Summer 2024 Newsletter

“Asking people from different disciplines to review your fellowship application is especially important for several reasons. First, except when the applicant applies for an award specific to their discipline, most fellowship applications are reviewed by reviewers outside the applicant’s discipline. Thus, asking people from different disciplines to read your application is essential. More so, it is imperative to bear in mind to write for a group of educated reviewers but with little or no knowledge of your topic.

Here are some of the benefits of asking different people to review your fellowship application:

1. Broad perspectives: Getting feedback from individuals in different academic disciplines or institutions can provide a broader perspective on your work and help you identify potential interdisciplinary connections or applications.

2. Gaining Clarity: Tailoring your application to an interdisciplinary audience helps you gain clarity on your idea and suggests other directions you might not have thought of.

3. Objectivity: Seeking feedback from individuals outside of your discipline and department can provide a more objective evaluation of your application. This is important because those within your discipline/department may be influenced by preexisting relationships or prior knowledge of your work.

4. Enhancing your application: Feedback from a diverse range of individuals can help you identify strengths and weaknesses in your application and provide suggestions for enhancing it. This can improve the quality of your application and increase your chances of being selected for the fellowship.

Integrating feedback from multiple people can be challenging, but it’s important to take all feedback into consideration and use it to improve your application. Over the years, I have developed a process of integrating feedback from multiple people. To avoid being overwhelmed with several comments at the initial stage, when I’m still working on fleshing out my ideas, I seek feedback in two phases: preliminary and later stages.

At the preliminary stage, I limit my reviewers to my fellowship advisor and major professor. Both bring different perspectives and expertise germane to developing a robust application. Specifically, the fellowship advisor ensures you meet the outline criteria for the fellowship and brings a wealth of invaluable experience to your application. In addition, the faculty advisor has a better understanding of your work and can ensure the content is robust. At the preliminary stage, I prioritize and implement feedback on ideas, content, and structure to make my overall argument and application competitive; grammar and formatting feedback are considered later. 

At the later stage, I share my work with more people in and outside my discipline. The goal is primarily to ensure that my application is understood across interdisciplinary lines. Also, those in my field can offer ideas that my major professor and I might have yet to consider. This process can be overwhelming; thus, I consider each reviewer’s feedback separately, working on it one at a time—and most times, you don’t get the feedback at the same time anyway. In my experience, most reviewers want to help make your application better. Remember that and appreciate their efforts.”