Tips to Make Your Application Stand Out
Are you an undergraduate woman or gender minority student thinking of applying to the Brooke Owens Fellowship? (Answer: You should!). Or are you currently in the middle of writing your application? Will, the Co-Founder of the Brooke Owens Fellowship, shared a series of tips weekly on Twitter to help 2018 applicants through the process. These timeless tips have been copied from his posts. Good luck with the application!
Tip 1: The Brookie application takes time and thought, so start as early as you can.
The deadline might seem like a long time away, but trust me: mid-terms happen. Start investing in yourself NOW.
Tip 2: Weak references can torpedo an application. Give your profs / bosses plenty of time & guidance about what you need from them.
A framing I learned from one our Brooke Owens Fellowship hosts & mentors, Debra Facktor, is to ask your prospective reference: "are you willing and able to write me a strong letter of recommendation by [Deadline]." That clearly states your need, and gives them a few easy ways out.
College professors get asked to write LOTS of letters of recommendation. Even if *you* stand out to them as a student, *your letter* may not stand out--unless you give them good guidance. Thankfully, the application is specific about what's needed!
Also, given that you are submitting at least two and as many as four letters of recommendation, you may want to ask your letter writers to focus in on certain aspects of your experience or personality. Get 1 to focus on your lab skills (or whatever), 1 on your leadership, and so on.
Tip 3: Don't neglect your resume. Flesh it out, show it to beta testers. Make it sing.
Obviously, good grades in challenging courses look great in your application. But most of our hosts really want to see what you've done--because on-the-job learning is so powerful and important. So, if your GPA maybe isn't the greatest, don't be discouraged: all is not lost.
When you write your CV, don't just list project names. Get specific. What's important is not just that you were on the rocket team, or that that team built a rocket that flew to 100,000 feet. What's important is your specific role on the team. What did you contribute?
Even moreso: how did your role change over the years? Did you grow from a contributor on one component to a system lead to a program manager? That's freaking incredible! But we won't know unless you tell us!
Writing a CV can feel a lot like bragging, and makes a ton of people (me included) feel very uncomfortable. So, engage your friends and teammates. Have them sanity check what you've written. Did you oversell it? That's bad. But underselling it is equally bad! Your bestie can help.
Related note: if you say you lead a part of a team... you had better be prepared to answer detailed questions about that team's work during an interview. That will quite possibly include answering questions about how you screwed up, and how you fixed!
Tip 4: Want to work on hardware? Show us your hardware. Our Multimedia Essay is a great avenue for you to show off the things you've already built and tested.
If you were on a Design, Build, Fly team; or if you worked on a rocket, or hybrid rocket motor, or a cubesat, *of course* you already listed that on your CV, right? But with the Brooke Owens Fellowship application, you have a super convenient excuse to include photos, videos, & stories.
There are a lot of practical skills associated with working with aerospace hardware that are often much better taught in a garage or out at a test stand than they are in a classroom. So many of you applicants rocked your FIRST Robotics team or something—show that off!
By the way, in my experience, there is zero requirement that your past hardware experience be aerospace related. If it was a Baja Car or a hyperloop pod or a prosthesis or *whatever*, that’s still cool. You sweated, you might have even bled (be safe, kids!). You learned!
Of course, don’t forget—your multimedia essays have to answer one of our essay prompts. Submitting videos that don’t answer our prompts is... not a good idea.
I like to think that several of [these essay prompts] are actually pretty fun to think about and answer... And if you are Brookie material, you are by nature creative, and you love a challenge. How can you work your hardware experience into a meaningful answer?
What if you’ve never really built hardware before, but want to start this summer? Don’t worry—there is still hope. We have a few Fellows like that every year, often coming from majors like Physics or Math. You might want to #AskABrookie for their advice.
And I’d encourage you to broaden your definition of what it means to work with hardware. If you are a scientist and work in a lab, it’s almost guaranteed that you’ve hacked or field repaired some bit of lab equipment. Guess what? That’s hardware.
Tip 5: The application form asks you to rank 8 attributes of a summer job, showing what is most important to you personally. Take this part of the application super seriously.
