Writing a personal statement: Part 1

For our REU program, we asked applicants to submit a personal statement. For the benefit of those of you who might want to apply next year, here are some tips.

Step One. Look innocuous.

"But wait," I hear the cries. "What about all those workshops and books that say they can tell you how to write a resume that stands out?" Let me refine that: Your personal statement's first task is just to get past the first round of inspection. Don't draw attention to yourself for the wrong reasons.

"Usually the first task in reviewing job applicants to reduce a large pile of resumes to a small pile--that is to begin to look for quick rejects. So avoid supplying gratuitous reasons for rejection--such as typos, spelling errors (its/it's, for example), unexplained long gaps in employment history, weird designs, statements about "my objective", no contact phone number, email addresses of the form plaigarist@wildthing.enron," wrote Edward Tufte on his forum.

Tufte mentions a personal bugbear above. Quick! Which of these are real words? Its'. It's. Its. The last two are. Now, for the bonus round, which of the last two is a possessive pronoun and which is a contraction? Seth Godin put it well here: apostrophes exist "to expose apostrophe ignorance."

For you biology students, species names are like apostrophes: they expose ignorance. Learn to format species names correctly.

Humans, for example, are Homo sapiens or H. sapiens. Not Homo Sapiens, H. Sapiens, Homo Sapiens, H. Sapiens, Homo sapiens, or H. sapiens.

Species names are always italicized. If it isn't italicized, it's wrong.

The genus name (first word in name) is capitalized, and the species name (second word in name) is not. This is important to recognize, because some word processors want to capitalize anything following a period, because a period normally signifies a new sentence, and the first word in new sentences are capitalized.

Formatting species names incorrectly screams "amateur hour" and can be a fast way to drag an application to the bottom of the pile. And not being able to write a species name correctly has been known to drive some biology instructors into dangerous berserker rages of the sort depicted.

The pool

We have slightly more applicants that I expected, which is nice. About 30. Now we have to see how quickly we can sort through them.

The (recruitment) circle is (nearly) complete

Today is the application deadline, so tomorrow I will have to take down this poster and many others. Yes, it's another riff on the "dark side" theme, playing a bit more with the idea that this is an apprenticeship.

And, say what you will about the faults in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, the design is striking. It's pretty hard to not to look at that poster when you see it in the hall printed two and a half feet wide. I've actually had a fair number of compliments and comments on the posters so far.

But back to applications. So far, I have a respectable number of incomplete applications, and a few completed ones. I am going to be very, very curious to see the final total number of applications.

And then, the tough part: choosing from those applications.

The big honkin' poster

This is the first recruitment poster I made, and it's actually the biggest. Over three feet high and five feet wide.

And let me tell you, it's really embarrassing when you make something that huge and in your face and make a mistake on it.

I don't think you'll find it on the picture at left, since I took advantage of this being the digital age and fixed the mistake before posting it on this blog. I thought about fixing the mistake on the big posters in the hall, but then I thought, "Why draw attention to it? Probably nobody will notice." Unfortunately, at least one person did. Drat.

I'm not what you're looking for

In talking to people as art of recruitment, it's interesting to hear the occasional student saying, "But I'm not..." and list some perceived fault. Not a 4.0 GPA student. Not a pre-med. Not enough experience. Not smart enough. Not tall enough. Not enough time. Not enough money. Not a Bio major (that one came in literally as I was typing this entry up).

Our biggest challenge is to get students to stop taking themselves out of the pool.

Every application is a collection of pluses and minuses. Students look at their minuses, and think they have no pluses. Or that the competition they picture in their imagination has no minuses. To any student reading: That applicant you have in your mind that you think you're competing against? Does. Not. Exist.

So you're not a perfect student. Does that mean you're not even going to try?

Seriously, you can't know what we're looking for. Often, we can barely articulate that ourselves...

Gonna be a party in Kentucky tonight

Congratulations to UTPA alumnus Matt Garcia!

Matt is defending his Ph.D. today. He's in the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at the University of Kentucky.

Matt was an Honors student in my first year here. His thesis was the first I was involved in as a committee member, because he had done work in neurobiology. Matt graduated in 2002. I ran into him at a Society for Neuroscience meeting a few years later, and he seemed to be doing well for himself.

Matt did his Honors undergraduate work elsewhere. I think it may have even been Kentucky, and it wouldn't surprise me if it was an REU program. But his story is an excellent example of what we're trying to accomplish in our REU program.

Another young turk

This poster was another riff on the Goodall poster I posted earlier, trying to remind students that a lot of significant scientific discoveries are made by people when they're young. In mathematics, it's almost cliché.

The downside of making such posters is that they can be quite depressing for the maker. As Tom Lehrer said, "It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years!"