The Graduate School
Advice on the Preparation of Materials for Graduate School Continuing Fellowship Applications
Advice to Applicants
Statement of purpose: Reviewers will be looking for the social, practical, or theoretical significance of what you are doing as well as the expected outcomes. You should articulate these clearly. Recognize that people from outside your discipline will be reading your application. Avoid jargon that only people in your area know—if you must use specialized terminology, explain it. Write with a general audience in mind. Would the significance be clear to a newspaper reporter?
Mention how your work fits with earlier scholarship in your field. What is the theory behind your project? Be concrete and specific. If possible, clarify your statement using examples. If you had to overcome special obstacles to get to your current position, briefly explain this. It is good to include a brief statement of your future plans and goals as well.
Vita: You will want a professional-looking vita—ask for examples from people in your discipline. If you have published work, this will be a credit to you. Say something about the nature of the journal in which you published—is it a university publication, or a national one? Is it a refereed journal or a conference proceeding? Is the paper expository or does it report your own research? Are you the main author?
Advice to Faculty Serving as References
Avoid both very short, or very long letters. A page to a page and a half is usually good. Focus specifically on the applicant’s research and why the applicant is the right person to carry out this research. Try to say why the research is significant in its field and what the outcomes will be from the research. If the student is at too early a stage to have research plans, you’ll have to focus on promise—but be specific in documenting this promise.
If the applicant has published, it is a great help to the review committees for you to comment candidly on the journals or proceedings in which the work appears. For fields outside their own discipline, the reviewers generally don’t know whether one journal or one conference is better than another, and may assume that a journal or conference is of moderate or low quality unless there is evidence to the contrary. But whatever the quality of the journal or conference, publications of any type are a credit to a student.
Advice to Graduate Advisers
Nominate your most meritorious students—weaker students don’t fare well in this competition. It is often thought that students who are further along in their studies are more competitive—the reason is that they know their plans in more detail and that this means there is something concrete to grasp. But concreteness is not necessarily confined to advanced students. Students at an earlier stage can also have well-developed research plans, and they can be competitive. More advanced students are generally better known to the faculty, and this is likely to give them an edge in the letters of recommendation. Talk with your nominees about their choice of letter-writers.
Cover Letter: Write a letter that includes a discussion of all your nominees, with the comparative rankings your program has given them. Tell why your program is nominating each student, and explain why the students are ranked as they are. Specifics are of great help to the review committees in these letters—your position as graduate adviser can allow you to hit the highlights of the student’s case in an effective way, and letters from graduate advisers are taken very seriously by the award committees. You will need to include a copy of this summary letter with each student’s application.
Check the applications you submit to make sure that everything is there in the right order.