"I love bacteria."

Several of my oldest friends are writing application essays right now. One is writing his research statement for tenure-track positions, one is applying to PhD programs, and one is applying to become a New York City teaching fellow. Of course, I think each of my friends will be great at the position to which he is applying, and I've happily been reading and editing their essays. I've especially been enjoying seeing which of my changes each of them likes and which alterations they can't stand.

But I'm far from the only one with application essays on the brain. FSP has opened up a contest for egregious parodies of graduate school application essays. I've been poking around on the internet looking for advice on essay writing for my PhD-bound friend, and have found some interesting things:

1. There are places you can pay to edit your graduate school application essays. This shouldn't have surprised me, but it's nice, in a way, to know I'm still this naive.

2. The typical, generic and earnest advice I expected to find. However, there were some interesting sections in these, like "What if I don’t have any unique experiences or qualities?" and some that were written in more relaxed tones. One site offered free example essays as a loss-leader, I suppose, for the "pre-written," "model" papers they sell.

3. Overall, the science blogs focus on other aspects of applying to grad school (being very very careful when selecting an advisor, etc), though FSP gives some excellent practical dos and don'ts of grad school application essays.

I remember that starting my graduate school application essay was very problematic. I was blocked on it for weeks. In the end I said %$*^ it, and started the essay "I love bacteria." And I went on to explain what I thought was cool, attractive, intensely important about microbiology for the rest of the first paragraph, then I wrote about my research experience, and finished with a paragraph about whom I would have liked to work with in each department. Overall, it was very conventional, but my honest and blunt introduction did have some consequences; I was identified by people at several interviews as "ohhhh, the girl who loves bacteria." But there's no such thing as bad publicity for one's application... right?

Since then, I have learned a few things about how to start writing introductions. Besides the ubiquitous and useful "start writing now, polish/cut later," I've found I often write an entirely superfluous, too-much-background paragraph that precedes a perfectly reasonable introductory paragraph in my drafts. Sometimes this superfluous paragraph is very well-written, but it doesn't really need to be there. This was pointed out by one of my oldest advisors, when I was writing my research statements last year, and I now see this problem in many things I write. If I took the time to look back, maybe even in my blog posts . But I also have been able to see this in other people's writing -- including in one of my friends' application essays. So that's my contribution to the application essay resources on the intertubes... check and see if your second paragraph actually is a decent introduction in and of itself.

Mostly, though, I'm happy to be at a stage in my life/career where I have a lot more direction and purpose to the starts of my essays (cough, grants), and no one expects me to start with "My life's purpose came to me as I was hiking though the French Alps three summers ago..." Except Female Science Professor, of course.