Hopefully I made someone else out there feel better about having less than ideal grades! I've also provided my CV if you'd like to take a look and if you'd like to use and reformat it for your own use, you can download it as a Word document here. I used some Google Fonts for the extra polished look; I'm quite partial to Open Sans but Lato or Roboto are also good choices. I've also included a sample personal statement that you are free to download here. Reading it again, it hurts to look at but hopefully it's of use to someone 😬 Here now I'll just jot down some thoughts on each. Succinctly, it is composed of (in what I believe is the order of importance):

1. Three letters of recommendation
2. Transcripts from all schools attended
3. CV (not the same as a resume)
4. A one to two page personal statement
5. GRE Scores (non-subject)
6. Possibly a diversity or research statement (but I won't comment since I never wrote one)

Letters of Recommendation

I didn't believe this at first but this is the most important part of your application. Why? I've seen applicants with pretty mediocre grades and research experiences get "this person walks on water" type letters of recommendation from BSD's (an acronym for big names in the field) who were HHMI Investigators or NAS Members and it opened every door for them. This is the only part of the application that I've seen that can mitigate any other deficiencies in any other part of your application; you can even ask your professor to specifically address these certain parts of your application if need be. Typically schools will ask for three letters but you can sometimes submit more; I sort of got around that by actually having two scientists I worked with submit a joint letter. You'll want to ask your professors three months in advance and regularly check-up on them and you'll want as many as possible who've supervised you in a research capacity. I had my manager, a former PI, and two scientists I've worked with submit letters.

Protip 1: Waive your rights to view your letter!. There is a box to check on every application whether or not you are waiving your right to view the letter of recommendation; always always waive it. The admissions committee can see whether or not you've waived your rights and want to know that your professor is making an honest assessment of your abilities as a scientist without worrying what you might think. There's always a few students who don't know about this and absolute freak out on Reddit or GradCafe about it but there's not much they can do other than email the committee saying they'd actually like to waive their rights.

Protip 2: PI's like letters from their friends: There I said it! Committee's look very favorably upon letters from other scientists who are friends and/or collaborators or else are from people whose work they respect. It can be claimed that this is a mechanism of insularity and it can also be claimed that it is a good way to know how much to trust an LoR; I think both are true. I get the feeling that there are tons of great letters submitted to committees every year and only the recognized names are not "chaff". I've been told this by multiple PI's who served on admissions committees.

Transcripts

My undergrad transcript was pretty shitty to be honest. I thought (wrongly) that getting into grad schools was more about having difficult classes than high grades but by my senior year I realized I had royally screwed myself over; I took two of the most difficult majors at my university and didn't have the study skills to manage taking 20 credit-hour semesters. In addition I was (after graduating) diagnosed with Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder which had detracted from my ability to study (ironically as I write this at 3:00 a.m.). I did pretty poorly in core classes for both of my majors which I knew was going to count me out and so I made the expensive decision to also try to pursue a master's in Applied Math which I did decently well in and had a 3.7 GPA after applying. In my opinion, you'll want at least around a 3.5 GPA to avoid the "danger zone" and make sure most of your core classes are A's with no C's. Most of the applicants I interviewed with later seemed to have grades above this from what little I could infer. Looking back, I would have picked just the math major and double-minored and chosen classes that gave the appearance of difficulty but perhaps had an easy teacher. I also would've been more upfront with having a diagnosed condition in my SoP; I had (and still have) trouble acknowledging its existence because it's largely unrecognized in the public.

Now I listed this as the second most important part of the application (to which I think many will disagree) but your GPA is probably the biggest filter metric that committees might use to disqualify you. For those with above a 3.5 GPA, they probably don't gain a ton having grades higher than that and so the results are diminishing. For those (like me) who have below around a 3.2 GPA, this is a big red-flag and will raise serious misgivings within the committee as to your ability to conduct graduate work even if you have high grades in a master's degree. This might be me obliging in post hoc ergo propter hoc but given how I did, I believe that my undergrad grades got me filtered out from many institutions regardless of my master's. One point I'll bring up again later but I very seriously underestimated how competitive neuroscience Ph.D. programs are and of the schools I either interviewed at or had chatted with, it seems pretty typical that some get around 500 applicants for class sizes just north of ten individuals. Assuming that they get half of their students accepting offers, that's an acceptance rate of below 5% 😱!!! I also seriously underestimated the utility of having the right connections. More on this later.

