UW Genome Sciences

Your application personal statement should be at most two single-spaced pages long. We recommend that the statement contain the following four sections: personal background, research experience, leadership/DEI/broader impacts, and reasons for applying to UW Genome Sciences. These sections may be interwoven with each other and do not need to be delineated with explicit headings, but the strongest essays will address all four topics in some depth.

Personal Background (¼ to ½ a page)

This opening section is your opportunity to explain why you want to pursue a Ph.D. in your chosen subfield of genomics. Some applicants trace their professional interests all the way back to childhood experiences, while others focus on formative moments from their undergraduate education or work experience. This section can also summarize the personal significance of early research experiences that you do not have time to discuss in technical depth. Whatever subject matter you choose, try to include memorable details and outline a compelling argument that a Genome Sciences Ph.D. is the logical next step for you. 

Research Experience (1 to 1¼ pages)

Describe some specific past research accomplishments in detail, including motivation (why is this work important?), roadblocks you overcame, technical strategies you used to achieve your aims, and big-picture scientific takeaways. Your potential future PIs will be reading this to assess your technical communication skills and your depth of scientific understanding. 

Leadership, broader impacts, and community (¼ page)

We want to recruit Ph.D. students who will care about their fellow scientists and eventually grow into generous senior graduate students who feel motivated to help their junior colleagues succeed. What have you done that shows you are likely to become this kind of good department citizen? Would you like to help our department and our scientific field do a better job of serving all members of society? What are your specific, realistic ideas for accomplishing this? 

Why UW Genome Sciences? (¼  to ½ a page)

Many students who are admitted to Genome Sciences end up having multiple excellent options for graduate study. If you want to maximize your chances of admission, it is in your interest to make a strong case for why you are likely to choose Genome Sciences over other institutions where you might receive an offer. This case will likely include naming GS faculty members with whom you are interested in working AND explaining why each of these faculty members is likely to be a good match for your interests and goals. You may also cite aspects of our department culture or graduate curriculum that appeal to you or reasons why Seattle is a place where you would like to live. 

Excerpts from admitted student personal statements

Below are several excerpts from application personal statements written by recently admitted students, reproduced with permission. Statements have been redacted to preserve the privacy of the students and their collaborators.

Example Statement Excerpts: Personal Background

Personal Background Example #1:

My path from environmental engineering to CRISPR technology development has not been a straightforward one, but a winding one that has allowed me to learn a lot about myself and the science I love. Growing up in San Diego, I developed a deep respect for the ocean, which evolved into a passion for the environment. During high school, I actively sought out ways to help our planet, starting a school recycling program, building a greywater system for our home, and volunteering for various stewardship projects. This interest carried into college, when I applied to MIT to study environmental or ocean engineering and completed an internship for the Navy building autonomous vehicles for collection and analysis of various indicators of ocean health. This plan changed during my first year at MIT, when one of the closest people in my life was diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer. I threw myself into studying this disease and I became increasingly frustrated by the gap between published research and actual treatments offered in the clinic. I wanted to help, but this disparity was insurmountable, and I was forced to sit back as he slowly died. I found myself drawn to the molecular biology I was reading about in my efforts to understand the current state of prostate cancer research. As I learned more, I was shocked by how little we still know about our genetic code and was captivated by the tools that have been developed to gain more insight into it. I wanted to combine this newfound interest in molecular biology with my desire to combat climate change, so I changed my major to biological engineering, which blended aspects of both fields.

Example #2:

I was six when I learned twins do not have to be identical.I was incredibly relieved. My mother had to paint my younger twin brothers’ fingernails to tell them apart while they were infants - one red and one blue - and six-year-old me did not want to rely on nail polish for the rest of our lives. As fraternal twins, my brothers grew into their distinct features, and I was fascinated by how different they looked. How could they be born at the same time yet look nothing alike? How closely did I relate to them as their sister but not a twin? Growing up, these questions stuck with me. Further interested in studying how genetics impacts our lives, I chose to pursue a major in Biology at Iowa State University to seek answers from a genetics standpoint. Once at Iowa State, I became interested in investigating how gender roles affect a woman’s ability to perform in scientific environments, and thus also pursued a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies. Diversity within science can be examined through many lenses, from how female-identifying scientists shape their work environments to the genetic mechanisms that cause humans to have unique phenotypes.

