About a year ago, I decided to go all-in on applying to AI safety fellowships, and around the end of 2025 I got into MATS. I think there's a small art to communicating your skills legibly. When I've spoken with others about how I answer application questions, they seem to appreciate my advice. I wrote a MATS 9 Retrospective which was well-received, so consider this to be similar advice, but for applying to jobs or fellowships.

Applying to AI safety fellowships or doing job applications is an adversarial process: The goal of an application process is to measure how well the candidate would do in the position they're applying for, but this process is noisy. Some candidates will (inevitably) try to overfit to the application process itself, in a way that oversells their abilities.

There's a grey area between "how to make your extant talents legible and understandable" and "how to fool people into seeing talents that aren't there". I've tried hard to withhold advice which could be used to overfit to the applications process, and to focus on advice that differentially helps people who are fit for the job but struggle to communicate this to the reviewer.

Many [...]

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Outline:

(02:03) How to apply

(02:06) Differentiate yourself from the Average Joe

(03:54) Making your skills legible

(05:37) Concrete ways to be more legible

(06:16) Put yourself in the reviewer's shoes

(07:37) The internet is more meritocratic, so use it

(10:44) Ensure that skimming your CV still leaves a good impression

(12:39) Consider how you can improve yourself

(13:38) A little love letter for typst

(14:49) Maintain an LLM-friendly version of your work experience

(17:35) Keep a text log of your questions/responses

(19:18) Applying to MATS and other AI-safety fellowships

(19:32) The AI Safety fellowship pipeline

(21:00) Different streams are more or less competitive

(21:44) Apply to multiple streams and to multiple fellowships

(23:15) The mentors (often) make the final decision

(25:09) If you're a "risky" candidate, try start with low-commitment fellowships

(27:31) Consider an 80,000 Hours advising call

(27:53) Fellowships are ~constantly accepting new applications

(28:36) Your success is roughly proportional to your effort per application

(29:28) Look through ~all the mentors' pages

(30:19) If you get through to a later interview stage, it's probably worth taking a day off of work

(31:02) Rejection feels like shit

(32:17) You should probably self-study the ARENA curriculum

(32:44) A long list of application questions

(33:17) Conclusion

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
October 2nd, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PiP4JqQFKhoqHGG2n/how-to-apply-to-ai-safety-fellowships-and-beyond

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

Resume experience section detailing MATS 9 research project.

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“How to apply to AI safety fellowships (and beyond)” by beyarkay (Boyd Kane)

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“How to apply to AI safety fellowships (and beyond)” by beyarkay (Boyd Kane)