CV (Curriculum Vitae)

This document is not a resume, it is a scientific document meant to showcase your experiences and training. The jury is still out but personally I don't think that jobs should be listed that are irrelevant to your research like how you were a Subway Sandwich artist during the summers. Sure you probably learned a lot about working with difficult people but space is limited to two-pages; surely there's more research-oriented experiences you could include right?

This section I'd probably tie with the Personal Statement as being the third most important part of your application because it really showcases your experiences and how that defines your "fit".

My CV has an unusually large number of publications but please don't think this is what you need before applying. In fact, I know of three individuals that got into every school (Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, etc) they applied to and none of them had any accepted publications. I truly don't believe that publications are a necessary part of getting into a good graduate school despite what people think because it's so random as to whether or not your name gets on a paper or not. I will say though that having an accepted first authorship is a big deal and this I was told by a professor top R1 to be what their committee sees as one of the ways to stand-out at even top schools. You might think that having an accepted first-authorship is an insane notion but remember that not everyone is a traditional student: some are coming from master's degrees or have worked in industry; further, some have had the privilege of work in labs throughout high-school and I know of at least one person with a first-authorship out of high-school in eNeuro. I've also heard of someone that had two first-authorships in Cell before applying. I listed three of my publications as in review and two as in preparation but just know that although the former is acceptable at any career stage to have on a CV, the latter is not. It's okay when applying to grad schools but is considered a faux pas thereafter.

You can also include small details like awards including the dollar amount to give reviewers some notion of the magnitude of each and you can also list those grants you've submitted to or plan to especially the NSF-GRFP. Although award notices won't come out until after interviews, getting one can help you off of a waitlist. You should probably apply to this grant concurrent with applying to schools but you'll get another shot (and only one now whereas before it was two) as a graduate student in either your first or second year. Also, you can't apply to this should you have completed more than twelve months of graduate school so if you've gotten a master's, you're ineligible (like me). You can find a list of awarded proposals here. I also put down a short, one-sentence blurb about each of my publications and posters with my contributions to them as sometimes it can be hard for a reader to infer what role you actually played in them.

If you have the time, you may even customize each CV for each school by listing preferentially certain skills and details but for most people, they haven't done enough to fill two pages anyways so it's not like they can "pick and choose" what to list and that's fine. One other thing I've done to make my CV standout is to format it more attractively and to use color and font to make it more pleasing to read. I used two columns, a sans serif (Open Sans) font, and color for each section header to direct the reader more easily to different sections. Having a link to a Github repo with complete and well-documented projects is a good idea as is a link to a website/blog.

The Personal Statement

My favorite part of the application! This is your chance to really shine as a budding scientist and to show the committee that you're more than just a set of numbers. Please, no cute stories. There was a huge Twitter furor directed at a certain PI (who shall be unnamed) who said something along the lines of "I swear if I have to read another application starting with 'when I was 15, my father was diagnosed with . . .'." A lot of students and others were outraged that their very personal stories were so flippantly disregarded by a PI but the fact is that this type of personal statement is trite, overdone, and tells the reader nothing about who you are as a scientist. We all have our stories, and while important, this is not the place to share them! The Personal Statement I used to apply to Boston University is available here but realize that this was for a program that admits directly to a lab. Let's break down how I wrote it and what I tried to convey.

Immediately I begin with a research statement indicating my interests that is at times both general and specific:

"I am interested in elucidating the cognitive mechanisms of the cortex that help link sensation to behavior"

You want to pique the reader's interest early and how they can place you into the grand scheme of the department. Don't bury the lede. I further elaborate on this goal with a short description of anticipated methodologies and analysis techniques I'd like to employ and also a short bit about my end goal to be a professor. Please note that I was very specific here to demonstrate how closely my interests aligned with the of the PI I was trying to apply to work with.

