OpenLab Student Fellowship Application

For undergraduate and graduate students pursuing bold, unusual, or disruptive work.

The OpenLab Student Fellowship supports Stanford students whose work resonates with OpenLab’s spirit: projects that are firmly grounded in academic rigor, yet don’t fit neatly into traditional academic disciplines. We support work that is disobedient (in a positive sense), highly multidisciplinary, or otherwise outside of the Overton window. OpenLab is built for researchers whose ideas defy existing silos and institutions, and who benefit from conversation with people from radically different backgrounds.

Fellows are expected to join OpenLab with a proposed project. However, the project does not need to be anything more than an idea (part of the OpenLab Student Fellowship experience may be exploring the feasibility of your project, or getting from 0-1). Students may propose projects that are likely to take one single quarter or much longer, although Student Fellowships are evaluated on a term-by-term basis. We give priority to students whose work does not appear to have a clean fit in their home department (under the assumption that students with work that matches nicely in their department are likely to be able to find a place for their work).

Fellows Receive

• Up to $1,000 in research funding per term, depending on project needs (max $2000/year; to be used for non-salary research expenses only)
• Access to the OpenLab community, spaces, and intellectual environment
• Opportunities to share work, get feedback, and connect with other researchers and builders

Who Should Apply

• We welcome applications from undergraduate and graduate students whose work aligns with OpenLab’s mission. Strong candidates are likely to be:
• Pursuing ambitious ideas that do not fit within a single discipline or department
• Working on projects that are not incentivized by the existing pathways (i.e., are not commercializable, directly challenge power structures, constitute a moonshot, etc.)
• Exploring questions, methods, or prototypes that are unconventional, disobedient, outside the Overton window, or otherwise diverge from standard academic paths
• Building things that benefit from feedback across very different fields and perspectives

Fellowship Expectations

• Spend at least 1 hour per week (in person) at OpenLab or with the larger OpenLab community
• Give a presentation at least once per quarter during the fellowship
• Actively engage with our community and contribute to a culture of rigorous, open-ended inquiry
• Make meaningful progress on their proposed project during the term
• Comply with all Stanford regulations and follow the highest ethical research standards; OpenLab does not have the resources to monitor and enforce this.

Selection Criteria

Applications will be evaluated based on:

• A commitment to an open exchange of ideas and interdisciplinary inquiry
• Originality and ambition of the proposed project
• Potential for interdisciplinary exchange and productive collision
• Feasibility of the proposed work within the term
• Likelihood that the OpenLab environment will meaningfully accelerate the project

Interested students are welcome to apply below:

Please reach out to Reuben Youngblom [ryoungbl@stanford.edu] with questions.