Top Tips for Studentships

During the infinite month that is January, we open our Summer Studentship Award Programme for applications. It’s an opportunity to provide students (and their supervisors) with funding to complete their own research project over the summer months. It’s been running for a few years now and attracts far more applications than we could possibly fund – although we wish we could fund more.  

It is also one of the Charity’s activities that we look forward to every year.  

All of the students we have funded have blown me away with their knowledge, ability and their confidence. There is no way that as an undergrad, or even a master’s student, I could have done what they do. Just incredible beings! 

So this piece is primarily written for the students who are thinking of applying themselves, their supervisors, and also our supporters, who might be interested in how we make the difficult decisions about how we spend your donations. 

What do we look for?

The science is key. It obviously must not use any animals, and it has to be human-relevant. But the majority of research does not use animals anyway, and the competitive nature of academic funding means that occasionally we will get proposals to do animal-free work that actually has no relevance to replacing animals in science. 

We have to ensure that any research we fund is of high quality, aligns with our Grant Funding Policy, and has real potential to replace animals in the laboratory.  

So how do we assess applications?

All submissions are reviewed by at least 2 members of our Scientific Advisory Panel, who are a 40-strong group of diverse scientists from academia, and the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. They all volunteer their time and expertise to help us out in this process (to whom we are extremely grateful!), and we give them all the same questions about the quality of the application. Each application must be treated objectively and fairly. All applications should be written by the student themselves, so we ask the reviewers to consider things like: 

• Is it understandable and communicated and justified well? 

• Does it have potential to impact the replacement of animal use in research and testing? 

• Is the scientific rationale clear? 

• Is the planning and design appropriate? 

• Is it feasible in the timeframe? 

It’s not just about the science

Some of our students have been long term advocates for animals, some of them are very new to the concept of animal replacement. Sometimes, the replacement aspect isn’t the key driver at all– they are focused on the science itself. We also have students who are driven by a quest to address a particular area of unmet medical research for personal reasons.  

The nature of their main motivation to do the work doesn’t really matter when all’s said and done. It’s the commitment, the passion, and the genuine interest in their scientific field that does.  

All the top submissions demonstrate:  

• the student’s awareness of the field,  

• the need for the research to be done at all,  

• the extent of animal use,  

To be honest, the majority of the submissions tick all of these boxes.  

So how do we decide who to fund if we’re spoilt for choice? 

It’s also about the individual

As part of an application, we ask for a personal statement. Applicants are asked to say how they will benefit from the studentship, in the context of past experiences, personal circumstances, career ambitions, etc.  

They’re also asked how the opportunity may help develop research skills, particularly if they’re interested in pursuing a career in animal-free approaches. But we don’t actually favour those  pursuing an animal-free research career – previous winners have included those wanting to go into clinical practice.  

If we can see that the students is really committed to the area of work (for whatever reason) and that the opportunity will make a huge difference to them, then this can push an application ahead of their competitors. 

Instructions must be followed

I can not stress how important this is.  

Some applications don’t make it to review at all because the applicant (and/or their supervisor) just hasn’t followed the instructions.  

Read the questions. Read the guidance. Meet the brief. 

If an applicant hasn’t done this, we can not ask our volunteer experts to spend their time reviewing their work. 

That said, if any of you reading this is thinking of putting an application together, but you have questions about it, please email me at juliet@replacinganimalresearch.org.uk 

Wishing you all the best with your applications. We are looking forward to reading them!