In the earlier post, I have gone through the hard components of the application. By “hard”, I meant the things that you have little or no control over, because they are in the past, and they are hard measures of your capability to conduct a PhD. If you don’t have such a flashy record, it is a good idea to focus on these soft components which are a much more vivid and multi-dimensional representation of who you are, where you are now, and where you want to go in the future.
Now I think this is a good place for me to discuss the reasons why I wrote this series of posts and what I want to convey to my readers. I have seen countless of posts on Facebook where people anonymously asked the public to assess their own credentials to see whether they can be admitted to a PhD programme of a top university. I’ve seen people stuck and upset when they were blackmailed by their supervisors and bosses into submissive positions, because they were afraid they would not get a good letter of recommendation when they applied for PhD studies and jobs. I’ve seen young talented people scared to apply for a PhD because their GPA was short of 3.6/4.0 or they did not have 10 publications before grad school. And I wanted my story to be a real life example of what you can do when you believe in yourself and focus on yourself instead of letting anxiety and toxic peer pressure dictate how you feel or what you do.
I am also not a naive hyper positive person who showers oneself in forced “positive vibes” and sticks self-help feel-good slogans all over my desk either. I believe self-confidence and focus is a good place you want to start with, but moving forward takes disciplines, strategies, and a healthy dose of frequent and honest self-criticism.
Therefore, I want you to read my story and reflect on yourself at the same time. Do not copy what I did, and absolutely do not listen to anyone else about what you should or shouldn’t do in order to achieve your goals. Be informed, do your own research, make your own judgements, and be responsible for your own decisions, because getting a PhD is all about becoming an independent thinker.
In the last post, I did mention the soft components would include a personal statement, two references, and a research proposal. In today’s post, however, I will solely focus on the former two documents that help to paint a portrait of yourself. The research proposal, I’d argue, while being the single most important part of your application, is not all about yourself, and thus deserves dedicated posts of its own.
The word limits for two types of document are as follows.
- Personal statement: Approximately 500 words.
- References: Each letter of recommendation should not exceed 1 letter headed page, which should be around 300-500 words.
Now that is not a lot of words you are allowed to write. You want to be ticking all the necessary boxes within the limited space that you are given, so the key here is to be strategic. In my case, I had less than two months to prepare everything from scratch, so being strategic is critical to help me manage the stress of time. I will recount the three stages of my systematic decision-making, which I think have worked well for me.
Step 1: Gathering information
In the span of two months, I took every chance to read and watch everything that I could about PhD programmes in the UK: vacancy advertisements, research being conducted in institutions across the UK, profiles of professors in my field, discussions of job prospects for PhD holders, reviews and sharing from alumni. The goal was twofold: First, to find out exactly what universities are looking for in a prospective doctoral researcher; and Second, to find out roughly what I could do and would do with my PhD qualification after graduation.
To achieve the first goal, I tried to find out the most common patterns, trends, and break them down into categories: hard skills, soft skills, research interests, research topics, personal and professional connections, even cultural backgrounds. The purpose was to find a fit between what they want and what I have to offer, which I will elaborate in the next step.
With the second goal, understanding what opportunities a PhD can open up for me helped strengthen my motivation, and find a fit between a PhD programme and my long term career goals. A PhD cannot be a random decision, it should be a continuation of a personal and professional development plan that evolves with you. While it is important to know, “What will I do with a PhD degree?”; it is equally critical to articulate an answer to the question, “Why can’t I do it without a PhD degree?” I believe the better your answer, the clearer you can portrait yourself in your application.
In my case, 2 months before the first application was sent off, the idea of pursuing a PhD never entered my mind. I was lost and did not have any career path in sight. I was earning money with my freelance jobs, but the work did not spark any fire in me and the value that I was creating was marginal. Preparing for my PhD application had given me an opportunity to do some soul searching and reflect on what I wanted to do with my life. I realised that I cared deeply about fashion and sustainability. I wanted to do something that intellectually challenges me everyday. I wanted to create something of my own that could have a real impact in the world. I also worshipped freedom. There are different routes that could get me there, and having a PhD is just only of them. But it made sense for me to come back to the UK where my inspiration was conceived, work alongside professors whose work I have been familiar with, and then to find a place where my interests and skills are valued. Getting a PhD that leads to a career in academia connects all those dots.
I was also aware that what I said I wanted to do back then might not eventually turn out to be what I actually want to do after graduation. People and situations do change, and as one gets into her PhD she might have different perspectives about her career. I’m confident that even if I had said that I was still considering my career options, it would not have had a detrimental effect on my application as long as I knew what those options were and demonstrated such critical considerations. The goal is to be informed, not ignorant.
Step 2: Self appraisal
After Step 1, I have already had a rough idea of the criteria that are sought for in a doctoral researcher. Step 2 was to reflect on how well I could fit into such expectations, as well as what my biggest strengths and weaknesses were. Everyone has their own advantages and disadvantages, and I believe the sensible thing is to be open and critical about one’s assessment of herself and be willing to show that to the admissions board. As I progress in my PhD now and start to engage more in professional training and teaching activities, I also see an emphasis in ALL training materials regarding a quality needed in a doctoral researcher, and that is you have to be teachable. If you are arrogant, you are not teachable. If you are ignorant of your imperfection, you are not teachable. If you are not honest, you are not teachable. So please be sincere when you assess and present yourself, and please please stay away from clichés like “My weakness is I work too hard,” or “I need to improve my communication skills,” without making any connections with your unique personality and the requirements of a PhD. They’re just blank words.
