Structure I've learned for fellowships

Introduction (~15%)

• X is a problem that the world cares about and researchers in my field care about
  • brief explanation of why the world and your field cares

Background (~40%)

• This is why I’m qualified to fix/solve X
• Evidence:
  • Argument for the methods you’re using
  • Describing how papers you’ve written put you in a good position to solve X. Even better if you’ve already shown evidence of beginning to fix X.
• Make sure to “show” and not “say” meaning you describe what you learned and what you found via research and analytically talk about its relation to the problem

Future Plans to keep solving X (~40%)

• Outline your research plans. What project(s) do you plan to do? How will you embark on them? It’s good if you can describe what experiment’s you’ll run, what hypotheses you’ll verify, etc.
• Here it’s good to be specific in your direction but target a general CS professor audience (my guess for the IBM fellowship. My MSR mentor told me that for the MSR fellowship)