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Application materials

Skill bydeng01/phd-application-skill/skills/application-materials

Tailor and optimize academic application documents — CV, resume, statement of purpose (SOP), and personal statement — for a specific PhD opportunity. Use this whenever the user wants to adapt, customize, write, polish, or optimize application materials — e.g. "tailor my CV for this position", "write an SOP for MIT EECS", "customize my personal statement for the Smith lab", "make my resume fit this studentship", or "optimize my statement for this professor". Selects, reorders, and emphasizes true material from the applicant's master CV and profile to fit the target; never invents credentials. Writes tailored documents to knowledge-base/applications/[id]/. Trigger whenever the intent is to prepare or adapt CV/SOP/personal-statement material for a specific application.From its SKILL.md

Install
npx -y skills add bydeng01/phd-application-skill --skill application-materials

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

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SKILL.md

5.1 KB, 950 tokens by cl100k_base, as published. Nobody here has run it

Application materials

Tailoring is the discipline at the heart of this skill: the same person, presented so the parts most relevant to this opportunity come first and loudest. It is selection, ordering, and emphasis of true facts — never invention. A tailored SOP makes an admissions reader feel the applicant has thought specifically about this lab; a tailored CV puts the relevant publication or skill where the eye lands first. The raw material is the applicant's real record; the craft is fit.

Step 1 — Load source material and target

Read the applicant's profile/cv-master.md (the complete superset of their record), profile/profile.md, and profile/research-statement.md if present. Read the target: the professor's profile at knowledge-base/professors/<slug>.md and the opening/application at knowledge-base/applications/<id>/ or knowledge-base/openings/. Note the program's explicit requirements (length, prompts, format) and follow them exactly — an SOP that ignores the stated word limit or prompt reads as careless.

If the master CV is thin or missing, ask the applicant for the missing material rather than inventing it. You can only tailor what truly exists.

Step 2 — Decide what to emphasize

Compare the applicant's record against what this target values (from the professor's agenda and the opening's requirements). Identify the three or four things about the applicant most relevant here — the matching method, the on-topic project, the transferable result — and make those the spine of the documents. Relevant-but-secondary material stays but moves down; truly irrelevant material can be cut for length. The same applicant's CV for a theory lab and a systems lab should look meaningfully different in ordering and emphasis.

Step 3 — Produce the documents

CV / resume

Reorder sections and entries so the most relevant come first. Tighten bullet points to lead with outcomes and the methods this lab cares about. Keep it truthful and verifiable; never inflate a role, a result, or a skill level. Output applications/<id>/cv.md.

Statement of purpose

The SOP is an argument: this applicant + this lab = a good bet. A workable arc:

  1. A specific opening that signals genuine, particular interest (not "since childhood I have loved science").
  2. The applicant's relevant trajectory — what they did, what they learned, the results — selected for relevance to this lab.
  3. Why this lab specifically: the professor's work, named, and how the applicant's direction connects to the lab's open problems.
  4. Goals and fit: what they want to work on and why this is the place.

Weave the applicant's real experience toward this lab's work. Mark with [brackets] any specific only the applicant can supply (a motivation, a result, a number). Output applications/<id>/sop.md.

Personal statement

Where a program asks for a separate personal statement (often about background, resilience, diversity of perspective, or fit with the program's mission rather than research), keep it distinct from the SOP — personal and reflective, still grounded in the applicant's real experience. Output applications/<id>/personal-statement.md.

Step 4 — Keep voice consistent and honest

All documents for one application should sound like one person and tell one coherent story — ideally aligned with any research proposal and outreach email for the same target. Match the applicant's voice from their existing writing; avoid generic admissions-essay clichés and overblown phrasing. The hard line from shared/references/ethics.md: tailoring selects and orders true facts; it never fabricates or inflates. An exaggerated CV is both dishonest and a liability the applicant can't defend in interview.

Step 5 — Save and hand off

Write the documents to knowledge-base/applications/<id>/. Tell the applicant what you emphasized and why, and list the [brackets] they must fill. For submission-grade formatting (a polished PDF or Word CV/SOP), hand off to the pdf or docx skill.

Guardrails

Never invent or inflate credentials, results, or skills — the entire value of tailoring is that it's true material well-arranged. When something relevant is missing from the master CV, ask rather than fabricate. Respect program prompts and limits precisely.

What ships with it

Read from the repository

Just SKILL.md. No reference files, no scripts.

Gives 0 of the 12 instructions most hr recruiting skills give in 950 tokens

Counted across 356 of the 357 authors here whose files we hold, read 2026-08-07

  • Quantify achievements with specific metricsin 14 of 356, across 6 files
  • Keep the resume under two pagesin 14 of 356, across 6 files
  • Request the full job description if not providedin 12 of 356, across 4 files
  • Extract keywords and prioritize job requirementsin 12 of 356, across 4 files
  • Stop and ask for clarification if required inputs are missingin 12 of 356, across 5 files
  • Map candidate experience to job requirementsin 11 of 356, across 3 files
  • Ask if the user wants adjustmentsin 11 of 356, across 3 files
  • Provide strengths and gap analysis after the resumein 10 of 356, across 2 files
  • Request candidate background details if not providedin 10 of 356, across 2 files
  • Format experience bullets as action verb plus resultin 10 of 356, across 2 files
  • Ask for missing inputs before startingin 10 of 356, across 9 files
  • Use exact job description terminologyin 9 of 356, across 1 file

Said here and by no other author read

  • read the master CV, profile, and target details
  • follow program requirements exactly
  • ask for missing material rather than inventing it
  • identify the three most relevant applicant strengths
  • tailor the SOP argument to the specific lab
  • keep a separate personal statement distinct

Grouped from the skills themselves: near-identical wordings counted once, and counted by distinct author, so one author publishing three of these counts once. Length counted with cl100k_base; the agent that loads this file may tokenize it differently.

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