In my case, my biggest disadvantage is the fact that I have never conducted a proper research during my entire education, so I didn’t have the faintest idea of how a research process would look like in real life. The second biggest advantage was the lack of a clear career path—I never lasted more than 4 months in any job, and frankly at that time it was one of my biggest self-doubts.
After some serious self-criticism comes self-confidence: I acknowledged that I am flawed, but it will not get in the way of my self development. In areas that I was lacking in skills (i.e., academic skills), the keyword here is transferrable skills. These are skills that I might have acquired from somewhere else (e.g., in schools, through a job or a project) but can be transferred and applied in PhD studies. Okay so I have not conducted a real research, but I am a published technical writer and expert translator, which is a testament to my potential to write a robust scientific paper. I also pride myself in the ability to learn and excel in virtually anything—from maths, chemistry, and physics, to literature, linguistics, and history—as long as I put in the efforts, which was shown in my academic endeavours. Furthermore, all the years of juggling freelance projects have helped me develop my own way of manage time that allows me to lead a slightly unconventional yet balanced and productive life, which is necessary for a successful completion of a lengthy and unstructured programme like the PhD.
In other weakness areas, it helped to look at trade-offs. So I might have issues with settling down, being through so many positions in different companies and different fields gave me perspectives. It’s always helpful to try many things to realise what I didn’t like, especially when I was fresh out of uni, so that when I decided to pursue something, it would be something meaningful and worthwhile.
Once Step 2 was completed, I already had the skeleton for my Personal Statement and the only thing left is to give it flesh. By now you have already known that my mantra is to be authentic. The reason for my authenticity approach is because I know my “audience” is so much smarter than me that any deceptive tactics would be uncovered with just a glance. Furthermore, because I knew a PhD is a long learning journey and the application is just a start, if I had to fake myself to be admitted, it would be to the detriment of my own development. I’d rather tell my future supervisors now that, “Look, I have these weaknesses, can you help me?” If they can, good. If they can’t, I’ll go find someone else that can. If I am not honest with them and with myself, then it will only be a waste of time for the both of us.
Step 3: Putting it together
It is never a good idea, in my opinion, to treat one’s application as a series of separate documents. The references should work in conjunction with the personal statement. The key is to have cohesion and corroboration, so I invested a decent amount of time into my two references.
References, if done right, present an opportunity to put an emphasis on what has been said in the personal statement. Nothing says authenticity more than a third impartial person saying nice things about ourselves. Therefore, it goes without saying that I wanted to have references from people that I trust, and at the same time, have a nice title that will ensure their credibility and impartiality. But unless you’re really lucky, compromises usually have to be made. The good thing is, because two references were needed, I could arrange for some trade-offs.
In my case, I knew the academic reference would pose more of a challenge for me: I had left uni for years, I did not stand out that much in class, and I did not put an effort into forging a professional nor personal relationship with my professors after graduation. I expected more refusals than acceptances. Therefore, while I sent out several requests to quite a few professors just to try out my luck, I put more efforts into only two people: one taught me an important module that shaped the direction of my PhD research, and the other supervised my internship project. The later refused to my disappointment, and the former gave me the warmest of support I could imagine from a world renowned professor that did not even know me personally. He wrote me a really nice letter of recommendation during Christmas and New Year holidays, and supported me throughout my applications to 17 different universities in 4 months. His name on my application definitely gave it a strong boost.
Because I knew how important it was to get a reference from him, the request email was very carefully crafted. The outline of the email is as follows.
- Greetings and introduction: Who I am? How did I know him?
- Impact statement: What impact did he have on me back then and now?
- Expression of intent: How did that impact lead to where I am today? What do I want from him now?
- Rationale: Why should he help me? Why him and not anyone else?
- Validation and further information: Attach necessary documents/records to validate what I said (i.e., CV, transcripts).
- When and how: When is he expected to give me the letter? How shall he do it?
- Thanks and regards.
Now that I had a big name on my application, I turned to the remaining reference to see what I could do with it. Obviously, I would want the second reference to be from someone that was close to me so that it could be a lot more detailed and personal. It is important, however, to understand my referees were putting their reputation at stake when they give me a letter of recommendation, so I couldn’t sway them from saying the truth. It is unethical to influence the impartiality of the referees. However, what I could do was to direct the focus on the areas that I wanted to highlight.
Particularly, since my first letter was quite a general one and could only say a few things about my research interests and academic performance, the second letter should be covering my transferrable skills and personality. I decided that the best person to do that would be the Editor in Chief/Director of the publishing company that I have worked for and collaborated with for years. Because we have a very close working relationship and share similar educational background, she was able to articulate a thoughtful and unique letter of recommendation from a perspective very different from mine, yet corroborated wonderfully with my own understanding of myself.
Even though I am able now to eloquently describe and explain the systematic approach that I took when preparing my application, not everything was straightforward at the moment. Yet the only thing that has always been crystal clear to me was that I wanted my application to be as authentic as possible. Some would say fake it till you make it, but a PhD is a tough and lonely journey, and certainly not everyone can make it. Imposter syndrome is real. Just be who you are and you will get to the right place. 🙂
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