Boston University supplemental essay

[ah233]

Boston Univ. asks for a supplemental essay after submitting the grad.school apps. Following is the prompt :

" Graduate school is a major challenge that requires one to overcome setbacks along the

way. Please describe a major, long-term endeavor you have undertaken in the past.

The endeavor that you choose to describe does not need to be related to chemistry, nor

even academics. Moreover, if you have already discussed a major endeavor in

chemistry in your personal statement, please choose a different topic for this purpose.

Address in your essay the following points:

• What was your motivation for this undertaking?

• What strategies did you devise to ensure you would make progress?

• What setbacks did you encounter along the way? Did your initial plan

change in response to these setbacks? How?

• Did you ultimately complete what you set out to do? If so, how? If not, why? "

So, I have got no idea what or how to write the essay !!!!! Any suggestion will be highly appreciated ??

btw I am a Ph.D applicant in Chemistry ...........

[process chemist]

I am facing this also w/ my Boston essay. I already wrote a strong SOP, and i don't really know why this is here. But I asked my brother who had a simular experience @ Georgia Tech. I think what they want you to do is to articulate a science experiment and results. My old company had this model called C.A.R. (Context, Actions, Results). So you should lay out the context of the experiment (why you did it), the actions you took (experiemts, and designs), and the results achieved. This is pretty much like a technical essay. When you say "why i did this work," don't say because my PI or a post doc told me, put some context to it like, "in Dr. Astion's lab were investigate the ETS pathway inhibotors, etc." For the actions just say you designed some test, don't say a post doc did developed the test and I just ran it. For results, don't just say, "we were able to synthesize the compound," say, "were sucessfully synthesized the compound ____________ with a yield of X%. This work lead to a publication/poster/communication or allowed the lab to develop expertise in X"

I wrote these things for 5 years, and they really don't teach you how to write a "technical essay" in school. Ideally it should be only one page, include maybe a couple of figures. But the biggest thing is they want to see what YOU did as part of the research team. On these sights we see so many people talking about getting pubs as an undergrad, which is diffucult to achieve; however, some of these people with these pubs were only added to the author list as a bonus. They may have just run the experiments that the post-doc or their PI designed, and really didn't contribute anything to the success or failure of the effort other than their time doing technician work. You have to highlight what YOU DID.

Did you read an iteresting paper, write a proposal, and present it to your group? Did they accept it? What test did you design, not a post doc or your PI, what did you do? What intersting piece of data did you mine to better understand the processes of the phenomina you are studying? Remember to use " I " alot rather than " we". Did you develop a model that helped the group understand the data better? Just jot down your research experience (s) and answer these types of questions and you should be fine. I am also a chemistry applicant, and these are just some questions I came up with when writing my own supplemental essay. Best of luck, and hope to see you in Boston in the fall!

[ah233]

thnks ......... that is really really helpful .... got a direction of wht path to follow !!!! ..... I was really lost on this essay for the last few days (they only mailed this essay request some 3 or 4 days earlier !!!

Hope to see u in Boston next fall !!!!!