Learning to write.
I am a 5th year PhD candidate in Operations Research and Financial Engineering (ORFE) at Princeton, and I am set to defend my thesis in September 2025. For this blog, I want to talk a bit about the application essay, how Amit helped me vastly improve my essays, and some of the takeaways that I find relevant even now. For context, all PhD programs have a single essay requirement, and they all roughly have the following prompt:
‘Why do you want to pursue a PhD at X department at Y school? Discuss your past experiences that have prepared you for graduate studies, your current and future research interests, and your future career plans after the PhD.’
I found this prompt extremely refreshing and direct, especially in contrast to “personal” undergrad essay prompts. Also, the past experiences, future interests, and career plans are mostly independent of the school so that part of the essay only has to be written once. However, this can be a double edged sword since focusing on just one universal essay prompt means it has to be extremely polished. My first draft had the following first sentence:
‘I was enthralled by how mathematical concepts can be readily applied to solve computer science problems in an introductory algorithms class during my freshman spring semester.’
Yes, this was actually my introductory sentence. I imagine it elicits one of two likely responses:
- ‘What on earth is he trying to say?’
- ‘There’s no way he actually kept this sentence.’
I’ll save you the trouble and tell you upfront that this sentence did not survive the editing process very long once I passed it over to Amit. I remember when we first hopped on a call to discuss the essay, he asked me upfront: ‘What is the point of this sentence?’ I was just silent because I just could not answer it. Looking back, the issue was I believed that good writing had to include flowery language in an attempt to sound almost mythical? Rather than just being direct and answering the question.
After all of the beginning nonsense in the draft, I did discuss my past undergraduate research experiences and goals for the PhD. Amit also noticed this and told me to scrap it and instead create a new outline with two guiding principles:
- Say what you need to say.
- No thesaurus words.
With just those nine words, things felt so much clearer. Writing truly did not need to be as complicated as I was making it out to be. Contrast the first draft’s introductory sentence with the final draft’s:
‘My objective is to enter into the Ph.D. program in Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton starting in the Fall of 2020.’
See how much better this is? With just this one sentence, I have started by answering the question. To the second point, I removed the word ‘enthralled’ and the sentence reads much clearer. This was also because of another great point that Amit brought up: people are reading these essays. A great exercise he suggested to help with this was to read sentences out loud. If it sounds like something that a human would not say or is unnatural, then change it.
The great thing about these lessons is that they are universal. I have written multiple papers during my PhD and, even in an academic context, these two rules apply. Academic writing can be annoyingly wordy, but it helps me to keep these two principles in mind. They will certainly be useful as I finish writing my Thesis and defend it in September.
– Vinit