Advice

Here are some very terse tips that might help a wandering PhD applicant. Please bear in mind that I am a very new, unimportant person in this field who is simply documenting her experience in this space.

Tip 1: Deduplication is Important

Try not to duplicate information in your CV, SOP, and Application Q&As. Motivate the reasons for working on different problems, your specific contributions and how they align with what you would like to do in the Future in your Statement of Purpose. Let the CV do the enlistment of all the other things you’ve done to prepare for Graduate School. A very extreme situation to think of would be something like:

with the exception of listing out your experiences and projects (while specifying the suprisal elements: Code-Bases, Websites, Accompanying Talks and/or Blogs clearly in your CV and providing rationales in your SOP). The listed equation shouldn’t be the goal (it definitely wasn’t for mine) but it is a good safegaurd to check for unnecessary redundancy between the information in your CV and SOP.

Tip 2: Balance is What You (Might) Need

“To be Specific, or not to be Specific: that is the Gamble”
– A Very Confused Me, in November 2022

How generalizable future work directions (in your SOP) must be to maximize your outreach whilst still representing adequate clarity about your future goals is a tricky optimization problem. My goal for this was to prioritize the latter while keeping the former as an undercurrent or a theme, if you will, for every future goal I wished to work towards with my advisor. Your concluding and introductory paragraphs can further support the latter - where precision may assist the crucial routing of your application to the advisors you wish to work with.

Tip 3: “V-A-Es” are Important (All of them, not a Part):

I believe that getting a sense of how comfortable you are with your potential advisor (informally, the “Vibe”), Answers (How patient, descriptive, transparent, acknowledging they are of your questions!), Expectation and Skill Alignment (Gauged through iterative discussion on the collective interests of both, you and your advisor) in combination, helped me decide where I’d like to go for my PhD.

This might seem like a trite piece of advice, but during my interview cycle, I’d heard a lot of people weigh heavy emphasis on evaluating advising compatibility on the basis of how comfortable I felt during my interviews (Vibe-Check, eh ?): While I agree wholeheartedly with the intent of this advice, I didn’t find it very easy to practically implement it. This could be because I was a nervous wreck in a few of my interviews, or because the time-subject allowance of the interview didn’t allow enough scope for a holistic discussion, but in general, I wasn’t too confident in my ability to, in some respect, judge a book by its cover .

What I found more concrete to quantify after my interviews (I had 8 of them) were some other metrics like:

• Answers: Could I ask all of the questions I had and Were all of them answered ?
• Expectation Alignment: Do we agree on what I’d want to/be able to do within the adminstrative and intellectual bounds of our research goals and …
• Skill Alignment: Are there any fundamental differences in the skills that I bring to the table as a candidate that may not align with the Expectations of my potential advisor (For example: Could entail differences in method-preference, empirical versus theoretical method design) ?.

Answering these questions, as early as possible (through inputs from the potential advisor and other students, if needed) helped me project my short-window of interaction to a larger, modular canvas.

Tip 4: When In Doubt, Optimize for Recall

While deciding between professors, labs and schools to apply to: I generally prioritized optimizing for recall i.e., How many people at X could I learn and/or work on interesting things with ? At the simplest level, this could involve looking at more fundamental statistics like the size of the department, size of your lab, and professors who have interests that directly align with your interest. At a deeper level, this involves looking at the historical trends in affinity to collaboration (intra and inter), anecdotal experiences about the ease of collaboration and reading work beyond your direct-interest alignment professors, to gauge your interest in related, or similarly motivated problems that are being worked upon in the school. During my search, I went as far as reading about work from professors who worked on the same problem (say, Data Selection) using an entirely different class of methods (Mixed Methods HCI)!

Tip 5: Dropout is Inevitable, Believe in its Regularizing Benefits

As a PhD applicant, you might try and incorporate all the advice you gain on maximizing your chances of selection. Some misses in applying this overwhelming amount of advice is inevitable. There will also be other factors that might attenuate your applications effects for unseen reasons (Labs not hiring, Faculty Switches, etc). I faced some of these and this unintended dropout was initially hard to reconcile with. In hindsight though, it contributed greatly to the uniqueness of my application (Accidental Personalization, if you will). For instance, I read work in diverse domains that did not strictly align with my research goals nearly all through my application cycle which greatly broadened my topical horizon in the field. This greatly eased my PhD Interviewing process as I had collected significant evidence to support my choice to pursue certain questions (‘Why this field ?, Why Now ? How is this any different from X?”).

Good Luck and May the Odds be Ever in Your Favor!