A friend of mine recently asked me to review an application for a fellowship program. I figured my comments might be useful to other people too. Below are some responses, with identifying details removed.
I think your response will be easier to follow if you answer their questions roughly in order. [order of questions] You sort of do this but it might be worth flagging/name-dropping.
Another piece of feedback is that you should write in a more informal way. You want to sound less like a corporate memo or academic paper. Shorter sentences.
Imagine explaining things to an ESL colleague who is very smart and understands technical jargon but otherwise doesn’t know much English. Be okay with long words in technical jargon but otherwise strive for small words and shorter sentences.
This will make it easier for your application to be understood. It might also help clarify your ideas.
Less importantly, I’ll flag that I’m a bit worried that your responses seem to be somewhat generic in the space of AI safety answers. This might be okay (don’t reinvent the wheel, this question doesn’t necessarily lend itself to creativity) but I’d still encourage you to briefly consider one thing you either disagree with AI “safety consensus” on, or are at least confused by. Even if this isn’t the right place to write it, it is still helpful to hold in your head in later stages/to debate people if you do get in the program.
Finally, I’ll note that it’s a good idea to ask Claude or other AIs to check your application (feed it both the prompt and your response) and ask it to critique your app, without asking it to rewrite anything.
A friend of mine recently asked me to review an application for a fellowship program. I figured my comments might be useful to other people too. Below are some responses, with identifying details removed.
I think your response will be easier to follow if you answer their questions roughly in order. [order of questions] You sort of do this but it might be worth flagging/name-dropping.
Another piece of feedback is that you should write in a more informal way. You want to sound less like a corporate memo or academic paper. Shorter sentences.
Imagine explaining things to an ESL colleague who is very smart and understands technical jargon but otherwise doesn’t know much English. Be okay with long words in technical jargon but otherwise strive for small words and shorter sentences.
This will make it easier for your application to be understood. It might also help clarify your ideas.
Less importantly, I’ll flag that I’m a bit worried that your responses seem to be somewhat generic in the space of AI safety answers. This might be okay (don’t reinvent the wheel, this question doesn’t necessarily lend itself to creativity) but I’d still encourage you to briefly consider one thing you either disagree with AI “safety consensus” on, or are at least confused by. Even if this isn’t the right place to write it, it is still helpful to hold in your head in later stages/to debate people if you do get in the program.
Finally, I’ll note that it’s a good idea to ask Claude or other AIs to check your application (feed it both the prompt and your response) and ask it to critique your app, without asking it to rewrite anything.
Let me know if you have follow-up questions!