about me & this site

My name is Jessica Liu and I am currently a 3rd year doctoral candidate of the Population Health Sciences PhD program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. My research is in the field of tobacco control, and I also specialize in adolescent health and school-based prevention/treatment. I'm in academia because I absolutely LOVE teaching and mentoring students. 

Each year, a good handful of my peers, mentees, referrals, or just random aspiring future PhDs will reach out to me seeking advice on how to apply to public health PhD programs. For the record - I applied to 10 of the top PhD programs in my field and got into all but one of them (I got waitlisted at 1 program because I effed up my interview and stupidly told them I had already gotten into Harvard, and then some very unprofessional drama resulted - which is a story for another time!). I am never one to brag, but I do feel like I somehow was able to put the pieces of an outstanding application together, even though I was completely clueless about the process. I was SO clueless in fact, that I didn't even know that PhD students should/do get a stipend until I was interviewing in January of the application cycle. (I'm an only child daughter of Taiwanese immigrant parents and a first generation college student, so I never really had much to reference growing up when it came to understanding the way higher education works in the US). 

In these little advice phone calls/Zooms that I have with prospective PhD applicants, I walk them through my entire process, share all of my application documents and email templates, and generally stay in touch with them and check in throughout the application cycle. People have told me that I should be charging big bucks for what I do, which obviously is very tempting for an underpaid graduate student like me. But as someone who believes strongly in closing education inequities, I wouldn't never want to give an unfair advantage to those who have the means to pay more for these types of services. 

So! This is my long-winded way of getting to my inspiration of starting this blog/resource. I figured that I have all of this knowledge and information about how to really succeed in the PhD application process, and others have used it and succeeded as well...hence I should find a way to consolidate all of this information and share it! And then other students don't have to be as clueless as I was when I was applying to programs. 

Also a note: this is purely a narrative of my own experience and journey of applying for public health PhD programs, and my not reflect and encompass all possible experiences. The PhD application can be quite unique depending on the person, program, mentor, etc. But I hope this blog/site can be a helpful guide and help gain some insight into the process.