An Unorthodox Approach to the Fellowship Process: Part 4 – Doing Your Homework on the New Class

Author: Ravi Parekh

Views are my own and do not reflect my employer.

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The transition from August to September is an important inflection point in the cycle. A new cohort of fellows has been in their programs since July, and by September, they have had enough time to settle in and form genuine opinions about their experience. I started scheduling one-on-ones with fellows from that new class specifically for this reason.

A fellow who started in July and is talking to you in September has already had their first real experiences in the role. They have been to their first internal meetings, worked on their first projects, and had their first wins and friction points. Those conversations can be more valuable than talking to a more senior fellow who may have lost the muscle memory of what it felt like to be a candidate. New fellows remember the process, and they have fresh takes on the culture.

Preparation Is the Difference

The key to those conversations is preparation. Before every call, I researched the person I was speaking with: their LinkedIn, their publications, if they had any, what they had shared publicly about their career path, and the specifics of their therapeutic area or functional focus.

I asked questions tied to what I actually found. Not generic questions about what they liked about the program or what advice they had for applicants. Real questions about specific things they had worked on, challenges they had navigated, and how their expectations matched what they found on the ground.

People genuinely appreciate that kind of preparation. It makes the conversation better for both people, and it is noticed. Fellowships are more about how you mesh with a company and how you convey your skills as transferable than about raw experience alone. The way you demonstrate that fit during the pre-application season is through the quality of your engagement. It signals that you are the kind of person who shows up prepared, because you are.

Keep Sharpening the Application

I also kept adding to my behavioral question document during September as my one-on-ones with fellows gave me new frameworks for thinking about what programs actually valued in candidates. If a fellow mentioned that their program put a heavy emphasis on cross-functional collaboration, I made sure I had a story ready that demonstrated exactly that. The document was never finished. It just kept getting sharper.

I kept the LOI refinement going throughout September, too. With conversations with new fellows in hand, I had more specific information to work with. A detail from a one-on-one call can become a sentence in an LOI that no other applicant could have written, because they did not have that conversation.