Blog – Writing Your First Fellowship

I haven’t written for a while and was trying to think of some useful wisdom I might impart. Then I had a meeting with a very senior person. We discussed my salary briefly and it flagged, again, some things that I had not been made aware of. So in the interests of exemplifying the phrase ‘if you can’t be a good example, at least be a horrible warning’ today, we’re going to go through some things to think about when writing your first fellowship. We’ll go through them as three main questions – the when, the what and the how?

The When

I have a junior colleague I lunch with occasionally. I like to think of my role as sort of ‘informal mentor’ but actually she’s extremely capable and very good at what she does so I really just turn up for the sandwiches and gossip. I asked her a while ago whether she was going to go for a fellowship and she said it didn’t feel like the right time. I had someone ask me at an early career researchers’ day ‘when do I write a fellowship’ and really the answer is exactly as my colleague put it.

You write it when it feels like the right time.

For me, I wrote my first grant before I even did my PhD. I quite enjoy having ideas and organizing them and presenting them. I quite like writing. I wrote a small grant with my PIs during my PhD to get me some extra funds for my research, which was successful and then I wrote my first actual independent grant a year post-PhD. It was only small but I managed to get it and was quite pleased with myself. And essentially from the point I started working more independently after my PhD I wanted to write something for myself. Eventually it took me about 4 years post-PhD to start officially writing fellowships and then it took me another two years to actually get one, with the turnaround time and rejection rate.

But this isn’t the case for everyone. I sit next to a wonderful BBSRC fellow who went off and worked for a while at an MRC institute and has come back and gotten a fellowship much later in her career but is still thoroughly enjoying it. When I had my ARUK fellowship I met people who were Race Against Dementia fellows who were about two years out of their PhD wielding millions. The time to write a fellowship is when it feels right for you.

And it’s important to say here that it may never feel right. You don’t have to write a fellowship to be successful in science. You can get a lectureship. You can leave academia and work in industry. You can go into medical writing, or instrument sales, or work in a core facility. There are endless options and just because you are surrounded by Wellcome fellows doing complex and shiny things, does not mean you need to be one too.

But if you do decide to write one, what do you write it on?

The What

This is important and will largely depend on your personal circumstances. I’ll go through what I did and then you can make your own choices.

I wrote a small grant very early post-PhD to do some pilot experiments. Something I was interested in which was linked to, but not matching, the lab I was working in at the time.  Our ‘big picture’ science was the same but what we were interested in on a day-to-day basis was slightly different. This is the key. You need to niche yourself away from your supervisor slightly. You need to find an area of the bigger picture topic where they will still be interested, and therefore continue to support you, but which is different enough that they might not have published on it before.

This is actually quite challenging to do cold-turkey. You can’t just sit in a lab that works on sleep and go ‘hmmm….what can I do that’s sleep adjacent’. What normally happens is that, as part of your every day research, some experiment will go awry. You’ll do a bunch of reading and get interested in something weird or left field. You’ll do a couple of experiments on their dime and find something even more weird and interesting. And so it snowballs.

This is much easier to do in a large and well-funded lab. As you can see from the phrase ‘on their dime’. If the PI has spare change for the odd assay, or the odd batch of mice, or a few extra samples on their next proteomics run then this is relatively simple and just requires you to have sensible conversations with them. I was working in a very small lab where the funding was all in very particular pockets and there was very little wiggle room. Hence writing the small grant. If I want to do some new science I need to get new science money. And there are pilot grants out there, your University will often have small pots of money for new projects, charities have some small pots, there are ways of funding this kind of thing.

Once you have your niche you’ll need to expand it a little. Think about exactly what the ‘big question’ you want to answer is, and figure out how you are going to go about answering it. Then think about where this big picture question might fit best. Are you going to go to a charity or a large funding body? This will dictate some of the rest of what you’re going to do. There are an enormous variety of fellowships out there now and you’ll need to select one that fits your circumstances.

Do you enjoy working within a group and not feel quite ready to lead your own team? There are three-year fellowships that work well for this. Do you feel independent enough to get a post-doc? Maybe one of the larger five-year ones is better for you. Does your University support career development and are they willing to support your career in particular? If they are then think about one of the longer fellowships where the funding for your salary tails off towards the end and the University picks up the slack. There are lots of options out there and the first port of call for you should be your grants team who should be aware of most of these options. Which brings us nicely on to our next topic…

Have you written your first fellowship yet? What was your biggest challenge — choosing the right time, the right project, or getting the costing right?

The How

Starting a fellowship is sometimes really hard. I know this because I’m about to start writing my third one and it feels like an ominous task. The first thing to do to make it easier is to ask for help. This can be from research fellows around you who have already been successful, or from your local grants team who may be able to direct you to people or send you grants to look at.

My first attempts were all via the latter. I had no local fellows to talk to, my PI had no experience in this area and nobody anywhere near my lab had held a fellowship. I was sent a previously successful application by the grants team which I pored over with a fine-tooth comb. This is where the writing process can go awry. This person’s application was amazing. He’d been on the BBC talking about his work. His work was published in some amazing journals. He’d been a co-investigator on some big grants. Why was I even doing this, I clearly was not competitive! But after being talked down from the proverbial ledge by several people I was told to crack on and I did.

If you have your big picture question already in your brain, this is where it can get kind of fun. You essentially have free-reign to try and figure out how to answer it. I went a bit wild in a couple of my applications. I made funky new mouse lines, I did snazzy microscopy I had no expertise in, it was great fun looking at the possibilities that were out there.

Once you have these details sorted then the boring bit comes. The costing. I have gotten into the habit of doing this on paper which is incredibly backwards but again, it’s something that your grants team will be able to advise you on. They know how much you cost, they know how much a post-doc will cost, they can tell you roughly how much people put on for consumables and they will advise you to add things like a laptop and professional development funds and travel money for conferences and other things you might forget.

What they may not do, which they did not in either of the applications I wrote, is flag YOU as an entity in all of this. So this is where I come as the terrible warning. Whenever I write a new grant, or a new fellowship, I put my salary down as what it currently is. Do not do this. You basically don’t really progress and you wind up looking, on paper, much less senior than you actually are.

You’re writing a fellowship, this is a big, independent step in your career so you should have a commensurate step up in your salary.

Some people seem to inherently know to do this but it absolutely did not occur to me and another friend confessed it would not only not occur to him but that he often just squeezes his own salary in the interests of the science, which is also a terrible thing to do.

So if you think you’re ready, you have an idea, you have the support then go for it.

Dr Yvonne Couch

Author

Dr Yvonne Couch is an Alzheimer’s Research UK Fellow at the University of Oxford. Yvonne studies the role of extracellular vesicles and their role in changing the function of the vasculature after stroke, aiming to discover why the prevalence of dementia after stroke is three times higher than the average. It is her passion for problem solving and love of science that drives her, in advancing our knowledge of disease. Yvonne shares her opinions, talks about science and explores different careers topics in her monthly blogs – she does a great job of narrating too.

@dryvonnecouch.bsky.social