When it comes to submitting grants, what does it really mean when a reviewer says you're being "too ambitious" or not ambitious enough? Gerty-Z at Balanced Instability: Adventures on the Tenure Track is confused on this point. When she was writing her first postdoc fellowship application, her advisor warned her not to be "overly ambitious," she says, so she tried to be as conservative as possible. When the review came back telling her she was, indeed, "too ambitious," she thought she wasn't going to get funded.