PhD Applications

I’ve retweeted some notes regarding graduate school applications.

Statement of Purpose

Notes by professors:

• What faculty members are looking for in a grad school application essay by MIT EECS faculty members.

• Graduate school statement of purpose by MIT EECS Communication Lab.

• Mentoring workshops at COLT: How to write statements of purpose by Boaz Barak and How to write statements of purpose for Ph.D. and fellowship applications by Yisong Yue.

• How to write a bad statement for a computer science Ph.D. admissions application by Andy Pavlo.

Example statements:

See cs-sop.org. It contains many SOPs shared by previous CS PhD program applicants. I also include some other statements I have found below:

• Vincent Sitzmann, Assistant Professor at MIT, Ph.D. from Stanford

• Zahid Hossain, Applied Research Scientist & Manager at Facebook Reality Labs, Ph.D. from Stanford

• Nishanth Kumar, Ph.D. Student at MIT

• Silvia Sellán, Ph.D. Student at the University of Toronto

The article by the MIT EECS Communication Lab has three annotated examples. The COLT slides contain a statement by Naama Ben David (Postdoctoral Researcher at VMWare, Ph.D. from CMU) with comments. My statement can be found here.

Pre-application Support Programs

Many schools have programs designed to support Ph.D. applicants, especially those underrepresented in the field. These programs typically pair applicants with current or recent grad students to receive feedback on application materials and gain insight into their graduate programs.

• Andrew Kuznetsov is aggregating a list of such programs here for 2022.

• For the 2021 application cycle, Jia-Bin Huang compiled a list here.

Fellowship Applications

Examples:

• Nelson Liu — NSF GRFP

• Sam Hopkin — NSF GRFP, Microsoft, Miller

• Nishanth Kumar — NSF

Faculty Applications

Examples:

• Caroline Lemieux — Research, Teaching, Diversity