Example #3:

I fell in love with science before I started my undergraduate career when taking community college classes that introduced me to the world of research. Through a wide assortment of research opportunities, I have gained a passion for research in mechanisms and systems of gene regulation. I wish to continue to learn and discover more in the field of epigenetics and transcriptomics. I like to think of the field of gene regulation to be looking into the ancient language of genetics and how we can understand the words (genes) of life, but now need the grammar (gene regulation) to gain a better understanding of biological systems that can lead to great strides in both medical and agricultural tools. Furthermore, I believe that the University of Washington, Seattle’s Genome Sciences Ph.D. program matches the work ethic and experience I have gained in my undergraduate career and can give me the training I desire to contribute to the field of gene regulation. When starting at UCR, I was a Neuroscience major. I later decided to major in Cellular, Molecular, and Developmental Biology to gain an in-depth view of the different levels of genetics that affect living organisms. I added a minor in Applied Statistics later to understand the data pipeline of research. Determined to gain more experience, I looked outside UCR and applied to several NSF-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU).

Example #4:
As structural prediction tools in protein science improve, there is now no shortage of interesting questions to ask. Yet in my work, I have repeatedly seen that it is the analytics side -- the way we answer these questions -- which needs improvement. It is my goal to combine the tools of analytical chemistry to answer questions in structural biology, and I believe the proteomics work in development in the Genome Sciences department at UW is a compelling place to accomplish this. During my freshman year of college, my research advisor sat me down in front of the modeling software “Coot” and taught me the basics of solving the crystal structures of proteins. As I studied the electron densities and ensured that the ball-and-stick model aligned to the x-ray data, it was as if all of biochemistry suddenly clicked for me. Visualizing the structure of an enzyme, observing the residues in their three-dimensional form, I fell in love and knew that the questions I wanted to ask were in the structure and function of proteins. In my first post-baccalaureate research posting, I worked in an institute that used high-resolution mass spectrometry to study the metabolomics of rare populations of cells. It was there that I learned of the power of mass spectrometry to give clear, quantitative answers to some of the most foundational of questions under the most challenging of circumstances.

Example Statement Excerpts: Research Experience

Example #1: 

I wanted to combine this newfound interest in molecular biology with my desire to combat climate change, so I changed my major to biological engineering, which blended aspects of both fields. In order to get hands-on experience in this realm, I began an internship at the XX Institute working on gene editing of lipid biosynthesis pathways in the model diatom Phaeodactylum tricornutum to increase biofuel production. This project was very interesting but progressed slowly, because genome editing tools like CRISPR were not yet optimized in this organism. As the summer continued, I gravitated towards developing technology to improve CRISPR delivery and editing efficiency in diatoms, and asked to shift my focus towards those endeavors. This was my first real exposure to technology development of this nature, and I eventually realized that functional genomics underpinned research efforts in these two seemingly disparate fields of environmental engineering and cancer biology that I found so engaging.

I became fascinated by the broader problem of developing genetic manipulation tools to be compatible with a wide variety of model systems and biological questions. I continued in this space for the rest of college, working on projects like optimizing electroporation for bacterial species beyond E. coli with the ultimate goal of increasing genetic tractability for a wide range of organisms. For my senior research project I found a niche where I could apply functional genomics to my areas of interest, using genetic engineering to make plants drought resistant, with applications for locations impacted by climate change. Through these experiences, I discovered two things - I really loved lab work and I wanted to take more ownership over my projects and see them through from conception to results.

