposal. I refined my skills and could write fluidly about my responsibilities within the big project I was now working on.
Where these things ought to have an impact is in the main, “Excellence” section of the fellowship. MSCA fellowship applications are divided into “Excellence”, “Impact” and “Implementation”, or at least they were in H2020 (my info may be out of date for Horizon Europe). The Excellence section is where you set out who you are, who your mentors are, what you’re going to do, and where and how you’re going to do it. This was the section I changed the most between attempts two and three, rewriting large sections not just about my recent experience but also reworking some aspects of the research proposal and trying to better justify research decisions as the earlier reviews suggested. As a result of all this hard work, the score for the Excellence section increased by… 0.0 points. Which goes to show that the things we think are important and commit so much effort to, might not actually be those that make much of a difference.
The big score leap was in the Impact section, which covers what the fellowship will do for your career plans, as well as your plans to conduct outreach and disseminate the research. It went from a score of 4.0 to 4.9 out of 5. Had I changed this section? Not very much! I made it a bit shorter and I narrowed the career development section down to just one path. I bolded some key words. My guess is that the reviewers saw some things in the Excellence section that made them implicitly trust that I could better reap the impacts of the proposed research, so the Impact score went up. These things might have been based on reality (more project management experience) or on biases (such as those induced by the word “Cambridge” on a CV). Either way, it’s another example of how reviewer comments should be read holistically, and how the general vibe of a proposal can affect how information in different sections gets evaluated.
‘ Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure.’
— Feste, Twelfth Night
A similar example comes from the reviews on my full (unsuccessful) Sir Henry Wellcome application. In my memory, I had been utterly savaged by the peer reviewers but when I went back to read the reviews for this post I found… that they were quite positive actually. However, like that first MSCA application, they were a little sparse and disengaged. One of the reviewers did some impressive hairsplitting by commenting that “[t]he project proposal is novel and important but maybe not groundbreaking”, which proves my point that you won’t win unless someone is excited by what you’ve written.
Now that I’ve finished stroking my ego when I was expecting to threaten it, I’ll get to the point. One of the MSCA comments said that it was a good thing that I’d worked and published across a few different fields, and that it was a sign of independence. My memory of the Wellcome reviews was that at least one reviewer felt that the fact I’d left developmental cognitive neuroscience for a couple of years was an example of how I didn’t have a clear career trajectory and therefore couldn’t become a leader in the field. This was a false memory. In fact this person gave a great example of how even the same person can evaluate the same information in completely conflicting ways.
This Kombucha Girl-type reviewer couldn’t decide if my background was a good or bad thing. They started by saying that my publishing record was good but because I didn’t seem to have been involved in designing most of the studies originally, I was probably not capable of independent thought. Then they conceded that the proposal was evidence of being able to come up with novel ideas, before moving on to say that they didn’t see why I had moved into a different field (policy research) for my first postdoc or what it meant for the current proposal. Then again, they mused, it could be an asset before ultimately deciding that it was a bad thing because I hadn’t made the impact on the current proposal clear enough.
I don’t mean to dunk on this person because I am certain I’ve left a string of yeah-but-no-but-yeah comments on a review before. The lesson here is that you can put all sorts of effort into a proposal but you can’t really control how other people will interpret information. To turn it around on myself, I suppose my MSCA lesson about contextualising your experience and skills for the proposal at hand could have worked here to guide the equivocal reviewer to the correct conclusion (that they should write such an effusive and glowing review of my career path that the committee couldn’t deny the interview even if I said I was going to turn lead into gold). But ultimately, reviewers have their own biases and will split hairs when that’s all that separates a funded application from an unfunded one.
‘That, of course, is the great secret of the successful fool — that he is no fool at all.’ — Isaac Asimov, Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare
Having been through the wringer on funding a few times, the best thing I’ve learned is a little protective scepticism about the whole process. Everyone who gets funded probably deserves it, but so did a lot of people who didn’t. The things you think should make a difference often won’t; what you find superficial might be what wins you the money. Applying for funding is a little foolish when you consider the amount of time invested (and what that costs either your employer or yourself), but it’s part of what’s expected if you want to make a living in this game. I’m not going to get all Girlboss Beckett up in here, but it is true that we can learn from the things that didn’t work out, and do better next time. And we can learn vicariously without needing to fail at all, which is why a Fool like me takes the stage to talk a little nonsense and hopefully a little wisdom too.
