Research Statement

[bxidntdrmer]

I decided to solicit more money from the government and throw together an NDSEG application. Here's a draft of my research statement. Most of the time writing it was spent trying to reduce it to less than 3000 characters...

Comments

[krasnoludek]

two bits of advice:

1. run a spell check and proofread. "tantalizing" and "Poonen et al."

2. If this is for non-mathematicians to read, you still need to dumb it down more.

[abooth]

two bits of advice:

1. run a spell check and proofread. "tantalizing" and "Poonen et al."

Just to clarify, I don't think Paul means to put a period after "al" in your text; the period in his text is just the one closing his sentence. (And if he means what I think he means I completely agree. I just point it out because I find the US period / quote mark convention a little counter-intuitive and it took me a few seconds to work out what he meant).

2. If this is for non-mathematicians to read, you still need to dumb it down more.

Really? Are you referring to anything other than the penultimate paragraph here? I can see your point on that one, but the it would surprise me if the rest was suspect. The penultimate paragraph communicated quite well to *me* the wide range of mathematical tools Dave's using, but I recognize that it probably wouldn't do that to a non-mathematician. It's exciting prose, but maybe an explicit "I'm using a very wide range of mathematical tools, such as..." might be clearer.

[krasnoludek]

If I were an non-mathematician, I would zone out the moment there was notation, namely paragraph 4. That's far, far too early. If I had a stronger mathematical background (say an engineer or applied scientist), where I had to work with equations frequently, the notation would probably not scare me away until that penultimate paragraph, as Adam noted. However, I'd still bet that a lot of engineers or applied scientists would zone out on the mathematical content somewhere earlier.

You'd also be surprised how many (even educated) people don't know what cryptography is, so I'd off-handedly mention that it's the making and breaking of codes.

My other complaint with this is a stylistic one: more than half your sentences have the main verb as "be." If you actually break it down into clauses, it's about 50-50. However, in your opening five paragraphs, only two sentences do not rely on "be" to denote the action for one of the main clauses.

More typos: "particularl"; "this (humble) problems"

[bxidntdrmer]

Thanks for the good advice.

I already tried to dumb it down a lot; here is the prompt;

"In a concise statement, provide a summary of your educational program objectives and your long-range professional goals. As part of this statement, we are interested in your ideas about: (1) the kinds of research in which you would like to be engaged during your graduate study or in the longer term; and/or (2) specific research questions that interest you and how you became interested in them. Please discuss these research interests in sufficient detail for an expert who is technically competent in your field to judge your understanding of the questions to be addressed, relevant hypotheses and approaches one might take to answering the questions, and other research principles required to investigate in the research area you identify. Your response will be limited to 3,000 characters, including spaces.About the notation: I tried writing this without any notation and it just sounded horrible and confusing. My hope is that everybody knows what a

[easwaran]

I suppose it's probably too late for me to comment, but you probably mean (3,-2,1), not (3,2,1) - that took me a few moments to figure out. And I agree with Paul about the math stuff so early, though I would have worried more about the phrase "polynomial with integer coefficients in n-many variables" rather than the notation