An Unorthodox Approach to the Fellowship Process: Part 5 – Submitting and Moving Quickly

Author: Ravi Parekh

Views are my own and do not reflect my employer.

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Applications open in early October, and submitting as soon as portals open can meaningfully increase your chances of securing an interview. I treated portal opening day like a deadline I had been working toward for five months, not a starting line.

Tailoring Means More Than Changing the Company Name

Every LOI was tailored to the specific company, the specific academic program, or both. This is worth elaborating on because people hear “tailor your LOI” and interpret it as changing a company name and a sentence or two. That is not what I mean.

Tailoring means understanding what is genuinely differentiated about a program, what the company is known for in the therapeutic space you are applying to, what the fellows who come out of it tend to do afterward, and weaving that understanding into the structure and substance of the letter. It means the person reading it can tell you did not copy and paste.

Running each LOI by mentors, professors, and past fellows before submitting is part of the process that separates polished applications from ones that are merely complete.

Lock In Your Recommenders Early

My letter of recommendation writers had been confirmed since July. By October, all of my letters were completed and submitted. I want to stress the July part specifically.

Asking someone to write a letter for you is a favor. A real one. Giving them a week's notice before a deadline is disrespectful of their time, regardless of how close you are to them. Confirming in July and following up periodically through the summer gives your recommenders actual time to write something thoughtful. It also gives you time to course-correct if a commitment falls through. Do not wait until September to ask. Do not wait until October.

Track Everything

The small detail that I think matters more than people acknowledge: I kept a tracking document for every application. Company name, academic partner, portal link, LOI addressee, submission date, contact person, and follow-up notes.

Sixteen applications across multiple portals with different deadlines and requirements are a lot to manage. Being disorganized in October will cost you. Someone who submits to the wrong portal, addresses a letter to the wrong program director, or misses a deadline because they were not tracking it carefully is sending a signal about their attention to detail without ever intending to.

I started interviews in October for almost every program. The one exception was Boehringer Ingelheim, where I had started in September. Moving quickly matters. Programs are evaluating candidates on a rolling basis in many cases, and being early in that queue is not a minor advantage.