Hello and welcome! My name is Sushrita and I am an incoming PhD student at JHU. I’ve made a comprehensive overview of my own thoughts and feelings when it came to PhD applications. I hope these are helpful for everyone, but be mindful that some may only really apply to CS PhD applicants. Ok I’ll stop stalling now.

This doc is the soldier. You are the calm, sleeping child.

Full disclosure. Some things on here are assumptions/intuitive speculations. I’m not on any adcomm, so I’m making some assumptions. Don’t quote me on it.

For every application process, I’m sure you know the following things must be submitted, and are scrutinized on various levels:

1. Your transcript
2. Your statement of purpose (SOP) or Personal statement or both
3. Your CV
4. A website. Again, more so for computing kids

Transcripts. There are several misconceptions I had surrounding the importance of these. For one, I had a 3.4 major GPA and a 3.59 undergrad GPA and was panicking. Turns out, as long as your cumulative was at least a 3.5, you’ll be ok. Another thing worth mentioning, your GPA is important sure, but you’re goal is to learn as much possible. With education being so expensive, I think it’s fine to take rigorous courses and sacrifice your GPA with the caveat that you properly learn.

Not sure who keeps makin these but it aint true buddy.

Your SoP/Personal Statement

Ah yes, the portion of my application that I probably spent the most time panicking about. I was on reddit and discord and for whatever reason, people like to believe that a weak SOP is fine, and that your list of pubs is more important. I would highly argue otherwise. Think about it like this, a PhD student is a big investment. You are essentially paying X amount of money for someone to do guided, independent research (pardon the oxymoron). So in that light, it matters both what the student has done previously, as well as their future vision.

Okay now that we’ve established the importance of a SoP, lets talk about the difference between an SoP and a Personal Statement. I remember applying to UW and being utterly confused because there was a congealment in the language. Here’s a few tricks to identify what to write about

1. The school only has an SoP: Talk about your research predominantly. This is your past work and grounds where/what you want to do in the future.
2. The school only has a Personal Statement: So this can be slightly more personal, but you should still talk about your research predominantly and your research vision. There should be personal themes though that talk about your own world view.
3. The school has both: Probably the more tricky one. You should clearly separate only talking about research in one, and the other should denote your personal world views and why it drives your research interests.

If you jump to the next section, I’ll break down what the best structure is (again, in my opinion) for an SoP. The great part is, I applied 2 cycles, so I’m well able to decompose the silly mistakes in my first cycle.

Your CV. People rarely find this one tricky. You can go on any faculty’s website and inspect their CV format and fill in a CV overleaf yourself. The thing about CV’s that I didn’t realize, is that they should show volume of involvement. So if you had multiple lab positions, it’s probably best to briefly describe the hard skills you did and link any publications. If you don’t have any publications, you should fill the gaps in more on the concrete work you completed (i.e. a more detailed CV).

Your Website. This is probably the most important one for the future. Assuming you get into a PhD, you will need a website for intern recruiting and to professionally display your work. If you are lucky and go to a conference before your PhD, people will probably google your name over seeking on LinkedIn. In those cases, you would probably want a succinct website to show your work and what research you’ve been up to. I’ll show a few examples of good websites that I’ve copied from.