Predoctoral Fellowship Cheat Codes
I’m unabashedly stealing this concept from Michole Washington and Daniel Gonzales and the countless others who have a similar resource for applying to fellowships on their websites. Check theirs out too (squarespace won’t let me post links?? wtf? will update later… Dr. Gonzales’s site).
I won several national fellowships during my time as a PhD student, and I enjoy helping new applicants get their package together. Below is information that should be helpful for the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP) and the Ford Foundation pre-doctoral Fellowship, both of which I won in my 1st year of graduate school. Email me if you want copies of my essays (show me yours, I’ll show you mine). This information is likely applicable for the Gilliam and other similar types of fellowships for seniors, 1st, and 2nd year applicants. Might even be helpful for F series NIH grants, which I also have won.
Hopefully I’ve posted this in time for this year’s submissions! Ok here’s my (ever evolving) list, based on helping dozens of students achieve medical school, graduate school, residencies, and numerous academic fellowships.
Read the instructions and follow them!
Margin sizes, font sizes, naming conventions, file formats — they all matter and will put you immediately in the “no” pile if you violate.
Look for a rubric or other assessment criteria
You can’t get an A unless you read the syllabus! Each fellowship actually tells you their individual cheat codes. They can only assess you based on what they’ve told you. Don’t omit anything they suggest, but try not to add too much extra.
Use HEADINGS, bolding, underlining, and italics and use them strategically.
Draw the eye to important information like research outcomes (papers, posters), awards won, skills gained, and prestigious-sounding affiliations. Most of these fellowships don’t specify formats other than page numbers and margins/fonts. So go buck wild. Each reviewer is looking at dozens of these essays, so make it reliably easy to skim or speed read. In my personal statement for NSF, I had the following bolded section headers: Intro, Research Background, Teaching Experience, Leadership and Diversity in STEM, and Art / STEM Interface. And then I had an italicized heading for Future Plans at the very end. I was doing the most, I know, but imagine if each paragraph just swung wildly from topic to topic!
Organize your statements logically — have empathy for your reader!! Build a story for them to follow rather than throwing random, disjointed information at them.
Personal statement: These are pretty standard in terms of order. Be sure to have some kind of intro (most people make this their personal journey into science), then go through your research/educational background in chronological order. Each new experience is a paragraph. If you’re running out of room, group experiences based on theme, but keep chronological within the paragraph (e.g., I had multiple TA/teaching experiences, so it got its own section).
Research statement: CLEARLY state (and I’d use headings / bolding) the following components: Introduction (e.g., 500 million people have this disease / We want to design better space probes), Background/Significance (this is our problem and the status quo in the field), Hypothesis (YES, like in middle school), and at least TWO, preferably 3 “Specific Aims”. Specific aims are basically mini outlines of what you’re planning to do. I had 3 specific aims that represented 3 projects that would add up to answering my hypothesis and would also represent my entire dissertation. (For the psych/neuro geeks: the first was a behavioral task, the second was a neuroimaging task using EEG / fMRI (ha, yeah right), and the 3rd was to develop a model of my findings). Remember that for the NSF and the Ford these are PURELY speculative. You do NOT have to actually do the projects you propose. Nobody will give a sh*t. Just write a project that makes sense.
This is the best breakdown of how you should write your intro to your research statement: CMU’s Novelty Moves Information. Seriously, use it for everything, even your dissertation abstract!
Don’t overshare about your traumatic experiences.
Oversharing your trauma can be damaging to your psyche. Protect yourself by disclosing the stuff that will be compelling to a reviewer without betraying yourself. I hope that makes sense.
Sometimes sharing from an emotional point of view sounds like a pity party to reviewers, who are likely from very privileged backgrounds or are survivors themselves in this academic system. They might not have the stores of empathy you might expect, so mention your story (be proud of it! don’t belittle yourself AT ALL EVER, zero negative self talk allowed in these esasys) and quickly move on. See more in #7 below.