I thus sought out the opportunity to work at the XX, under XX of the Genetic Perturbation Platform (GPP). The mission of GPP is to develop and distribute functional genomics tools and expertise to a wide audience, which makes it an incredibly collaborative platform with a wealth of multidisciplinary work. This unique role has allowed me to work on a diverse range of projects, from base editing screens tiling across important DNA damage repair genes such as BRCA1 and CHEK2 to our recently-published work on improving on-target Cas9 sgRNA design rules based on tracrRNA identity. Through these projects, I gained hands-on experience with nearly every available
CRISPR technology. In doing so, I realized that there was no toolkit that enabled other researchers to pressure-test these systems in the way that our well-funded and well-connected lab so easily could.

I initiated a project to address this gap - developing a modular approach to CRISPR vector assembly. This technique, based on Golden Gate cloning, reduces both the time and cost associated with making new vectors and, more importantly, allows for systematic comparisons of novel CRISPR components. This flexible, easily adaptable system, now called Fragmid, along with a website supported by our software team, has enabled the creation of hundreds of custom vectors for dozens of labs across the country, even prior to publication. After many months of optimization and even more months spent meticulously organizing and future-proofing this toolkit as a distributable resource, the pipeline was recently released to all Broad affiliates. In the final step before submitting for publication, I am expanding this toolkit beyond mammalian cells into Drosophila and other model insects, in collaboration with the XX Lab at XX, and working with the XX Lab at XX to expand to delivery mechanisms beyond lentivirus, such as AAV. This platform that I conceptualized, iterated on hundreds of times in the lab, and distributed is enabling researchers who I have never met to probe their diverse biological questions in a more efficient manner, pushing the edge of science forward in many different areas. The desire to close the gaping disparity between what is physically possible and what is available on the bench or in the clinic drives me to continue to work on basic technology development and distribution.

Example #2:

In my first post-baccalaureate research posting, I worked in an institute that used high-resolution mass spectrometry to study the metabolomics of rare populations of cells. It was there that I learned of the power of mass spectrometry to give clear, quantitative answers to some of the most foundational of questions under the most challenging of circumstances.

Currently, I work as a research scientist at XX, a spin-out from the Institute for YY. It is this work that has allowed me to not only apply my analytical skills to structural biology questions but to also see ahead to the work in analytics still yet to be done and so desperately needed.

XX seeks to develop a protein-based, computationally-designed oral IL-23R inhibitor for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease. Developing analytics for this designed protein has been one of my main roles at XX, and it has been fraught with delightful challenges. Our lead protein design is unique: at only a few kDa, it’s too large for typical peptide analyses to work but too small for typical protein analyses. With a high pI, it is remarkably positive and problematically sticky. Finally, with two disulfides, there is the opportunity for heterogeneity in production that must be monitored.

My first task with XX was to develop a size-exclusion chromatography (SEC) analysis method that could provide us with a purity measurement. Being so positively charged, our protein had a habit of sticking to the stationary phases of our columns, causing our resulting peaks to smear. After fixing the pumps on the HPLC and testing many different columns and mobile phases, I found that a high ionic strength running buffer kept non-specific interactions to a minimum and resulted in beautiful peaks. However, one contaminant persisted, and finding its identity became my next task.

Early work showed that treatment of our protein with a reducing agent caused our protein to behave in the SEC method similarly to this contaminant. This was my first hypothesis, that the contaminant was a disulfide isoform of our protein. Leveraging my experience with small molecule mass-spectrometry, I planned to use MS to analyze our protein sample and determine the mass, and therefore identity, of the contaminant.

Small molecules, however, behave very differently in MS than whole proteins like ours. This was a fact I didn’t truly appreciate until I saw the tangled mess of spectra coming from my sample. The reduction of a disulfide bond results in a 2 Dalton mass shift which is very difficult to observe within the spectra of a several-thousand Dalton protein. It’s possible with high-resolution MS, but not with the instruments I had access to.
I designed a workaround to this limitation. If the contaminant could be separated from the protein, even low-resolution MS could identify it. SEC couldn’t effectively accomplish this, so reversed-phase chromatography was investigated. With again much persistence, I found a reversed-phase method that separated the contaminant from our protein.

