<p>Hello,</p>
<p>I received the Goldwater this year. What you listed indicates that you’re competitive. I’ll list my thoughts on the application process.</p>
<ul>
<li>The Goldwater is all paper, no interview. It requires a standard list of research activities and extracurriculars, a two-page essay, three short answer questions, and exactly three letters of recommendation. The application is the same every year. Each university is only allowed to nominate four students to the national committee, which makes its decisions some time in March. Check your campus for its own dates and deadlines. Usually, a little under 1,200 sophomores and juniors are nominated nationally, and under 300 receive it, with a few others getting honorable mentions. It awards $7,500 for each subsequent year that you are an undergraduate.</li>
<li>Carefully, carefully review previous examples of Goldwater essays, just to get a good idea of the style they’re looking for (not to copy anything). There are many excellent examples online. My personal favorite is this one essay about window glass.</li>
<li>Start on your essay over the summer, and once you have a reasonable draft hammered out, pass it along to other people to review it. I had a draft of my essay done by mid September, though the essay was due to the campus committee in November. By the time it was passed along to the national committee, I had passed it by the editor-in-chief of the scientific magazine I worked for, my PI, the Goldwater committee campus chair, and a previous Goldwater scholar from my university. All of them provided very useful and diverse feedback. I myself put in countless hours into just editing, especially throughout Winter vacation (after my campus told me that I had been nominated).</li>
<li>The essay should be written like a research abstract. Avoid using of the word “I” whenever possible. The committee mainly wants to see how you write as a scientist.</li>
<li>Pretty graphs and graphics, that would fit well into a research paper, are nice to include.</li>
<li>The short answer questions are not to be blown off or filled out quickly. I shouldn’t even say it like that — they are just as important as the essay. They paint who you are and where you are going to the reader. You should not use flowery or empty language. Phrases like “my passion for” and “my desire to help people” are really good at convincing readers that you didn’t really think about your answers. When filling out the application, keep telling yourself that the person who will end up reading it is smarter and more experienced than you are. They can see right through whatever you write.</li>
<li>Your letters need to be diverse and research based. My own letters came from the heads of two different laboratories I had worked in, and a third came from a professor whose class had a significant research component to it, and with whom I had done a good amount of work, related to scientific stuff, outside of the classroom setting. All three of them could say detailed and personal things about me without being redundant. I was fortunate enough to have worked with full or associate professors. If you yourself worked closely with postdocs, try to have them collaborate with laboratory heads (though this isn’t so important if you can’t make it happen). Meet with all of your recommenders if it seems necessary. A Goldwater recommendation should not be lukewarm. Read up on Yale’s or Stanford’s guides on nationally competitive letters of recommendation. Getting them is a tricky practice of politeness, intuition, and psychology that I won’t get into here, but much better people have written much better guides about this topic.</li>
<li>It should be noted, since you listed this in your qualifications: the fact that you go to a top 50 university doesn’t really matter. Take a look at the list of 2014 winners. Plenty of community colleges and smaller schools are there. MIT and Princeton only got two winners, though they both nominated four students. Some schools ranked much lower by US News and World got a much better turnout. I don’t know why this is, but I would be very surprised if there were only two students at MIT or Princeton that were capable of getting the Goldwater. I would venture to guess that, in some cases, the unsuccessful applicants from those universities, upon receiving the nomination from their schools, did not put sufficient thought into their applications before turning them in to the national committee. Perhaps this is because they were self-assured that, being a nominee from MIT or Princeton, they would get it. It may be completely misled of me to say this (there are many, many other possible reasons), but I am using this hypothetical to illustrate a point: the Goldwater does not go to the most inherently qualified future scientist, it goes to the qualified individuals that put the most effort into their application. The national committee wants to award the best future scientists, but they won’t give the Goldwater to someone that clearly didn’t put time and thought into their application. Personally, I think that there were plenty of other students from my school that applied and could have gotten it — and in fact, given the quality of their research and their grades, were way more qualified than me — but they didn’t put as much thought into their application or essay at the campus level. So never, ever overestimate your chances with this.</li>
<li>“I am going to get a PhD.” This is not an ambition — this is a fact. This is the eleventh commandment of the Old Testament, an amendment of the US constitution, and an old prophesy that was read aloud in the Garden of Eden. Carve this fact into your application. You get my point.</li>
<li>Internet forums don’t usually give good advice on college and prestigious scholarships. Lots of misinformation. I myself almost didn’t apply because there were a lot of Internet comments that said “you basically HAVE TO HAVE a GPA of 4.0 for the Goldwater!” (mine was between 3.8 and 3.9, whereas many students with higher GPAs did not receive it). Reach out to other Goldwater scholars and knowledgeable professors at your school, even if you don’t really know them, and ask their advice. Also, the guides published by other universities are all great references. Google is great.</li>
</ul>
<p>That’s about all I can think of. Best of luck. Let me know if you have any other questions.</p>