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PhD Admissions Essays - Coggle Diagram
PhD Admissions Essays
Paragraphs
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🎨Extracurriculars, your unique background, and commitment to diversity (optional). What will you bring from those experiences to your PhD? Why do they make you a strong candidate?
🥼Future research directions and specific labs you'd like to join. What would you like to study in those labs? Have you emailed the faculty?
🏫Why you chose the program. Be specific. Do you like their proximity to your family, inclusive culture, or curriculum structure? State why you personally chose the program so it's clear you've done your homework.
🎊Closing: thesis again, summarize why you're a qualified candidate for this program
Research experiences
🏫Name of the lab and institution. E.g. In freshman year, I studied treatments for Kerfuffle Syndrome in Dr. Advisor's lab at the University of Undergraduates.
❓Problem you were trying to solve, and why it's important. E.g. Kerfuffle Syndrome affects millions of Americans each year, but has no effective treatments.
🧪Hypothesis and approach to test it. E.g. I hypothesized that an inhibitor of the Kerfuffle Receptor (KR1) could treat this disease. I applied this inhibitor to patient iPSC-derived neurons and tested its effect on neuron morphology.
🤯Outcome, interpretation, and impact. E.g. KR1 inhibitor treatment rescued dendritic spine loss, suggesting it might be an effective treatment for Kerfuffle syndrome.
🧾Research products and your contribution: E.g. For this project, I designed and executed experiments, conducted analysis with the help of my advisor, and presented my work as a poster at Kerfuffle Symposium (see CV). I will be first author on a manuscript in preparation.
🌊Flow into the next experience: E.g. From this project, I became interested in drug development, and wanted to expand those skills by conducting research in chemistry.
Content
Passion & curiosity: what research questions excite you, how parts of your research experiences piqued your interest and made you follow up with more work 🤔
Critical thinking: how you designed experiments to answer questions, how you interpreted your results, big picture research questions 🧐
Potential to succeed in grad school: multiple research experiences across several years resulting in research products 👩🎓
Commitment to grad school: your career goal, how you've experienced years of research and still enjoy it 📅
Well-rounded: passions and skills beyond the bench, leadership positions and diversity or outreach work 🎨
Common mistakes
🥇Keep the essay focused on you. Use I statements and focus on your contributions. E.g. "Dr. Advisor was kind enough to offer me a job" vs "I then sought a research position in Dr. Advisor's lab"
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🤨Avoid jargon and acronyms. Only use them if you're going to explain them and use them several times.
🧪Only include the minimal methods required to show how you answered your question. The goal is to show how you think, not how many techniques you know.
Getting started
Read the prompt, then outline how you will answer each part of it 📑
Explain your research experiences out loud to a friend. Write down what you say; this will make your writing more natural 👩🏿🤝👩🏼
Write a thesis sentence of what points you want to get across to your reader. Use a version of this to start and end your essays. This is the "tell" part of show and tell :point_left:
Structure your essays with "show and tell". First, show them how you're qualified (e.g. with research experiences). Then, tell them what you've shown them (with a summary of the qualifications you have) :eye:
Reviewers
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🖊Underline your critical sentences: references to research products, summaries of your qualifications
✂Even if you have extra space, keep your essay focused on answering the prompt. For each sentence, ask: does this help make my case that I'm a strong candidate?
Structure
Make a good first impression: open with a hook sentence, then summarize what the essay is about (your thesis sentence) :confetti_ball:
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Tell a story: show how your research experiences shaped your research interests and PhD commitment over time 📚
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