To be an easy yes, give them an easy win [Applications in Academia 101, A Survival Guide, Part 7]
In the last post on applications, we discussed the importance of not disqualifying yourself. I mentioned a few ways you could accidentally do this, but I also emphasized the value of identifying potential weaknesses in your project or application yourself early on, so that you can fix them. By addressing these weaknesses proactively, you can reduce the chances of reviewers spotting them first and using them as reasons to reject your application.
For this post, I want to explore the more positive side of this approach—how you can position yourself as an “easy win” or an “easy yes.” These are the applicants who are quickly deemed safe choices by reviewers, making them less likely to end up on the elimination list. When reviewers or funding committees are making decisions, they often look for reasons to either eliminate or approve applicants efficiently. By presenting yourself as an easy yes, you can bypass some of that scrutiny.
Of course, the level of competition plays a significant role. In extremely competitive scenarios—like an ERC grant or similarly prestigious opportunities—where there might be only one spot for 80 applications, your ability to influence the outcome is limited. In such cases, decisions are often influenced by factors that are neither logical nor fair, with a substantial element of chance at play.
However, for less hyper-competitive funding opportunities or application processes (there are many!), where there is sufficient funding to support most qualified candidates, your strategy can make a significant difference. In many committees I’ve been part of, relatively few people have to be eliminated at all (unless there are unusually high numbers of applications one year) and the applications often are so similar, that nobody gets eliminated outright. A majority of applicants receive support in some form, so your chances are good (even by mere dumb luck). Apply to more things to make use of this statistical advantage! You’re bound to get something at some point.
Keep in mind the two factors that actually determine decision outcomes
But, even in those cases, we usually need to exclude an application or two. Given what I said above about all candidates being more or less on par, getting eliminated often has more to do with application skill than actual aptitude for receiving the funding. The key to success in such cases as I’ve outlined above is ensuring you’re not easy to eliminate and framing yourself and your project as an obvious choice. While this may not be self-evident or easy per se, you may have a larger amount of control over the process than may expect. Even if decisions have felt random to you in the past (and, to be fair, they sometimes are). It’s hard to tell from an outsider’s perspective but from the insider view of the committee, it becomes obvious that certain quite mundane factors are almost always at play:
- Applications aren’t read carefully because people are pressed for time
Reviewers are often pressed for time, so they may skim rather than carefully read applications. To combat this, your application should be as clear and reader-friendly as possible. Write for a distracted reader:- Be redundant: Repeat conclusions and critical points in multiple places. Redundancy (although it may have a bad rep in other contexts) ensures reviewers see and remember the core message, even if they’re skimming.
- Have a take-home message: On that account, make sure you have an easy-to-spot core message. Of course, this is more from the world of grant proposals than applications but thinking about this will still improve your applications: What makes you unique? Who are you? Basically, this is an elevator pitch that provides a summary of what they will get if they pick you. It’s never wrong to have an elevator pitch ready, so you might as well prepare one now.
- Err on the side of over-explaining: Provide enough context to make your application understandable, even to someone unfamiliar with your topic or background. Avoid leaving anything open to interpretation. This is harder than it sounds and may take some experience to nail consistently.
- Write for a distracted reader: Use clear headings, bullet points, and short paragraphs to improve readability and ensure the main ideas stand out if you’re an experienced academic writer. (Although if you’re not, know that students often totally overuse these devices and end up with documents that look unprofessional and sloppy. If you’re unsure, keep bullet points to a minimum and really only use them in places where this provides a clear advantage.)
- Decisions are made quickly during meetings
The same time pressure applies during the decision-making process itself. Reviewers won’t spend long deliberating on individual applications. If they can find an easy win or, conversely, an easy candidate to eliminate, that’s what they will do (and that’s ultimately their job, too). Even in a perfect world where they actually care about the applicants (I definitely do!), that still may not mean that they have the time to read and re-read your application super carefully. And it doesn’t preclude them from having to make the necessary uncomfortable choices of kicking someone from the list. So, they skim and look for clear signals to either approve or eliminate candidates quickly. To navigate this:- Be an easy win: Make it obvious why you should be approved by demonstrating value, feasibility, and alignment with the funders’ priorities.
- Avoid making it easy to eliminate you: Eliminate ambiguities, inconsistencies, or anything that might make you seem risky or unclear. Don’t let your motivation or interest sound vague, as that can suggest a lack of knowledge/understanding of the field or institution or not knowing what you want. Committees will always pick the candidates who know what they want, know what’s available/offered and ask for it over someone who’s vaguely interested in everything.
- Preempt their questions: Anticipate and address any potential concerns upfront so they don’t have to work to fill in the gaps or guess what you meant. They don’t have time for this work. And if they do, they might come to wrong conclusions. Both of which isn’t in your interest.
