Max Weber Fellowships

Candidates are reviewed by the Director of the MWP and the professors of the relevant Department/the RSCAS, and selected by the Max Weber Steering Committee according to the following three selection criteria:

Selection Criteria
Academic accomplishments and potential: Academic excellence is assessed on the basis of the candidate’s contributions (publications, PhD thesis, etc. as outlined in the CV), their plans and commitment to an academic career as outlined in their ‘Academic career statement’, and other supporting evidence (i.e. two letters of reference). Preference is given to applicants in the early stages of their post-doctoral career, who can gain most from the programme.
Research Proposal: the proposal must be clear and well structured, with well-defined and realistic goals that can be achieved within the duration of the fellowship.
Mentorship: The capacity and availability of EUI faculty, be it in the departments or the RSCAS, to provide mentorship is taken into account; however, while having common research interests may be helpful, it is not a necessity for mentorship.
Diversity: The MWP strives for geographic diversity and gender balance among its fellows.

N.B.: In order to keep the application process open and fair, the policy of the EUI is not to offer individual guidance and advice on project proposals. Prospective applicants are also requested not to contact EUI faculty members regarding potential mentorship. When searching for potential mentors, applicants are requested to consult the departmental web pages where research themes and faculty profiles are listed, and to indicate who they regard as potential mentors on the appropriate space in the application form.

Final approval is made by the Executive Committee of the EUI. Their decision is final and no appeal is possible. The Academic Service will inform all candidates by e-mail by the end of January at latest.

Selection Procedure

All the applications are first reviewed by the Professors that applicants have themselves indicated as prospective mentors. We take mentoring very seriously and a fit with a mentor is one of our criteria. We rarely allocate more than one Fellow to any given mentor. All Professors make a number of nominations to the department, which they discuss collectively, selecting a pool of candidates that is normally 3-4 times the number we eventually choose whose research proposal and academic career plans they regard as both indicating potential and a fit with the resources available in the Institute, including getting the most out of the sort of programme we offer.

Along with one of the programme administrators, the Director then discusses this pool of candidates with the department’s representative on the steering committee, benchmarking their selection against a number of candidates who have not been selected and those chosen by other departments. We also look at the synergies between the potential Fellows as a whole, given that this is a multidisciplinary programme. Together we agree on a short list and a reserve list from among this pool, occasionally adding one or two other names that the Director may propose as having profiles that complement those in other departments. These lists are then discussed by the steering committee as a whole, taking into account the various data we have regarding the origins and gender of applicants to seek to guard against national and gender biases.

We can usually select around 4% of those who apply in any given year (for the 2021-22 call for applications it was 4.15% of the total number of applicants for a place: 47 out of 1133, as 12 continue for a second year). We choose on average an equal number for the reserve list, so that means 8% make the final list of potential candidates. Inevitably that means that many of those who are not on either the short list or the reserve list are as good as those who are. However, they will tend to be less of a fit either with our capacity to mentor Fellows in a given year, or with the opportunities the programme offers – perhaps because they are too experienced, or work in areas that have no overlap with other Fellows.

N.B. As academic staff at the EUI change very regularly, given that none has a permanent position, over time a wide range of mentors with different specialities and preferences become available for candidates to work with. So a candidate who fails to make the short list in one year may well do so in the following year.