How-To Guide: Writing a Successful ARC Fellowship Application
July 2025
This guide distills expert advice and key insights to help you craft a compelling ARC Fellowship application, whether you are applying for a Future Fellowship (FF) or a DECRA.
Thanks to our Director, Prof Denise Meredyth, and Senior Associates Profs Stephen Muecke, Steve Buckman, Fiona Cameron, Ian Hunter and Dr Laura Dan for their contributions.
1. Start With the End in Mind
· Visualize Your Final Report: Write your application as if you are reporting on a completed, highly successful Fellowship project. Highlight what you would want to showcase as achievements at the end of your Fellowship or beyond.
· Understand your audience. Fellowship selection committees are often highly multidisciplinary, so craft a narrative that engages the non-expert but captivates the imagination of the discipline expert.
· Frame the need for this research as a story or a compelling metaphor: the quest, the battle against the odds, the forgotten truth, the illuminating idea, the thread through the labyrinth, the treasure hunt, the intervention, the alliance or movement.
· Craft your own role in the story. What is unusual about your background, achievements and insights? What makes you a strong protagonist in the story you are telling?
· Align With Career Development: Clearly articulate how the Fellowship fits into your career trajectory. Demonstrate how your project builds on past achievements and opens new developmental paths. Who have you worked with and who have you influenced, within and outside the academy?
· Show developing leadership and mentorship. Build on research supervision and be explicit about projects or initiatives you led or shaped, who was involved and what happened for them.
2. Understand What Reviewers Look For
· Future Fellowships (FFs): Emphasize international leadership, influence and standing, keynote presentations, excellent publication record, and strong professional networks.
· DECRAs: Focus on a solid publication record and evidence of research excellence and esteem to date.
· For All: Ensure your Research Opportunity and Performance Evidence (ROPE) statement robustly supports your claims of research performance and is understandable to those outside your field.
· Inspire reviewers to back you. Help them to see that this Fellowship opportunity will be transformative for your future work, enabling you to lead your field over at least a decade. Show them that you are ready to do it: you are an independent researcher equipped with experience and a vision.
3. Craft a Captivating First Page
· Hook the Reader: The summary and project description should immediately convey originality, usefulness (beyond the obvious), and scholarly merit. Keep the non-expert engaged with a short plain language summary of any technical sections that all can follow.
· Define clear Aims and Objectives and connect your research narrative and proposed outputs/outcomes to these.
· Consistent Storytelling: Maintain a consistent narrative throughout—demonstrate you are an outstanding researcher for your career stage, with an excellent, clearly articulated proposal and outcomes.
· Does your work have a clear purpose? Be clear in your own mind why this research needs to be done and what contribution it will make to knowledge impact and/or research impact. Engage your assessor by sharing your purpose and intentions right at the beginning. Then circle back at the end to demonstrate how your project will deliver on the purpose.
4. Define a Strong Research Question
· Novelty and Relevance: Pose a research question or aim that:
o Is genuinely new (not already answered in the field)
o Advances your research area in a clear, significant direction
o Can be described as cutting-edge.
o Will impact the field, challenge dogma, make a difference
o Can be investigated through the approach you describe, even if aspects remain ambitious and risky.
· Proper Object of Inquiry: Avoid questions where the answer is already known to you. Instead, frame your project as an inquiry or exploration.
· Have a good justification: Although you don’t know the answer to the question (it’s research) there should be a good reason why you are following this path. Why is it important to answer this question? Who will care?
5. Detail Your Research Design and Methods
· Specificity Matters: Clearly outline the stages of your project and specify your methods—avoid vague or generic terms like "mixed methods" without detail.
· Anticipate Outcomes: Show how your design will gather evidence and lead to anticipated outcomes.
· Your narrative: should provide the assessor with the understanding of how your aims and objectives will deliver on your purpose.
6. Key Characteristics of Successful Applications
· Immediate Impact: The proposal stands out from the first page. An informative, outcomes-focused title can help here.
· Clear, Consistent Narrative: The story of your research excellence and project value is evident throughout.
· Original and Feasible: The research question is new, important, and answerable with the proposed methods, within budget and within your timelines.
· Well-Structured: The design and methods are specific and logically connected to your aims and anticipated outcomes.
· Accessible: The narrative is tailored for the expected audience
· Peer reviewed: Seek comments and feedback from both within and without your discipline
7. Avoid Common Pitfalls
· Don’t Write a Job Application: Focus on research, not on why you want the job.
· Don’t ignore scheme aims, criteria, guidelines and instructions: expectations and made explicit and should guide your approach.
· Broaden Your Audience: Write for both experts and non-experts; don’t assume deep field knowledge from all reviewers. Provide detail for the expert and plain language, explanatory summaries for the non-expert reviewer.
· DECRA is Not a PhD Extension: Propose something significantly bigger and more ambitious than your doctoral work.
· Check Basics: Ensure correct spelling and grammar and a reasonable, justified budget.
· Avoid Cut-and-Paste: Don’t recycle text from articles; your application should be tailored, flowing and coherent.
· Genuine Inquiry: Don’t substitute advocacy, ‘good works’ or speculative interpretation for rigorous research questions and evidence-gathering.
· Own Your Project: Avoid over-reliance on interviews or “action research” unless clearly justified. You must remain responsible for the project’s design and execution.
· Focus on the future: show how your research will create change, rather than just extending what you, colleagues, your school of thought or your supervisors have done before. Past research justifies your current position but it no doubt also gave rise to new questions, to be pursued now – it points to the future.
Summary Table: Dos and Don’ts
Don’ts
Dos
Write a job application
Assume only experts will read it
Propose a DECRA as a PhD extension
Use vague or recycled text
Substitute activism or speculation for research
Over-rely on interviews/action research
Write with the Fellowship outcomes in mind
Align project with career development
Hook the reader from the first page
Pose a novel, significant research question
Detail clear, specific methods and stages
Maintain ownership of project design
Check spelling and budget
By following these guidelines, you’ll maximize your chances of producing a standout ARC Fellowship application that demonstrates your research excellence, originality, and potential for impact.
