APPLY NOW! Early-Career Fellowship 2025 Cohort Application
We are accepting applications for the next round of The Open Notebook‘s early-career fellowship for early-career science writers, funded by a generous grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. The next fellowship period will begin on February 24, 2025. This one-year fellowship is remote and part-time.
Fellows will work with The Open Notebook (TON) team to report and write articles for publication at TON with the support of a paid mentor who will help shape story ideas, provide reporting and writing guidance, and offer career-development mentoring.
Fellows and mentors will also take an active part in a Slack-based professional discussion group composed of former fellowship participants and TON editors. Membership in this community will continue after the fellowship ends. Each fellow will receive a stipend of $6,600.
Eligibility
- The fellowship is open to early-career science journalists anywhere in the world.
- Some training and/or experience in writing for the general public is a requirement for this fellowship.
- Science journalists (or aspiring science journalists) must have fewer than three years of regular professional science writing experience.
- Internships and student work do not count toward the fewer-than-three-years requirement.
- Exceptions to this requirement may also be made for cases in which an applicant has more than three years of professional science writing experience but some or all of that experience is not in English.
- Applications, including writing samples and letters of recommendation, must be in English. Materials translated into English from another language are acceptable.
Time Commitment
This is a part-time, remote fellowship. The fellowship involves reporting and writing four articles of 1500-2000 words for The Open Notebook, as well as meeting regularly with an assigned mentor and taking part in editorial discussions and cohort-based activities on Slack. We estimate that for most fellows, the fellowship takes about 5-7 hours per week on average; however, the amount of time the fellowship takes will depend on fellows’ experience and working style as well as the phase in the reporting/writing/editing process for any given article. Some weeks will almost certainly require more time and some will require less.
PLEASE NOTE: Although it is part-time, this fellowship requires a significant weekly time commitment, and juggling the fellowship along with other commitments can be challenging. Before applying, please consider carefully whether you will be able to devote sufficient time to completing articles as specified in the fellowship description. We have a rigorous editorial process and fellows must be committed to meeting article deadlines and filing stories on time and turning around revisions on schedule. This includes making time for 1) conducting phone interviews with sources, ordinarily during U.S. daytime hours; 2) weekly phone or video meetings with mentors; 3) multiple rounds of editing and revision for most stories; 4) annotating stories for fact-checking; and 5) participating in conversations in the fellowship Slack community.
Selection Criteria
Priority will be given to applicants who demonstrate:
- A strong intention to work primarily as a professional science journalist. (Note: This fellowship is intended for people whose main goal is to do journalism, as opposed to other forms of science communication.)
- Some training and/or experience writing about science for the general public (it does not have to be extensive)
- Some understanding of the science journalism profession, the challenges science journalists commonly face, and the ways in which you would like to grow as a science journalist
- Familiarity with The Open Notebook and the types of topics we tend to cover
- An ability to generate good story ideas suitable for The Open Notebook
- A commitment to delivering your best work and being conscientious about deadlines
- Strong writing ability (If English is not your first language, we do take this into consideration and do not expect flawless writing. However, for a successful experience in this fellowship you must have a fairly high level of proficiency in English.)
(Note: The deadline for reference letters is November 6, 2024. We recommend that you notify letter-writers well in advance of the deadline so that they have time to write you a well-considered letter.)
Deadline
Applications must be received by 11:59 p.m. U.S. Central time on October 31, 2024.
