Guidance on Voice and AI

The goal of our application process is to get to know you—your curiosity, your resilience, and your potential as a future scientist and colleague. We read your entire application to see a coherent picture of your intellectual identity.

Our priority is your authentic voice and ideas. If you use AI, you must use it as a tool to refine your own work, not as a substitute for your own thinking.

If You Choose To Use AI In Your Application:

DO use AI for:

• Brainstorming and outlining your initial ideas.
• Proofreading and polishing grammar and sentence structure.
• Getting feedback on the clarity and organization of a draft you wrote.

DO NOT use AI for:

• Generating your core ideas, arguments, or personal stories. Your unique experiences are your greatest asset. Weaving a consistent voice, tone, and set of core ideas across your entire application is a deeply personal process and is not a strength of AI.
• Writing entire essays from scratch. AI-generated text is often generic and lacks the specific, personal details that make an application compelling. Our reviewers are experts at spotting inconsistencies in depth and narrative across all materials, including your letters of recommendation. This becomes especially obvious when we get many applications that answer prompts using the same AI-generated ideas. The best way to ensure a coherent and authentic application is to write it yourself, using AI only in the limited ways recommended above.
• Inventing or exaggerating research experiences or skills. Uncorroborated details are easily identified by reviewers, and AI cannot create a believable, specific narrative that aligns with the rest of your application profile.

The Key Principle: 

Your application should sound like you. If a tool helps you express your own ideas more clearly, that's acceptable. If it replaces your ideas with generic ones, it will weaken your application. Reviewers are trained to look for a coherent and specific narrative across all your materials, and applications that lack this coherence will be less competitive.

The most compelling applications are those where your own authentic voice and story shine through consistently. Use AI as a polish, not as the foundation.