This is super awesome! Thanks for sharing the specifics of what you did—it will definitely be useful info for us in the future. We’ve considered having people fill out fellowship apps during our intro talk but have worried that this might lower the quality of applicant responses. I’d be interested in knowing what your experience with it was.
Thanks! We took an approach of making the fellowship application form as minimal as we could, so most of our applicants were able to put fairly high-quality responses to the remaining questions. We also have experienced a somewhat higher attrition rate for the actual fellowship (4->2 last semester, 50->15 this semester), which we suspect is due to the shorter forms, but we haven’t seen any other new problems.
This is super awesome! Thanks for sharing the specifics of what you did—it will definitely be useful info for us in the future. We’ve considered having people fill out fellowship apps during our intro talk but have worried that this might lower the quality of applicant responses. I’d be interested in knowing what your experience with it was.
Thanks! We took an approach of making the fellowship application form as minimal as we could, so most of our applicants were able to put fairly high-quality responses to the remaining questions. We also have experienced a somewhat higher attrition rate for the actual fellowship (4->2 last semester, 50->15 this semester), which we suspect is due to the shorter forms, but we haven’t seen any other new problems.