How many opportunities should I apply for?

Three steps to helping students figure out the application process!

by Henry Dyson

During the winter semester, I talk with a lot of students about the national scholarships and fellowships to which they will apply in the fall.

One of the most frequently asked questions is, “How many scholarships and fellowships should I apply for?” The answer depends on viewing these ONSF applications within the context of your overall application strategy. Here are three steps to coming up with an appropriately diversified application strategy that includes highly competitive national scholarships and fellowships as well as other opportunities.

Step 1: Brainstorming

Step one is the brainstorming phase. You should put as many opportunities on the table as might fit your postgraduation plans. You should think creatively and expansively about how different opportunities might fit your existing plans or encourage you to explore new possibilities. Don’t worry too much about competitiveness or other self-limiting thoughts at this stage. It might also be helpful to think in terms of natural clusters. If you want to study in the UK, we have a natural cluster on our UK Scholarships webpage that will expand your list beyond the Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships. If you want to live, work, or study in Asia, you can look at the Schwarzman Scholars Program and Yenching Academy, but also Princeton in Asia, Blakemore Freeman, and many other opportunities.

Keep in mind that not all of your opportunities will be through ONSF, or even other fellowships offices such as the International Institute. If you want to apply to American PhD programs, MD, JD, or other degrees - those are natural clusters. Similarly, you may mix your national scholarship and fellowship applications with clusters applications for jobs and internships in particular sectors. For these applications you’ll work with faculty mentors, pre-med and pre-law advisors, and either the U-M Career Center or career office in your school or college respectively.

If you’ve done your work in the brainstorming phase, you now have a large list of potential applications organized in clusters that includes national scholarships and fellowships as well as some non-ONSF opportunities. Put these into a spreadsheet with each opportunity in a separate row.

Step 2: Organizing

Step two is organizing this list according to two variables: competitiveness and deadlines. In terms of competitiveness, you want to make sure that you’re applying for enough programs - and the right kinds of programs - to feel reasonably confident that you’ll end up with something you want to do after graduation, that you’re neither selling yourself short nor overdoing it. So imagine that you’re plotting your applications according to the following distribution curve.

On your spreadsheet, start a column titled “Competitiveness” and label each application as “High risk, high reward” (HRHR), “Middle High Risk” (MHR), “Middle Low Risk” (MLR), and “Safety.” You should be able to sort the sheet alphabetically using these labels and see your distribution.

Let’s start at the safety end first. You don’t need ten safety programs. You need one or maybe two really good options that you know you can fall back on if other applications fail. A good safety option will usually not be a scholarship that you apply for, but rather a job found through networking. Any time you’re applying to an opportunity that is open for others, the numbers will push it back towards the more competitive side of the graph. Because student loan debt is a very important factor, I’m also not a big fan of using an unfunded graduate program as a safety option. A good safety option should also be flexible regarding when you’ll need to commit yourself. A safety option that, for example, wants a yes or no answer in November, won’t work with your timeline for many other applications on your list. You’ll want at least one safety option that you can go to late next spring, if necessary, after you’ve heard back from other applications.

The middle risk categories should be opportunities for which you’ll be a solid applicant, but are also open to others. You don’t know for sure regarding any particular one, of course. But you’re pretty confident that something in this range will work out. Two factors that you’ll want to consider when gauging risk are the number of positions available and the expected number of applicants (if you can get a reasonable estimate). Of course, the biggest factor is your fit for the program: are you highly qualified according to their selection criteria? The appropriate mentor or advisor for that cluster of opportunities will be your best guide. Your risk management strategy for the middle risk opportunities is to have a sufficient number of applications that you average out the randomness that is inevitable in any application process. You’re also hoping to end up with some options from which you can choose the best fit. But these should all be programs with which you would, at least prima facie, be happy.

With this solid basis, your list should have at least a few aspirational or “reach” applications. These might be options that are at the high end of your competitiveness as an applicant, or that are HRHR for any applicant due to the large number of applications for a limited number of spots. Most ONSF opportunities will fall in the HRHR or MHR categories.

Student Example #1

Consider the example of a rising senior who wants to pursue an MD and Master’s of Public Health (MPH) and a career in international medicine. Let’s assume that she has a 3.7 GPA, a good MCAT score and resume of campus activities, but has been prevented from pursuing international experiences due to the COVID pandemic. How can she use the above graph to think about her fall applications?

One of the first questions this student faces is whether she will apply to MD or MPH programs in the fall. If so, the majority of her curve will be constructed from high and middle risk graduate applications selected with her pre-health advisor and faculty mentors, along with a good safety option or two just in case she doesn’t get into a school of her choice. To this list of applications, she might add a few HRHR applications for programs such as Fulbright, the Wallenberg Fellowship, and Kathryn Davis Projects for Peace that would give her some international experience before beginning her MD-MPH training. If successful in one of these fellowship applications, she would seek a 1-year admissions deferral for her graduate school of choice.

