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[lodore66]

Like half a million other people, I've put in for quite a few of the Oxford and Cambridge Junior Research Fellowships for 2008 and beyond.  The thing is, I've heard anecdotally (but from senior people outside Oxbridge) that these fellowships almost invariably go to internal candidates. 

Rather than waste my time, my referees' good will and a substantial acreage of forest by sending in applications for other JRFs advertised in the meantime, I wonder does anyone have any info on this? I know quite a few people who applied last year (as well as myself) but to no effect . . .

[scotia]

Why not go to the college websites and look for yourself rather than relying on apocryphal tales? I randomly selected one college and found more than one Junior Research Fellow with a PhD from a US university. It took me less than 5 minutes to do the research.......

[lodore66]

Why not go to the college websites and look for yourself rather than relying on apocryphal tales? I randomly selected one college and found more than one Junior Research Fellow with a PhD from a US university. It took me less than 5 minutes to do the research.......

Well, maybe you got lucky -- I've tried checking this out before and did again just there, but nevertheless drew a blank on either who received fellowships or where they're from.  It might well be just lack be a lack of web savvy on my part, but I'm still interested in what people think about the original question . . .

[scotia]

I looked at the staff list of the second college on the alphabetical list.

[babbinacara]

From the US PhD to UK job thread:
(aaah, I can't figure out how to quote across threads, so cut 'n pasted)
"JRFs are very, very college specific. Some colleges never look outside, others nearly always do. They do mostly go to UK PhDs, but the applications are overwhelmingly from the UK because the posts tend to be advertised in the UK only. Good quality post-doc research that can be completed within 3 years is what the cttes are looking for, and the source of your PhD *should* be second to that. Be warned that they are competitive in an odd way. Unlike a job app, where, say, you are applying for a history post and you will be in competition with other historians, with a JRF application you, as a historian, will be up against easily 300-400 applicants in "Humanities"."

As Scotia said, the easiest way to figure out which colleges might be more open is to check out their staff lists, or research pages. Modern/recent colleges may tend to be more open than are the ones established in 1280 or whenever.

[britsci]

There are hundreds of applicants per place.  I applied when I was finishing my PhD and I was told by my supervisor (a JRF 25 years ago) that they went to people who already had "a big idea", i.e., an amazing research proposal isn't enough, you have to be a superstar *already*.

In my opinion, there probably is a slight bias toward Oxbridge candidates, but unless your previous research is good enough to rank you in the top three out of 400 candidates, this will not be relevant.

[snape]

I do know of at least one non-Oxbridge person (UK PhD) who got one. One department I know about was performing quite badly (by the standards you would expect at Oxbridge). They started hiring a lot more people from outside.

[amaranthia]

They're not rigged, but like any job search there are likelier candidates than others. I didn't get one (though applied a couple of times); I got a lectureship in the department instead (and now sit on JRF committees in my college), which was lucky for me, but I was told that my CV made me a more obvious candidate for a teaching job rather than a JRF (oddly enough) as my CV was balanced between teaching, admin and research rather than being research-only. JRFs demand a particular kind of candidate and application -- like others on this thread have said, it isn't only about looking like the best candidate in your field, but also the best candidate out of ALL fields out of over 300/400 applicants. You have to look like you're already producing major, discipline-changing research right now, as opposed to you might do so in the future (one reason why it's harder to get one, proportionately, in some oversubscribed fields like literature than in smaller fields like Classics or philosophy); you can't have done too much teaching (or look like you might spend the JRF doing a lot of teaching) as they want research-bunnies only; you need stellar references from major professors, hopefully ones that people within the college know so they feel they can depend on the referees being completely sincere. It's also a lot rarer than it was to get one without the PhD in hand already.

The first key thing to remember is that JRF committees usually go through two ranking stages (though all colleges do things very slightly differently and not all may follow this exact pattern). Usually in the first stage, those on the committee in your field (history, say) rank all the history candidates in order. Then the top one or two is put through to the mixed-discipline shortlist. In the second stage work is sent to readers, usually specialists within the university, and then readers' reports are used to rank the shortlisted candidates overall. Most colleges have one or two posts, usually one in arts/humanities and one in sciences. So usually, you first have to be ranked top of all the candidates applying in your field, then ranked the top one or two of a mixed-discipline shortlist, to get a post. Some colleges have an interview as the final stage, where you're asked questions not just by subject specialists but also by people who are not in your field at all (you might be a theologian but you may get asked a question by a physicist, say).

