Posted on behalf of Materials Girl

Now that the small flurry of blogging on the ACS meeting has subsided, posting resumes!

Applications for schools/scholarships inevitably want you to discuss how participation in their programs would be beneficial to you, what makes you qualified, etc, etc… Sometimes I really wish they would be more specific and not ask vague, broad questions. For me, the answer can easily be summarized by one word: experience. Unfortunately, no matter how universally true the response, its length is by no means sufficient to create a proper statement.

It seems that all essays in the genre boil down to an inherently dry rehashing of past experience, present thoughts, and future plans. There seem to be few techniques to make the reading of personal statements interesting or even enjoyable*, aside from mentioning specific science, notably work you have done, to attract – hopefully – the interest of admissions staff. Another method would be to take a lighter tone and throw in some humor – however, that may well be unfavorable, considering that scientists should maintain a professional tone. (Or is that just my inexperience speaking?).

Anyone can read a [good] resume** and decipher a decent amount of a person’s abilities – why restate details in an essay and bore the readers? To those who are writing and have written a multitude of applications, what non-academic features did you include to single yourself out? To those reading the essays, what has made applicants stand out past their intellectual accomplishments?

P.S. – When a program claims to be “highly competitive”, what type of quantitative data can generally be assumed to support that statement?

*This is without considering college/undergraduate application essays, which run the gamut from horrendously employed grammar and monotone statements of extracurriculars, to whimsical stories of adventures and unique lessons learned. (Many moons ago, one of mine began with one time I caught an especially large and disgusting cockroach in a library’s restroom. But, for all I know, that one could’ve been the weakest of my essays).

**Therein lies the issue of how to write a succinct, informative resume…

I would say no. Grant proposals are a precious commodity, especially in this day and age of reduced funding and evaporating money. However, in a recent Nature correspondence, Dr. Noam Harel describes his vision for a centralized grant repository, ideally open to the public, where researchers could place their best ideas, allowing various funding agencies to discover the plans most-suited to their respective agendas. Dr. Harel likens this potential web manifestation to something like eBay, Facebook or Google, but for scientists and funding agencies. A more apt analogy might be Monster.com, with both sides searching for their ideal match, and a long-term relationship (perhaps I am now making it sound more like eHarmony.com…).

When it comes to the integration of scientific communication and technology, I am extremely optimistic, and although I don’t reject Dr. Harel’s idea entirely, I just don’t see it taking off in its presently-proposed form.

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