I still remember vividly that Sunday evening in the lab when I used the reversed-phase method with the MS. For the first time, I saw the structural heterogeneity of this protein represented as clean peaks on the chromatogram, each with a mass difference of 2 Daltons corresponding to disulfide cleavage as hypothesized. I had successfully used my analytical chemistry skills to probe the structural features of this protein. Further testing with this method confirmed that the contaminant seen in our SEC assay was a disulfide isoform of our protein, as expected.

As I began to look around, I saw every new problem as a proverbial nail for my newfound hammer to solve. My new RP-HPLC-MS method could characterize our protein; the next step was to see if it could quantitate it from complex matrices. Yet, characterization from pure samples and quantitation from dirty samples are completely different beasts, and I wish I could tell you I was successful. It was not without trying; I spent many long days and nights ruining many columns before I came to the conclusion that this top-down, whole-protein approach to quantitation was unviable in this case, and that work would need to be restarted with a bottom-up, fragmented peptide approach. Unfortunately, my efforts were needed on other projects and this work was put on pause.

Example Statement Excerpts: Leadership, broader impacts, and diversity/equity/inclusion

Example #1:

Mirroring my desire to make genomic tools available to more people is my goal to make science itself equally accessible. I deeply understand the benefit that diversity of thought brings to a workplace and actively work to improve this in every role I’m in. Specifically, I have aimed to make scientific access more equitable, both through individual mentorship for women in STEM as well as my participation in established programs, such as the inclusion, diversity, equity, and allyship (IDEA) ambassador program at XX. As one of twenty IDEA ambassadors, I received extensive DEI training, which enabled me to expand my capabilities for doing this type of work. I am currently leading an effort, supported by this program, to evaluate hiring and retention metrics within our group and make these processes more equitable. I will bring these tools to my graduate studies and continue to work to address the divide in access to science and higher education.

Example #2:

While research efforts are undoubtedly the main focus during any graduate program, I also aim to prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion during my graduate career. During my undergraduate studies, I earned a Minor in Women’s and Gender Studies by exploring the socially constructed paradox of being both a woman and being a scientist. We know that women and gender-nonconforming people have historically been dissuaded or excluded from the sciences, but during my studies I learned that this rift between “male” and “not male” in STEM fields is taught during childhood education. In order to combat this social construct, I would invest time into outreach efforts that show middle and high school students from underrepresented populations to teach them anyone can succeed in science and diversity in science is a necessary strength. If accepted into the Genome Sciences Ph.D. program, I would immediately start volunteering with the Genome Hackers program. I also plan to continue my membership in both Women in Genome Sciences (WiGS) and Genome Sciences Association for the Inclusion of Minority Students (GSAIMS) in order to continue the important inclusion efforts by both organizations. I would also like to get on the board for both groups if possible, as I have experience with administrative tasks, event organization, member retention, and outreach efforts from previous academic memberships during my undergraduate career. When science is more diverse and inclusive, it benefits us all, and I want to continue shaping our environment from a trainee perspective.

Example #3:

I was also very involved in possibly one of the most impactful communities in my career choice, the Louis Stokes California Alliance for Minority Participation (CAMP). CAMP gave me opportunities to receive funding, allowing me the freedom to gain further research experience during my school years, and provided an important support group on my journey navigating the world of academia. Since I believe strongly in its goal of making research approachable and affordable for people in underrepresented communities, I decided to run for a leadership position. I joined the STEM program’s board of officers my sophomore year of college and later became the acting president my junior year to help other students find their path in science. During my time as President of CAMP, I ensured that we stayed fully functional during the online world the Covid -19 Pandemic created. I decided that our main goal for the 2020 - 2021 school year was to give as much information on career development in STEM as possible. The primary way I wanted to accomplish this goal was by inviting different experts from different areas of science to come and talk about their path in science. We invited UCR faculty to speak about their experiences in STEM and had speakers from industry to talk about what other careers are available in science. To further prepare members, we had a panel of previously graduated CAMP alumni come to answer questions students have about graduate school and give advice to students interested in following a career in academia.

