Moshe Poliak

PhD student, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT

Resources

For students: applying to graduate school in psychology and cognitive science, and getting started with statistics.

Applying to graduate school

Graduate school applications are an uneven playing field: a lot depends on access to mentors, advice, and unwritten rules. These resources are for anyone applying in psychology, cognitive science, or a nearby field. If you would like to talk more, email me.

Application assistance programs

Free programs where people from Harvard Psychology or MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences give advice, read your statement of purpose, and offer a view into the department. You do not need to apply to Harvard or MIT to use them.

Harvard Psychology PPREP · MIT BCS AAP

What faculty look for

Harvard Psychology’s PRO-TIP videos are interviews with faculty about what they look for in applications. The advice applies well beyond Harvard.

PRO-TIP videos

Writing a statement of purpose

A common mistake

Many statements are written chronologically: “When I was a kid, X happened; then in college, Y; then I did research on Z.” This is usually not effective. Organize by theme instead: “A quality that makes me a strong applicant is X, and the evidence for it is Y.” The content ends up similar, but the reader no longer has to infer your strengths.

There is no single right way to write one. These ideas come from my own applications and from advising applicants through MIT’s Application Assistance Program.

What it is not

  • A college admissions essay (“I am well-rounded and have some quirky hobbies”).
  • A biography (“When I was a kid, a relative had a stroke, and now I’m passionate about the brain”). One exception: if you are part of an underrepresented group, saying so can give useful context to your application.
  • A CV in prose (“In my first year I did…, then that summer I did…”).

What it is

A case that you will be a good graduate student who completes the program. Taking on a student is a big commitment of time and funds, so show a potential advisor that you are a good bet:

  • a research question that shows thinking, knowledge of the literature, and a connection to the advisor’s field;
  • your toolkit (experiments, statistics, MRI, EEG, neural networks), how you have used it, and how you would apply it to your question;
  • that you know what the advisor works on and how you would fit in the lab and department.

A typical structure

  1. My question is… (one paragraph)
  2. My experience shows I have the persistence and the toolkit to study it (most of the statement)
  3. I want to work with Professor X at Institution Y because… (one paragraph)

Contacting professors

Reaching out can help, but do it with care. “I read your paper, let’s meet to talk” is often not well received by professors (graduate students, by contrast, usually love emails like that). A better message asks whether the professor is admitting students this year. You learn where to apply, which saves time and fees, and your name will be familiar when applications are read.

Learning statistics

Data skills and basic statistics open the door to quantitative research, and faculty often say a solid statistical toolkit is the first thing they look for in applicants. A good start: R, the tidyverse for manipulating and visualizing data, and linear models, from simple regression to generalized linear mixed-effects models.

  • New to statistics: Field, Miles, & Field (2012), Discovering Statistics Using R. Friendly and witty.
  • Ready for Bayesian statistics with brms: Nicenboim, Schad, & Vasishth (2025), Introduction to Bayesian Data Analysis for Cognitive Science.