If she is “all in for a gap year” and doesn’t plan to apply for MD or MPH programs in the fall, then she needs to diversify her applications portfolio with more MHR and MLR applications. She might add another international program such as Princeton in Asia, Africa or Latin America. A strong domestic option might be the NIH Intramural Research Training Award Postbacc research program. One nice feature of this program is that applicants can apply to multiple labs at the NIH, internally diversifying their applications for this one program. However, as mentioned above, this candidate may also want to pursue healthcare jobs or research positions in consultation with mentors and career advisors outside of ONSF.

What about the Marshall Scholarship? If successful, this would provide full funding for the applicant to pursue her MPH in the UK. The minimum GPA for Marshall is 3.7, so the candidate is eligible. To help her make a decision about applying, I would want to discuss all the factors that make her a perfect choice for her UK graduate program and the Marshall Scholarship criteria, but also where this HRHR application fits into her overall application strategy for the fall.

Student Example #2

Here is a concrete example that uses high-end law school admissions as a basis. What counts as high and medium risk depends on the candidate’s qualifications. For this initial exercise let’s imagine a highly qualified applicant who has a 3.9 GPA, 169 LSAT, and strong resume including campus research and a couple of political or think tank internships through programs like Michigan in Washington or PSIP. For this student, the HRHR category might include Yale, Stanford and Harvard as the top three ranked law schools in the country. The MHR and MLR category might include schools like Columbia, Penn, Georgetown, Northwestern, Michigan, Berkeley, Vanderbilt and Emory. What about safety options? Would the candidate be happy at a middle-tier school like Michigan State’s law school? Or, if for some unlikely event that she weren’t to get into any of the schools above, would she prefer to work for a year in a position that she finds through networking with contacts she made at one of her political or think tank internships and then reapply?

How might a candidate fit national scholarships or fellowships into this mix? Since she already has a well diversified portfolio of applications, she might just mix in a few HRHR options such as Rhodes, Marshall, and Fulbright. A more challenging candidate is one who is “all in” for one or more gap years before applying to law schools. In that case, the student might start with the HRHR programs just mentioned, but will then need to fill out the bulk of her MHR and MLR categories with other postgraduate opportunities, perhaps including a mix of international programs to “diversify” her Fulbright application cluster or job applications for research assistant positions at various think tanks in her field. Again, she will want to work with a variety of postgraduate advising offices or mentors to fill out the complete list of applications.

Step 3: Planning for Deadlines

Once you’ve ensured that your application portfolio is appropriately diversified, you’ll want to arrange your prospective application programs by deadline, so start a new column. A key distinction that you’ll need to keep in mind is between programs that allow for direct applications and those that require U-M nomination. Applications that require U-M nomination will typically have earlier deadlines, starting as early as late August for ONSF opportunities such as the Marshall Scholarship and Fulbright applications in the International Institute. Other deadlines for scholarships and fellowships will typically extend through October, November and December. Graduate school applications may start as early as late summer or early fall for medical school and law school, but will typically extend through October, November and possibly December for master’s and PhD programs. Job applications may start as early as late summer or early fall in some sectors, but will typically come later in the cycle and may extend into the late winter or even early spring.

As you look at where various applications will cluster on your calendar, think about the manageability of your own workload and also your letter writers. Coming up with an appropriate list of potential letter writers that you’ll use for different types of applications is the topic for another blog. However, it is inevitable that certain key recommenders and mentors will end up on many if not all of your applications lists. This is natural and appropriate. They are probably the people with whom you’re closest and want to do the work of supporting you. Recommenders don’t write completely new letters for each application. Depending on the nature of the application, it is between 5% and 15% more work to adapt and submit a letter to each opportunity. So you’ll want to make sure that you give each recommender a timeline for your applications and the materials they will need to adapt each letter to its specific purpose. Having a well thought-out portfolio of applications spread over an appropriate timeline will present you in the best light to these recommenders.

As you look over your portfolio of applications, if the list seems too crowded or too thin in any particular risk category or month, make adjustments as necessary. It’s fine to take out programs that were on your original list, but that now don’t feel like priorities once you see them in context. If you need to do more brainstorming to add to your list, you’ll have a better sense of what kinds of programs you should be seeking.

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Release Date:	02/15/2021
Category:	ONSF Director's Blog
Tags:	ONSF

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How many opportunities should I apply for?

Student Example #1

Student Example #2