So your work has to not only be appealing to those in your field, but it ALSO has to be appealing and interesting to the academic layperson. If your work is very important in your field but also very involved in particular specific disciplinary controversies or theories, or very niche, then it can fall at this hurdle (if you're doing great original work in Kleinian interpretations of seventeenth century sermons and a prof of materials science on the committee finds it incomprehensible or unrigorous or even just boring, say, then you're out -- an extreme example, but not that far from the truth). Of course, a few JRFs are subject-specific, which helps a bit with this, as you're more likely to be read and judged by those in your field only, and the field will be smaller. But in the main, basically, you have to come top out of 300-400 people. Which is not great odds! :)

It's also perfectly possible to get shortlisted for every one and be utterly brilliant but still never get one. Each college committee is quite random (and the committees change every year) so it's also quite a matter of luck. One year there might be someone on the committee of a particular college in your field or specialism; the next year there might not be. And at the shortlisting stage a lot is determined by subject politics, and the relative seniority of the people on the committee. If you're applying in philosophy and you're the new Wittgenstein, but the philosophy person on the committee is relatively junior, and the senior prof on the committee is in History, then senior prof ends up getting the history candidate he wants instead, etc. etc......isn't that the way of every job search, though?

[lodore66]

Many thanks, amaranthia, for the comprehensive post which deals with a number of queries and issues that I'm guessing many more people than just me have been wondering about.  The main problem I've had with the JRF competitions has been the information vacuum that sometimes attends them.  Fair enough, the selection criteria are published, but they're usually very vague and correspondingly difficult to interpret.  I know that this is to give the search committee room for maneouver, but from the applicant's end it can be quite frustrating, as one is never sure whether to go for a broad (but risky) topic that will draw in a wide audience, or to pitch a well-honed idea that is likely to produce a definite result but which at the same time excludes a lot of reviewers. Also, the lack of conrete info leads to the apocryphal stories about things being 'rigged' that prompted my post in the first place. 

At a purely personal level, I would like to know what you (and your colleagues) mean when you mention "discipline changing research."  Would this be four or five articles in good journals in a year out of the PhD?  A well-reviewed book?  Or something altogether more Olympian that I can't imagine? ;-)

In any event, thanks again for information!

[amaranthia]

Hi lodore66 -- if anything, to already have a well-reviewed book or loads of articles might make a candidate look like they should be applying for lectureships rather than research fellowships, which are meant to be very early-career posts for people who are brilliant but haven't necessarily published that much (though a few publications don't hurt) but in general there's no one thing that would make a candidate a definite shoo-in. Though I guess "discipline-changing research" basically means references from really major people in your field saying "this person is the best person I have ever taught/advised/read the work of/they are already producing research that means they are already a major scholar in the field". Difficult to achieve just straight out a a PhD, I agree (!) and I think it's actually harder to get a JRF than to get a mongraph published by a good press, to be honest. It also tends to favour candidates in particular disciplines -- say, for example, in some sciences, or philosophers and mathematicians, where the most brilliant people do all their best work under the age of 30/35 (it's pretty damn hard for a junior literature scholar or historian to be discipline changing that early in their career, as their fields don't tend to work that way!)
Sadly, though, there do actually seem to be enough candidates on the shortlists who DO seem to have the regius professor of whatever writing "this person is a genius" in their references to make it a genuine criterion!! On the other hand, though, sometimes people who do something interesting well, and are quite solid but not particularly brilliant, do occasionally get them.....so it's still quite random, I think.
I would agree that a lot of candidates do get them who are already at Ox or Cam, probably because they are more likely to have supervisors/advisors within the system who know how to advise their candidates to "package" themselves for a JRF, or have introduced them to important referees, and so on.

[bacardiandlime]

One additional point that hasn't been mentioned, most (although not ALL) JRFs specify that the candidate must have a degree from the UK.
Yes, this tends to favour Oxbridge candidates, although people from elsewhere in the UK (UCL, Bristol, Edinburgh for instance) are sometimes successful. The JRFs with American (typically Ivy League) PhDs, it tends to turn out were Oxbridge undergrads. This is not necessarily due to prejudice on the part of the committees, more that many JRFs are not advertised further than the Gazette and the Reporter.
I've received a lot of conflicting info on JRF selection criteria, and I would say they are not 'rigged' per se. I would also like to dispute the 'internal candidate advantage' - as with the other urban myth that having been MCR president leads to success in the college JRF competition: I have never seen it happen, in fact almost the reverse. A quick glance around the JRFs at Oxford and Cambridge tends to show that they have been students at different colleges from the one that gave them the JRF.
One thing that does seem to be clear is that colleges, even if the competition is ostensibly for 'humanities' in general, often have a favoured subject in mind. Maybe they've decided that since they took a historian last year, and a classicist the previous year, this year they want a philosopher.... well, if you're in music or law you might not get it no matter how good you are.