Immediately after this, I parse my scientific path into bite-sized chunks, each lending a bit more insight into how my experiences have shaped my scientific approach and offer more detail into the roles I've played in my various research groups. You need to show and not tell! Like all forms of science communication (posters, papers, presentations, dissertations), you need to tell a story! For my particular story, always returned to a certain theme which was the idea of a "virtuous loop": experiment feeds into theory which generates new testable predictions for experiment and so forth. Each stage in my story made clear to me this idea and I show my involvement in both ends of the loop. I also include a short statement at the end of each signaling that I understood the importance of each piece of work; I understood that each contributed one small sentence to the scientific literature.

In the penultimate paragraph, I brought it back to the program and spent this time highlighting how I might fit in the lab of my desired advisor. For most programs, you'll have three (or four) rotations and thus will name the three or more PI's here that you'd like to work with along with one sentence for each about why you are interested in them. This may be used by committees such that they may give your application to the correct faculty reviewers (which you've just named) to see if they are tacitly interested. I conclude with a short self-reflective paragraph and then add a signature which I think is a nice, personal touch.

Protip 1: Make sure the professors named are taking students, will still be at the institution, or haven't passed away! It's always super opaque as to the academic musical chairs that happens continually and your ability to see what's going on really depends on the strength of your network. Once again I'm going to hammer the point that Twitter is a godsend in this regard: what's the first thing a PI will do when they get the NoA (notice of award) for their R01 (and thus are likely looking to hire more students)? Tweet out the good news. You should also email them directly but that'll be talked about in another section. Also, when a PI moves institutions, they'll probably tweet that out too. One thing that I didn't know was how often PI's move around! As far as I'm aware, there are several forces that can engender this:

• Spousal Hires: it seems to me that sometimes a spousal pair of scientists will join an institution even when only one is offered a position (the other may be a staff scientist of some sort) but this may mean that both will leave if another institution offers to hire them both as faculty. This actually happened at two institutions I applied to and I found out during the application process.
• Tenure-related issues: being fairly naive coming from a SLAC (small liberal arts college) where almost everyone made tenure, I assumed this was also the case for most R1's but this isn't remotely true; some R1's have tenure-rates below 50%, pretty scary! This means that approaching years six through eight you can see PI's possibly moving around as either they think they'll have trouble making tenure and will thus start interviewing around or either they will have just been awarded tenure and will take that around as leverage to get hired "with tenure" at some other university. It's a grim calculus to make but take a look at said untenured faculty members record of getting funding, publishing in big venues, and graduating students and compare that to their peers at the same institution.
• Sexual Harassment: Sometimes a university has come upon the knowledge that one of its faculty members is guilty of harassing other members of the department; instead of firing them outright, they will ask that faculty member to instead leave/resign. From the outside, this is hard to identify but will sometimes appear as an abrupt departure of a faculty member from one university to another (probably a much lower-ranked and less scrupulous institution). It also is the case that sometimes faculty members will move institution, in protest, of their previous institution which continues to house known sexual harassers (or they themselves were harassed). It's an unfortunate reality of Academia that this still exists but I would be remiss not to bring it up.

You can also keep track of this by looking at which professors are giving talks at your university: sometimes (but not always) these talks are the public-facing portions of interviews. I knew of a couple professors that I worked with that were giving an unusual number of talks at universities recently and that affected how I ranked certain schools (because I thought the interviewing faculty member might leave). It's also pretty easy to tell if a particular professor has passed away as well (not uncommon) if you're on Twitter. The field is very small so these sorts of events will resonate through the community quickly. I read one person's personal statement and had to inform them that they probably wouldn't be able to work with that particular professor.