Show with facts, don’t tell with emotions. Instead of trying to evoke emotion from your reader, try to outline the facts of the situation. I know this is hard to hear because this is your REAL LIFE, your reality! I, Jasmine, know this and truly do appreciate your story, but I’m giving you the cheat codes that have worked for ME.. you gotta do what you feel is right for you…
Not recommended: “I was tired and exhausted from caring for my 3 siblings and working 2 jobs along with school and ended up physically ill and depressed”
Recommended: “Despite caring for 3 siblings, maintaining 2 jobs, schoolwork, and declining physical and mental health, I was able to conduct research during the following summer” or “I maintained a 3.0 GPA” or whatever it may be. It’s about putting a positive spin on objectively hard situations.
This is probably the most important advice, and the hardest to teach without doing a hands-on, deep assessment of your particular prose, because everyone has a unique writing voice. Use active voice, action verbs, and a professional voice, even for the personal essay. Instead of “The school I went to was great”, it should be “I went to a great school.” You’ll notice you’re speaking in active voice when you use fewer “to be” verbs (is, were, are). Speak in a matter-of-fact tone about your personal story, just like you would do with your research. I find it amazing how many people have really unprofessional sounding personal introduction sections and then fantastic research sections. It’s like the voice of the writer completely switched from paragraph to paragraph. Here’s how to mature your personal statement, illustrated with an example:
Not recommended: “Little did I know that all of the hard work that my parents tried to instill in me was going to waste because I was stuck in the worst school district of my state and also in the average studnet’s class surrounded by my unmotivated peers who steered me in the wrong direction.” whew. the number of times I’ve read the same style of chaos as this sentence!!
“Little did I know” is too casual.
“worst school district” wow, way to put down an entire ecosystem of people? how about pointing to why it’s a bad school (structure issues)
“stuck”, “unmotivated peers” it’s starting to sound snobby
“my parents tried to instill in me” implies that it didn’t work. Nah. it did work.
it’s also a bit of a run-on sentence. it’s very much giving “11pm tweet on burner account” or “close friends story” on insta.
Recommended: “Despite the hard work my parents instilled in me, there were overwhelming structural issues around me: I was at a low performing school where student apathy was at a high.” It’s non-judgmental to the students and school, it doesn’t implicate you in any wrongdoing, and it’s getting the point across— that you come from the rough side of town! and you still made it to grad school *nails emoji*
Your Research Statement should be easy to understand by a freshman in college. No jargon, no unexplained concepts. Literally hand it to an 18 year old and they should be able to grasp the main idea of WHY you’re doing the project and HOW you’ll be able to do it. Remember, your reviewers are not experts in your subfield; they are very intelligent people who just happen to not be knowledgable about your subject. And even if they are familiar, they are assessing your work based on the clarity of your proposal as well as the importance of the question / hypothesis.
Have the most senior student or postdoc in your group read your research statement. They will be less harsh than your PI but still critical! Obviously, your PI should also read it at some point (if you’re already in grad school).
Writing is about having empathy for your reader. Nobody knows this more than folks in marketing. Imagine you’re marketing YOURSELF. Suddenly you’ll want to remove any self-disparaging comments (“I was unfocused in junior year, which is why my grades slipped” changes to “despite struggles in my junior year, I was able to finish college strong with acceptance to grad school and a poster presentation at X conference.”). Empathy in your research statement means keeping your prose simple and logical, erring on the side of shorter sentences.
Re-read the instructions AGAIN. Seriously. It’s important.
Finally, here are some easy grammatical things that make my blood boil and that you should def know:
Use parallel structure in your lists. This example is adjectives:
Wrong: “I will develop devices that are faster, cheaper, and low rate of absorption.”
Correct: “I will develop devices that are faster, cheaper, and have a lower rate of absorption than the standard.” Even better if you make this statement in active voice :-P
And for verbs…
Wrong: “I want to inspire young minds, research new topics, and learning about the physical world” Make sure the verbs are all in the same tense!
Correct: "I want to inspire young minds, research new topics, and learn about the physical world” This mistake happens alllll the time, usually when the sentence is very long and the writer has lost track of the verbs at play bc there are too many other words. In that case, consider making 3 separate sentences? Also I prefer the oxford comma, but lots of old heads don’t. Use your discretion.
Also… if you’re gonna use a superlative for comparison (anything with “-er” or “-est”) please specify relative to what!! (see the first example again… “than the standard” is a major key.)