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 application processes have significant flaws that lead to them being noisier than they should be (including those at companies you think should know better). I'm unsure why this is the case, I suspect the issue is that this process is recreated at ~every company, and every company thinks they're a special snowflake with special hiring requirements such as "very smart people". Put less cynically: hiring is a hard problem, people who get good at hiring often get promoted away from hiring, and there are often very few ways for feedback to flow from the applicants to the people doing the hiring.

With my disclaimers out of the way, I'll split the rest of this into some advice for making your skills legible in general and then some advice specific to AI safety fellowships.

How to apply

Differentiate yourself from the Average Joe

There will be lots of Average Joes applying alongside you, and you want to make sure you're not mistaken for an Average Joe. Put yourself in the mind of the reviewer: the vast majority of applications will be from Average Joe. The application before yours, and the application after yours, will be from Average Joe. Average Joe is great, very fun to talk to. But Average Joe is not quite cut out for ...

Edimah

Edimah