Protip 2: Propose to them their next project and then they'll have to hire you! This is a piece of advice I heard in an interview with Professor Konrad Kording on MindCORE but if you provide a description of your research interests or potential projects on your personal statement, an excellent strategy is to anticipate what the PI's "next step" project would be. This is also great advice when/if you interview them! One way to do this is by reading their most recent papers (duh!) but another strategy I like is to read the public summaries of their ongoing grants. A popular way to look up grants is through NIH RePorter but I also really like the interface of Grantome. Another sly thing you can do (which I stumbled upon by accident) is to correspond with them via email and have them tell you themselves what they want to work on next; then meet them in-person and bring up the project again. Professors are busy people and they may not remember corresponding with you earlier about it. I did this once (again, by mistake!) and they were blown away. I don't condone this one I probably shouldn't have even shared it.

Protip 3: Visit the department's webpage and emphasize what they value: this is a tip from industry but every department prides themselves in some unique way according to certain values whether that's interdisciplinarity between certain departments, training in a certain regard related to a T32, or inferred through the subfields of their most recent hires. Departments will push for grad students that have training in what particular directions they are trying to move in or to continue to buttress the strengths in which they've already achieved. I have a lot of training in computational approaches for latent space inference (manifolds!) and one of the best compliments I received was in-person from a professor who said, "you're exactly the type of student we're trying to recruit!" Awkward then that I didn't get an interview there 😓.

Protip 4: Find out where postdocs are getting hired and possibly name them as options: It can be pretty hard to tell but you should also consider adding new faculty to the list of professors you're interested in. You know almost certainly they are looking to attract students and also committees are inclined to help out their new members by admitting students whose interests align. I had some of the most engaging conversations with these new faculty when I reached out over email and they seemed to be all enthusiastic and appreciative that I knew they had just gotten hired. One faculty member I chatted with helped single-handidly get me an interview for a program and also admitted because we connected so well (and he wanted a new student of course). But do beware the risks of working with new faculty: you can't know a priori how they will be as a PI and your careers in Academia will be inextricably entwined.

GRE

Okay well first of all, it seems that no one really cares anymore about this and yet I had to spend hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours studying for this I'm not bitter at all 😡. I even studied for the now defunct Biochem GRE at one point! So in the last year or so, it seems like almost half of all schools have dropped the GRE as a requirement largely because it hasn't been seen to correlate strongly with performance in graduate school and also because it poses a not insignificant barrier financially speaking: several hundred dollars for materials, several hundred to take the test, and several hundred to send your scores out. Also, it seems that some students are only applying to schools that don't require it and thus there's even more pressure on other schools to drop it lest they lose out on a significant fraction of the graduate students applying that year. You can find a comprehensive list for the biosciences here but realize that it changes daily (Princeton Neuro just dropped theirs last w'eek). Anyways, I tried to do as well on this as possible to mitigate my grades and I thought I did an okay job but was very disappointed with my Quant section score as it's the most important for the sciences. Really not much more to say here other than that if you want to take it, I recommend Magoosh and following one of their guides (I did the Advanced 6-month). You can buy subscriptions off students as well for cheap(er) off of the GRE subreddit. Really just aim for above an 80th percentile in all sections and above the 90th for quantitative if you want to do computational work but no huge biggie if you are somewhat below that. I've literally never seen a PI (on Twitter) say they care about the GRE except as a bar to hop over.

Some Thoughts and Acknowledgements

The Ph.D. application process is definitely a grind (and don't let some neurotic pre-med tell you otherwise)! It pays to start early and it also pays to apply intelligently: go where you know you're a good fit with professors willing to take you; have some insider knowledge of each school's reputation and dynamics; and also understand how each part of the application plays a role in your evaluation. It helps to have some compatriots to apply alongside with; for many, it's the other seniors at your university but since I was out of college, it was my coworkers at the Allen Institute. Specifically I'd like to acknowledge Becca de Frates, Maggie Chvilicek, and Rob Serafin for making the initial application process quite a bit more bearable! Also to Lucy Lai, Adriana Schoenhaut, and Chris Large for their materials and review of my essays. I know that it can be hard to reach out and ask for advice or for others' material so I've made them available throughout this post but I can also send more if you email me at erickenjilee[at]gmail.com. I'd also be more than happy to review your application as best I can.