The Brooke Owens Fellowship has a weird, wild, and wonderful aspect called matching. It is, in my opinion, one of the key things that makes the program so special. It is the way we make it work to have one common application for 30+ different companies and many different job types.
We have some very knowledgeable aerospace people who spend a lot of time figuring out which company & which role would best set each candidate up for success. While it’s true that our selection committee are basically aerospace wizards/witches, the process is not actually magic.
We get a fair amount of data from each of our incredible host companies about what they want in a candidate and about what kind of job their Brookie(s) might do. This is super useful—but it’s only part of the equation.
Of course, we also ask each candidate specifically where she wants to work. That is definitely useful and definitely considered. But a lot of candidates may not have much information about many of our hosts. So we need more. That’s where this question comes in. This question is basically the Brooke Owens Fellowship sorting hat. Or at least a big part of it. This is how you show us what’s most important to you.
There is no universally right answer. But there assuredly is a right answer *for you*. No one of these 8 attribute is inherently superior or more important. But only you can tell us which one is the key to your happiness and the ways you want to be challenged and grow.
It’s easy to get so focused on your résumé and your essays, and to just kind of informe these plain little check boxes towards the bottom of the application form. I understand the temptation to ignore them until you are about to submit, and then just to pick quickly. But don’t!
Spend a little time with these eight little drop down menus. Do some soul searching. I can tell you that the members of the selection committee absolutely will spend some time with your answers! So endeth my tip of the week. Good luck to all applicants!
Tip 6: Don’t worry that being a non-native speaker will hold you back from an aerospace career. It’s a strength, not a weakness!
There’s an old saying about how Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except she did so backwards and in high heels. That’s you. You are doing the exact same stuff as your native-speaker classmates… but you are doing it all in your second language. That is *impressive*.
I’m a more-or-less monolingual speaker who is married to a bad-ass, bi-lingual aerospace superstar. For a long time, she was embarrassed about her accent and about the fact that her written English isn’t perfect. Took her a while to recognize: she is freaking incredible!
Aerospace is full of people who speak English as a 2nd (or 3rd…) language. Listen to the chatter of pilots talking to flight controllers, or to the astronauts onboard the ISS. You'll hear lots of accented, imperfect, extremely effective English (right alongside native speakers).
Plus, given the way language fluency is mapped into our brains, I’ve always noticed that people who speak multiple languages are in some (not all) ways literally more creative and better prepared to handle complex problems.
So, if your English isn’t perfect, don’t let that stop you. Address it in your multimedia or written essay, if you’d like—several of our prompts set that up nicely. We’ve had lots of ESL grads who have kicked butt as Brooke Owens Fellowship Brookies. Maybe the next one should be you!
Tip 7: Your friends & mentors are your allies. Have your allies review your application.
I get it. You are a smart person, and probably pretty self-sufficent—you’ve needed that to get where you have in life. And I also get that the Brooke Owens Fellowship application essays sometimes invite responses that are pretty personal. But, if you are up for it, having an ally read your resume and your essay, and review your multimedia essay, can be absolutely invaluable.
There are a couple of reason for this. The simplest is this: typos on a resume are often cause for immediate rejection. Allies catch typos. But the much bigger reason is this: you know that Imposter Syndrome that lurks like a monster in the back of your brain? Well, thankfully, that devious little beastie only poisons our opinions about ourselves. Not about our friends.
Think about it: do you think your bestie is an imposter? Or the girl who leads your study session, or your team captain, or your church small group leader, or whoever you would consider yourself a fan or an an ally to? No. No your don’t. You think she’s awesome and deserving.
There are people who feel that way about you. They may be your roommate, or your BFF, or your SEDS Chapter President, or whatever. Find those people. Ask them if they are willing to help. I bet you’ll find they are willing to give you their time and their expertise.
If you have undersold yourself in your essay, they’ll point that out. If your resume talks about the cool things your team did, but leaves out your specific contribution, they’ll see that. Not sure if you’re a fit for position X at company Y? They may have a clearer perspective.
You can spend hours reviewing an essay and miss something that would be obvious to an ally in 30 seconds. That’s just how our wild and wonderful brains work sometimes. Think of it this way: the first person to read your essay could be a member of a selection committee, or could be your bestie/mentor/roommate/whatever. Your choice!