What Reviewers Look For in the PD Soros Fellowship — Application Essays
This rubric looks at whether your essays explain how your New American experience has shaped your choices and accomplishments, then connect your current work, graduate-program choices, and early-career direction. It also looks for specific actions, clear reflection, and a consistent case across both essays so readers can understand your role and reasoning without relying on other application materials.
What We Check
Whether the first essay explains how the applicant's experience as an immigrant or child of immigrants informed who they are and the context of their accomplishments.
Whether the first essay shows accomplishments through the applicant's visible choices, actions, roles, and effects rather than through titles or an unseen resume.
Whether experiences produce a recoverable change in understanding or behavior.
Whether the second essay explains current or near-term activities and why the applicant selected the graduate programs and schools named in the text.
Whether the second essay connects current work and graduate study to an early-career direction.
Whether the essays show creativity, initiative, originality, or sustained accomplishment through visible decisions and work.
Whether the two essays complement each other: the first supplies New American context and accomplishments, while the second supplies current work, graduate choice, and early-career direction.
Mistakes We Flag
- Treating background as the whole story
- Family, cultural, legal, or hardship context matters when you show how it shaped a choice, interpretation, relationship, or action. Background alone does not explain your individual response.
- Turning the essay into a resume
- Titles, awards, and affiliations do not show what you actually did. Develop an accomplishment through your role, decisions, actions, and what followed.
- Naming a lesson without showing change
- Saying you became resilient or learned an important lesson is not enough. Show the earlier view or situation, what tested it, and a later choice or behavior.
- Using a program name as the reason for fit
- A school’s reputation, location, or acceptance status does not explain why it fits your goals. Connect a specific form of training, method, community, resource, or professional need to your current work.
- Repeating rather than dividing the work between essays
- The first essay should retain its New American context and accomplishments, while the second should explain current work, graduate choice, and early-career direction. Shared facts can appear in both, but each essay needs its own purpose and must make sense on its own.
References
Frequently Asked Questions
How long can each essay be?
The stored instructions set a 1,000-word limit for each of the two required essays. If you have newer official instructions with a different limit, those instructions govern.
Do I need to describe hardship, migration, or legal status?
No. The essay does not need to narrate migration, disclose legal status, or present adversity. What matters is explaining how your experience as an immigrant or child of immigrants informed who you are and the context of your accomplishments.
Do I need awards, a leadership title, or admission to a graduate program?
No. The essays can show meaningful work through visible choices, actions, roles, and effects. For graduate study, you can explain why you selected programs even if you have not yet been accepted.
Can the essays rely on my resume, recommendations, or other application materials?
No. Each required essay should show the needed reasoning and support in its own text. Readers should not have to rely on an unseen resume, transcript, recommendation, or another application field to understand your accomplishments or program reasons.
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