Would you please provide instructions for writing the research statement?

The goal of Quant-TIDE is to support your path in graduate school in Engineering and Social Sciences. Through your research statement, we want to know about your research: What do you study? What kind of projects do you do? How will the methods and skills that you learn in Quant-TIDE help your own research? 

Example Content

The primary goal of your research statement is to provide a summary of your research program and describe your projects. We want to know more about the topics that you are passionate about researching and what you find interesting about them. We want to know about the methods or skills that you seek to gain through more training, as well as research skills or relevant experience that you already have.

By “research interests,” we mean: What topics do you research? What knowledge do you want to discover or share with the world?

You have 250 words for the research statement. Typically, academic sentences are about 20 – 25 words, which means you have about 10 – 13 sentences in total. Here is an example of how you might use these sentences:

1. It is best to begin with a clear summary statement of research interests as Sentence 1.
2. For Sentences 2 – 3, it would be good to define, elaborate on, or provide more nuance about your research interests. If you can cite past research or describe the relevance to a cultural event, those two things are both compelling.
3. For sentences 4 – 6, you might try to briefly connect your overall research interests to some of the research projects that you are working on or planning.
4. Now would be a good time for a new paragraph! For Sentence 7, you might describe the skills and methods you use in your research (e.g., good people skills, experience with statistics).
5. For Sentences 8 and 9, you could describe how you gained the skills you described in Sentence 7. 
6. For the remaining Sentences 10 – 13, you would say how the methods you learn in Quant-TIDE will help your own research.

Important Note

Please note that you do not need to use the structure described above. We are providing this template to help people who are not sure where to start write a strong statement. We invite you to write a statement that inspires you: If it inspires you, then it will inspire us.