Example Statement Excerpts: Why UW Genome Sciences?

Example #1:

I am driven by a love for the environment and basic biology that has morphed with time and experience into a passion for developing and distributing genetic manipulation tools. My work in XX has made it very clear that I enjoy the process of generating ideas and driving a project forward from start to finish. I want to continue developing my research and leadership skills, particularly in the space of functional genomics, and the GS program at UW provides a unique opportunity for me to do so. Specifically, I am very excited that the coursework is centered around genomics, and I am especially interested in the Grant Writing and Scientific Speaking courses, as scientific communication is important to me. Additionally, I am drawn to the tight-knit community and many department-wide activities that the small size of GS affords. I hope to continue advancing my career by working in a group such as that of Jay Shendure and Lea Starita on massively parallel functional genomics. I am also interested in the Fowler Lab and Stergachis Lab, which both leverage functional genomics to answer a variety of fundamental biological questions. I’m confident that my extensive research experience, leadership, and desire to make science more accessible have laid the foundation for a successful career, which I am excited to potentially further at UW, with the ultimate goal of leading my own lab one day.

Example #2:

The Department of Genome Sciences has already been wonderful to me as a staff member, so much so that I can picture myself here as a Ph.D. student for the next several years. It’s not often that someone can directly see what being a graduate student in a specific department is like, and I know for certain that I would be happy as a Genome Sciences student. I know I made a great choice when I chose to work here, and I hope the department will continue to invest in me and my professional development as a graduate student. Based on my enthusiasm about genetic variation and recent excitement about clinical implications of data, I am particularly interested in working with Dr. Maitreya Dunham, Dr. Robert Bradley, and Dr. Andrew Stergachis. The Dunham lab’s research fascinates me as someone wanting to dig deeper into impacts of genetic variation, and it would be a fantastic opportunity for me to build upon my current foundation with brand-new skills and ideas. Her lab’s work on transposons is intriguing to me since transposons are mobile in the genome, which is a very different mechanism than the DMS approaches I am familiar with. I am interested in seeing how we can utilize transposons to study genetic variation. Additionally, Dr. Robert Bradley’s research on how mutations affect RNA splicing factors sounds particularly interesting to me, as I have mostly focused on how mutations affect proteins thus far. Diving into RNA research would grant me the opportunity to apply what I have already learned in my current position while gaining new expertise in a related area. The exposure to computational biology would also be immensely helpful for my development since I would like to improve my computational skill set. Overall, I feel that I would be a good match for Dr. Bradley’s group. Furthermore, Dr. Stergachis’s lab’s research is appealing to me as well. His lab’s work on noncoding sequences as a basis for disease would be an interesting mirror to my current research since I have been working exclusively on genes that encode proteins. The drive to integrate genomics into the clinic aligns with my recent research interests as well. I have seen the innovative approaches developed in Genome Sciences to answer problems at the edge of our understanding of human genetics, and I know I would be happy studying in almost any lab in our department.

Example #3:

Here, in the Genome Sciences department at UW, are motivated researchers developing these tools, and I am seeking to be among them. Dr. Michael MacCoss and his team have been pioneers in advancing and democratizing proteomics research by producing Skyline and are currently working with cutting-edge instruments and techniques to improve sensitivity, accuracy, and throughput of proteomics analyses. Along this line, Drs. Judit Villen and Devin Schweppe are also working to develop new quantitation methods in this field. A PhD from any one of them would allow me to continue in my career. After my PhD, I have two paths forward. One path is to take the analytical skills I will learn into the translational research space and continue my work with XX, the YY, or another protein and analytics-focused startup such as ZZ. Another path after a PhD is to take an academic post-doctoral position to continue using the tools of proteomics to answer basic science questions in structural biology. This path would allow me to engage in my love of teaching, mentorship, and science communication by ultimately allowing me to pursue a faculty position at a university. In either case, a PhD is needed to further my training and career as a scientist, and the department of Genome Sciences at the UW has the expertise to train me to use the tools of analytical chemistry to answer questions in structural biology.