- Get the formal criteria right: Don’t mess up the formal criteria for the application. Applications with formal mistakes are often thrown out immediately without anyone ever looking at them. When decision-makers realize the need to make a hard choice, they will often do a quick sweep of formal criteria first to see if they can kick someone out rather than having to do so for complicated intellectual reasons (which requires thoughtful consideration, lots of back and forth and remains a largely subjective process in many ways).
- Do your research if you have the time: If you get past the formal check and there still has to be an elimination based on content reasons, the fit with the application criteria is often the number one factor. Second come the personal preferences of the evaluators, so it can make sense to research who they are and cater to their interests a bit. It can make or break an application to have a supporter on the board who is particularly excited about your work.
Even in a scenario where committee members genuinely care about the applicants (and many do; I know that I definitely do), they are still operating under constraints that prevent them from giving every application the careful, detailed attention it would deserve in a perfect world. Don’t write your application with the perfect world in mind. Focus on how you can make people’s lives easy in the messy real world. (This is actually good life advice even beyond just applications.) By structuring and presenting your application to account for these limitations, you increase your likelihood of success—whether by making yourself an easy yes or avoiding being unnecessarily eliminated due to preventable mess-ups.
Giving reviewers compelling reasons to say yes without hesitation
In summary: When reviewing applications, the people handing out funding often operate in two steps:
- Quickly identifying the safest, strongest candidates—the ones who are easy to fund.
- Looking for candidates to eliminate from the remaining pool.
By positioning yourself as an easy yes, you get off the elimination list early and increase your chances of success. (Although of course, this is easier said than done.)
For example, in the committees I’ve been part of, not everyone gets funded, but most people do—as long as their applications are well-constructed and free of obvious issues. Reviewers are looking for candidates who:
- Present a clear, feasible project with obvious relevance to their goals or resources.
- Make it clear how the funding will lead to tangible, positive outcomes that reflect well on the institution or funding body.
- Demonstrate strong alignment between their goals and the opportunity being applied for.
Of course, in extremely competitive situations where 80 people are applying for a single spot, the outcome might be largely out of your control, as decisions in those cases are often not fully logical or fair. But for many applications, simply ensuring you’re not easy to eliminate and presenting yourself as a clear, low-risk win can take you a long way.
In my experience with stipends committees, the goal isn’t necessarily to identify the best candidates—those are usually obvious and immediately fall into the “definitely funded” category. And at least in the funding committess I’m in, there is hardly ever any discussion on them. Instead, the real challenge is figuring out what to do with the remaining applicants when there are more applications than funding available. In these cases, the focus often shifts to whom to eliminate. (Because somebody needs to go, even if there aren’t big leaps in the quality of individual applications. Also note how I say application quality and not applicant quality. What counts is not how good you are but how good your application is. Really strong candidates can submit weak applications and less strong candidates sometimes write really convincing applications. It’s a skill that can be learned and careful attention to your application materials goes a long way. You do have ways to influence the outcomes of applications at least in the long run.)
Rather than trying to stand out as the absolute best, a more effective strategy is to make your application harder to eliminate. Avoiding big mistakes is crucial, but even small nuances can matter when the committee is looking for reasons to disqualify someone. Massive mistakes might put you at the top of the elimination list, but smaller details can still nudge you out when the competition is tight. They will be looking for mistakes so if you know what might count as one (not always easy to tell), then take active measures to avoid them.
To improve your chances, your goal should be to make it as easy as possible for the committee to see you as an “easy win.” This means presenting a strong, clear case for why funding you benefits everyone involved. If the reviewers have to put in effort to figure out how your work aligns with their goals, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage. Instead, your application should clearly demonstrate:
- How your project or goals align with their interests or resources.
- Why your project is feasible, relevant, and timely.
- What tangible, positive outputs they can expect from funding you—something that reflects well on the institution or funding body.
It’s also helpful to show that even if small parts of your project don’t go as planned, there’s still a strong likelihood that there will be some useful outcome. Elaborating this is what we call a mitigation plan. Have one if your project contains risks (most do and even if they don’t reviewers like to hear how you thought about all the eventualities beforehand and figured out ways to avoid unexpected horror from striking). Reviewers want to feel confident that funding you is a safe and worthwhile investment. They want to see you got things under control and know your way around. You can be counted on to positively reflect back on them. Nobody likes publicly announcing to have picked someone over other applicants who turned out to be erratic or didn’t deliver.
Ultimately, making your application an “easy yes” isn’t just about avoiding being disqualified—it’s about simplifying the committee’s decision-making process. Lead them to the right conclusion: that funding you will be mutually beneficial and produce something they can feel good about supporting.
Anyway, that’s it for now. I might make a little series on writing project / grant applications in the future (based on a project management class I’m currently teaching..). Let me know if you would be interested in that!
Best,
S
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Sarah Lang (March 27, 2025). To be an easy yes, give them an easy win [Applications in Academia 101, A Survival Guide, Part 7]. Epigrammetry. Retrieved April 26, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13kwb