Around September every year the job market becomes busy. For postdocs in astronomy and astrophysics the NASA Hubble Fellowships are viewed as some of the most prestigious available. This encompasses Hubble, Sagan and Einstein fellowships. They are also arguably the most flexible as they can be taken to any US institute (with some minor restrictions on institutes having too many fellows at a given time).
I was very lucky to receive a Hubble (Sagan) fellowship in my fourth and final year of eligibility,. I say "lucky" sincerely, since only ~ 1/15 applicants are successful. A lot of stochasticity will go into any decisions, and every year there will be many more than just the ~25 chosen who would be worthy.
I have attached here two versions of my proposal: my first and my last. My first was submitted for the late 2016 call, which was several months before I defended my PhD in March 2017. My last was my fourth and final attempt before I became too old *sigh*, and was submitted in the late 2019 call.
First (Unsuccessful) Application Download Link
Fourth (Successful) Application Download Link
There has recently also been a website created housing various successful Hubble applications from previous years, which can be found HERE. The aim is to make the fellowships more accessible to a more diverse cohort of applicants, i.e. outside of "elite" Universities where it is easier to find resources from colleagues.
Obviously, for my second attempt I had a few years of postdoc under my belt so I was more experienced and had more papers published. However, I don't think that was the main improvement to my overall application. In fact, many people receive a Hubble fellowship straight out of their PhD, and the distribution is somewhat bi-modal, with peaks in the first and fourth year (Pepper et al. 2019):
I was very lucky to receive a Hubble (Sagan) fellowship in my fourth and final year of eligibility,. I say "lucky" sincerely, since only ~ 1/15 applicants are successful. A lot of stochasticity will go into any decisions, and every year there will be many more than just the ~25 chosen who would be worthy.
I have attached here two versions of my proposal: my first and my last. My first was submitted for the late 2016 call, which was several months before I defended my PhD in March 2017. My last was my fourth and final attempt before I became too old *sigh*, and was submitted in the late 2019 call.
First (Unsuccessful) Application Download Link
Fourth (Successful) Application Download Link
There has recently also been a website created housing various successful Hubble applications from previous years, which can be found HERE. The aim is to make the fellowships more accessible to a more diverse cohort of applicants, i.e. outside of "elite" Universities where it is easier to find resources from colleagues.
Obviously, for my second attempt I had a few years of postdoc under my belt so I was more experienced and had more papers published. However, I don't think that was the main improvement to my overall application. In fact, many people receive a Hubble fellowship straight out of their PhD, and the distribution is somewhat bi-modal, with peaks in the first and fourth year (Pepper et al. 2019):
I believe the biggest improvement was that whilst in both cases I was trying to find a niche type of planet (circumbinary planets), only in the latter proposal did I show that a niche topic actually has broad implications. I think this is important in convincing a broad audience of the importance of your work.