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.
On X (formerly Twitter), people were saying that this year’s acceptance rate was lower than usual.

Apparently the initial acceptance rate was about 14%, or around 17% including the second round of selections.

I had heard that it is usually close to 20%, so when I saw this year’s rate my first thought was, “Seriously?”

Through this application process—reading many other people’s JSPS applications and writing my own—I’ve put together some points worth keeping in mind to improve your chances even slightly.

I think this advice applies not only to JSPS applications but to any writing meant to be read by others, such as grant proposals and job application essays, so I hope you’ll read on.

What matters lies beyond the application itself

First, the key to writing an application is conveying what you want to say within a limited 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 in mind what lies beyond the writing itself.

While writing, it’s easy to get caught up in immediate concerns—producing elegant prose, or writing something your advisor won’t complain about—and lose sight of what an “application” fundamentally is.

It isn’t self-satisfaction: someone reads it, evaluates it, and scores you on that basis.
This is clearly different from an exam, and precisely for that reason there is no single correct answer.

My impression is that many people who have spent their lives taking tests with defined answers suddenly hit a wall when faced with an application, unsure of what to write or what “correct” even means.

Even while writing, you need to keep asking who the application is for.
Writing a few applications for other funding bodies before the JSPS one and having people read them makes a striking difference in readability.

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 consider these connections at multiple scales: between sentences, between paragraphs, and across the application as a whole.

To put it in more practical terms,
a logical piece of writing is one in which the reader finds the information they want, in the order they want it.
When this is done well, the content flows effortlessly into the reader’s mind.

The point is to judge from the reader’s perspective.
No matter how logical you think your argument is, it may not come across that way to someone else.

Guides on writing JSPS applications often recommend inserting phrases like “in other words” or “the details are described below,” but the underlying purpose is to give the reader signposts that make the structure easy to follow.

Opinions differ sharply on whether such phrases are necessary, but one thing is clear: if omitting them makes your structure hard to follow, you should include them even at the cost of precious space.

Specificity

Specificity means, quite literally, providing exactly as much information as the reader needs.

You’ve probably often heard people say, about applications or research talks,
“My research needs so much background that I just can’t fit it into a short format.”

I’ve felt the same way myself—facing a 10-minute conference talk and thinking there was no way I could finish in 10 minutes.

But it often turns out that even a talk you confidently packed with content contains plenty 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 what you most want to convey.
Then keep what is necessary to explain that core message and discard what isn’t. That is how you achieve specificity.

In applications like the JSPS fellowship, you have to describe your research and yourself in a very small amount of text.
People often suggest dividing the fellowship funding by the number of characters in the application to calculate the value of a single sentence.

I think the point of that exercise is to make you ask: is this sentence really worth that much money? If not, rewrite it.

Background sections describe the field from a third-party perspective and are necessary to make your own work stand out, but since they describe other people’s research, their intrinsic value is low.
Whether you keep them to a minimum or find some other value in them is up to you.

Revising in this way is how you refine your content.

So far I’ve talked about specificity while only discussing what to cut, but the real point is to condense the content and make each sentence as specific as it needs to be—no more, no less.

Throughout the process, I kept logic and specificity constantly in mind, periodically stepping back to reread and rewrite.

Show it to others early

One of the most important things about an application is getting other people to read it early.

Some people wait until it’s finished and they’re satisfied with it, and only show it a week before the deadline—which is honestly a waste.

Showing your draft to others means both checking whether you’re heading in the right direction and getting feedback.
It isn’t just about corrections.

As the saying goes, the quality of a JSPS application depends on how many people have read it: feedback brings new insights and can even change your fundamental way of thinking.

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 came around, I often saw people cutting back on experiments to focus entirely on their applications.
It’s true that these documents require a fair amount of time, and revising them over and over eats up an enormous number of hours.

That said, once you’ve written a reasonable draft, there’s no point in reading it over and over and burning time for nothing.
In fact, you should put some distance between drafting and revising before you read it again.

An application is an important document with your future riding on it.
But it doesn’t improve in proportion to the time you pour into it. The real challenge is producing the best possible version as efficiently as you can.

Rather than being glued to your computer, keep your experiments moving along, and even take breaks to refresh yourself. Writing that way lets you keep a level-headed perspective.

I didn’t write only at the university. I would take my laptop to cafés and other places, changing my surroundings often as I wrote.

Closing thoughts

This year’s provisional acceptance rate is said to be about 14% at the first-stage screening.
To put it the other way around, 86% of applicants were not selected for a JSPS fellowship.

Since the vast majority of applicants are not selected, there’s no need to be more discouraged than necessary if you weren’t.

At the same time, those who are selected have, in effect, secured their place ahead of many other people’s dreams and livelihoods.
The award does reflect a genuine evaluation of your research as it stands, but beyond that it carries the responsibility to work even harder from here on.

I want to keep that in mind myself and continue giving my research everything I have.