Chapter 11 · Every screen, part by part
Your profile
Every match is scored against this, and every draft is written from it. It is the one screen where the quality of what you get out is set entirely by what you put in.
(The personal fields are blurred in this screenshot. In your workspace they are yours.)
1 — Guided setup. Walks the same fields in order, with one question at a time. Worth using once at the start; after that, editing the tabs directly is faster.
2 — Profile completeness. A percentage, and underneath it the five groups it is made of with a fraction each — Identity & education 7/7, Research profile 5/6, University preferences 2/4, Professor preferences 0/4, Outreach preferences 2/4.
Read the fractions, not the percentage. A group sitting at 0/4 is the one costing you something, and the percentage hides which.
3 — Still missing. The specific fields that are empty, named. This is the actionable version of the number above it.
Nothing here is required, and everything empty is unused. A preference you have not stated is not treated as "no preference" — it is simply not part of any score. That is the difference between a match that says no funding stated and one that quietly assumes you don't mind.
4 — The tabs. Eleven of them, with a count where the tab holds a list:
| Tab | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| Identity | Name, current institution, degree, discipline, country |
| Education | Each degree, with dates and institution |
| Research interests | What you want to work on — the single highest-leverage field on this page |
| Experience | Jobs, internships, assistantships |
| Publications | Anything you have published |
| Projects | Work that isn't published but is real |
| Skills | Grouped by category, as chips |
| Awards | Scholarships, prizes, honours |
| Tests | GRE, TOEFL, IELTS, and the rest |
| Preferences | What you want from a program, a professor and a country |
| Private notes | Yours. Never sent, never quoted in a draft |
5 — The panel. The tab you are on. Switching tabs does not discard what you have typed — the panels stay mounted, so you can move between them mid-edit and come back to find your text where you left it.
Things worth knowing about the fields#
The long text boxes understand markdown. Anything with a Write / Preview toggle
takes **bold**, *italic*, - lists and links, and renders them wherever that text is
used later. What is stored is the markdown you typed, which matters because an assistant
reads these fields and quotes them into drafts.
Skills group by category. Whatever you type as a skill's category becomes a heading, and the count beside each heading is how many skills sit under it. Add your own categories — the point is that nothing you know gets left out because there was no field for it.
Lists edit in a drawer, not in place. Adding or editing an entry opens a panel with the whole record and its labels, rather than expanding a row.
Private notes really are private. They are excluded from match scoring and from every draft. They exist so you have somewhere to put the things you would not want quoted.
Preferences deserve a second pass#
The Preferences tab is the part most likely to be left half-done, and it is doing more work than it looks like:
- University preferences shape which institutions are worth researching.
- Professor preferences shape the match score directly — seniority, group size, how hands-on you want a supervisor to be.
- Outreach preferences shape what drafts say about you, and what they ask for.
A professor-preferences group at 0/4 means the match score is working from your research interests alone.