Postdoctoral Researchers Editing and Proofreading Services

A fellowship panel reads your application and asks itself one question: is this the applicant's own programme, or their supervisor's programme with the applicant's name on it? You have worked in the group for four years, the ideas grew out of conversations, the equipment is theirs and the dataset is shared. All of that is normal, and none of it helps you answer the question the panel is actually asking.

We work on what postdoctoral researchers write — fellowship and independent funding applications, independence and research vision statements, project proposals and their framing, career development and training plans, applications for lectureships and independent positions, contribution statements for shared work, publication strategy and first-author planning documents, host and mentor arrangement descriptions, and interview and presentation material for fellowships. Our editors work on the case for independence.

The independence case is what fellowship applications are decided on, and its failure is describing excellent work without distinguishing it. A panel is not looking for distance from your supervisor; it is looking for evidence that the question is yours. We work through these so the intellectual origin of the proposal is stated plainly — what you noticed, when, and what nobody in the group was pursuing — since a specific origin story is far more convincing than any assertion of independence; so the relationship to the current group's work is described rather than avoided, given that a proposal with no visible relationship to four years of work reads as invented and one that overlaps entirely reads as continuation; so your own contribution to the shared publications is stated in the terms the panel needs, naming what you designed, built or analysed rather than your position in the author list; so the proposed host is justified as a choice with what it gives you that your current group cannot, because moving is easier to argue than staying and staying needs an argument; so the elements that require the supervisor's resources are identified with how you would proceed without them, as a panel testing independence will ask exactly that; so the training and development you still need is stated honestly, since a postdoc who claims to need nothing is not credible; and so the proposal contains at least one thing your supervisor would not have done. Applications written this way convince a panel the programme has an owner.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including applications, unpublished work and career plans. We are editors rather than research or career advisers, and we offer no view on your science, your independence or your prospects. What we can do is make the ownership of the question visible.