I shared this opportunity with a law school friend, and their reaction was: law students at good schools will already have their summer plans set well before late June, so most won’t be able to commit to working on something full-time for 8-12 weeks between July and October. Correspondingly, LPP may be significantly limiting its applicant pool (and possibly the quality of its applicants) by posting these kinds of opportunities so late. I flag this in part because I think something similar happened with LPP’s cost-benefit writing competition last summer—the opportunity was posted in June and had a deadline in July.
LPP is throwing serious money at these (both cool-seeming!) projects, but I suspect is significantly undermining their effectiveness by only sharing the opportunities so late. (I also recognize LPP may not have that much control over when it gets its funding, so this comment may be a critique of whoever is funding these projects (OP?) as much as a critique of LPP.)
We agree with your assessment. We were also aware of the timelines for law students (especially in the US), but decided to take our chances. This was our reasoning:
The funder behind this project agreed to provide funding only if we found suitable applicants (given the late announcement). So in the scenario where we don’t find any applicants after all, we will only have lost some time announcing and advertising the opportunity. We thought it was worth a try.
The fellowship is also open to applicants who are not US law school students, which significantly increases our applicant pool.
If the fellowship goes well despite the late announcemment, it will be much easier for us to secure early funding for future fellowships. Having received 864 applications for this fellowship (of which 122 from the US), we’re optimistic that this will be the case!
Multiple factors affected the timing of the announcement, some of which were outside of our control, but we hope to have more predictable schedules as our capacity (staff and funding) increases.
I’m a bit late to the party here; sorry!
I shared this opportunity with a law school friend, and their reaction was: law students at good schools will already have their summer plans set well before late June, so most won’t be able to commit to working on something full-time for 8-12 weeks between July and October. Correspondingly, LPP may be significantly limiting its applicant pool (and possibly the quality of its applicants) by posting these kinds of opportunities so late. I flag this in part because I think something similar happened with LPP’s cost-benefit writing competition last summer—the opportunity was posted in June and had a deadline in July.
LPP is throwing serious money at these (both cool-seeming!) projects, but I suspect is significantly undermining their effectiveness by only sharing the opportunities so late. (I also recognize LPP may not have that much control over when it gets its funding, so this comment may be a critique of whoever is funding these projects (OP?) as much as a critique of LPP.)
Thanks a lot for your comment, liilly!
We agree with your assessment. We were also aware of the timelines for law students (especially in the US), but decided to take our chances. This was our reasoning:
The funder behind this project agreed to provide funding only if we found suitable applicants (given the late announcement). So in the scenario where we don’t find any applicants after all, we will only have lost some time announcing and advertising the opportunity. We thought it was worth a try.
The fellowship is also open to applicants who are not US law school students, which significantly increases our applicant pool.
If the fellowship goes well despite the late announcemment, it will be much easier for us to secure early funding for future fellowships. Having received 864 applications for this fellowship (of which 122 from the US), we’re optimistic that this will be the case!
Multiple factors affected the timing of the announcement, some of which were outside of our control, but we hope to have more predictable schedules as our capacity (staff and funding) increases.
Thanks again!