The results for the JSPS Research Fellowships (DC1 and DC2) were announced at 14:00 on Wednesday, September 27, 2023.
I was one of the students who applied, and I am happy to report that I was selected.
Word going around on X (formerly Twitter) was that this year’s acceptance rate was lower than usual.
Apparently the initial acceptance rate was around 14%, or about 17% including the second round of selections.
I had heard that the rate is usually close to 20%, so when I saw the numbers my first thought was, “Seriously?”
Through this application cycle I read a number of other people’s JSPS applications and wrote my own, so here I’d like to summarize the things worth keeping in mind to improve your chances even a little.
I think this applies not only to JSPS applications but to grant proposals, job application essays, and any writing meant to be read by others, so I hope you’ll read on.
What matters is what lies beyond the application
First, the key to writing an application is conveying what you want to say within a limited amount of space.
An application explains your research and argues for its importance: this is who I am, these are the things I can do, and therefore I can achieve this goal. So please fund me.
In other words, you need to keep sight of what your writing is ultimately for.
While writing, it’s easy to get caught up in immediate concerns—producing elegant prose, writing something your advisor won’t complain about—and lose sight of what an application fundamentally is.
It isn’t self-satisfaction: there are people who read and evaluate it, and score it accordingly.
That is what clearly distinguishes it from an exam, and it’s precisely why there is no single correct answer.
My impression is that many people who have spent their lives taking tests with right answers suddenly hit a wall when faced with an application, unsure what to write or what counts as correct.
Even while writing, you need to keep in mind who the application is written for.
For that reason, writing a few applications to other funding bodies before the JSPS one and having people read them makes a striking difference in how readable your writing becomes.
The keywords are “logic” and “specificity”
Logic
The two things I paid the most attention to when writing my JSPS application were logic and specificity.
Logic means that your argument is consistent and that each topic connects to the next.
You need to think about these connections at multiple scales: between sentences, between paragraphs, and across the application as a whole.
To put it in more practical terms,
logical writing is writing in which the reader finds what they want to know, in the order they want to know it.
When this is done well, the content flows effortlessly into the reader’s mind.
The point is to think from the reader’s perspective.
No matter how logical you think your argument is, that logic may not land with your reader.
Guides to writing JSPS applications often recommend inserting phrases like “in other words” or “the details are described below,” but the essential purpose of these is to give the reader signposts that make the connections in your text easy to follow.
Opinions differ widely on whether such phrases are necessary, but one thing I can say is this: if leaving them out makes your structure unclear, put them in, even at the cost of precious character count.
Specificity
Specificity means, quite literally, providing exactly as much information as the reader needs.
You’ve probably heard people say, about applications or research talks,
“My research requires so much background that I just can’t keep it short.”
I’ve thought the same thing myself many times before a ten-minute conference talk—there’s no way this fits in ten minutes.
But even in a talk you’ve confidently packed with content, it often turns out that there was a lot of information the audience didn’t need and almost none of what they actually wanted to know.
In other words, you haven’t decided what to keep and what to cut.
To make those decisions, first determine the single thing you most want to convey.
Then keep whatever is needed to explain that core point and discard whatever isn’t. That is how you achieve specificity.
Applications like the JSPS one require you to describe your research and yourself in a genuinely tiny amount of text.
People often say you should divide the JSPS funding amount by the character count of the application to calculate the value of a single sentence.
I think the point of that exercise is to get you asking: is this sentence really worth that much money? If not, rewrite it.
Background explanation is a third-person account, and while it’s necessary to make your own work stand out, the text itself describes other people’s research and is therefore low in value.
Whether you keep it to a minimum or find some other value in it is up to you.
Through this kind of revision, the content becomes refined.
So far I’ve talked about specificity while only discussing cutting material, but the real point is to condense the content and raise the specificity of each sentence to just the right level—no more, no less.
Throughout the process I kept logic and specificity constantly in mind, periodically stopping to reread and rewrite.
Show it to others early
One of the most important points is to have other people read your application early.
Some people wait until it’s finished and they’re satisfied with it, then show it to someone a week before the deadline—but honestly, that’s a waste.
Showing your draft to others is about confirming that you’re heading in the right direction and getting feedback, not just getting corrections.
As people often say, the quality of a JSPS application depends on how many people have read it: you gain new insights, and sometimes your fundamental way of thinking changes.
Ideally, aim to have someone other than your supervisor read it at least three weeks before the deadline.
Don’t stare at your application nonstop
When application season comes around, I often saw people put their experiments on hold to focus entirely on their proposals.
It’s true that you need to invest a fair amount of time, and since you revise it over and over, it ends up eating up an enormous number of hours.
That said, once you’ve written a decent draft, there’s no point in endlessly rereading it and burning time for nothing.
In fact, you should leave the draft alone for a while before you go back and revise it.
An application is an important document with your career riding on it.
But it doesn’t get better in proportion to the time you pour into it. The real challenge is producing the best possible document as efficiently as you can.
Rather than being glued to your computer, keep your experiments moving along, or even take a break to clear your head. You’ll write with a much cooler eye.
I didn’t just write at the university; I would take my laptop to cafes and other places, changing the setting often as I wrote.
Closing thoughts
This year’s provisional acceptance rate is said to be around 14% at the first round of screening.
Put another way, 86% of applicants were not selected for a JSPS fellowship.
Since the vast majority of applicants aren’t selected, there’s no need to be more discouraged than necessary about not making the cut.
At the same time, those who were selected got their place at the expense of many other people’s dreams and livelihoods.
Of course, the selection reflects a real evaluation of your research as it stands, but beyond that, it carries the responsibility to work twice as hard from here on.
I want to keep this in mind myself and keep pushing forward with my research.
