Hi all,
I submitted my stage 1 application on May 22 around 4PM. Got the endorsement e-mail tonight around 8PM. I’d like to thank to all people who shared their personal experiences in this forum and especially @Burak_Uzun @GorkemP for answering my questions!
I have a PhD in NLP and worked as a research associate at a university in London. Afterwards I worked in a startup who later was acquired by a big digital tech company.
LORs:
- My PhD supervisor (2015-2019) with whom I had published conference and journal articles during my job in London. These articles were within the 5-years window.
- My supervisor from the research associate job at the university who knew me since 2015. They also founded the startup mentioned. In their letter, they covered the research associate, startup and the acquisition process.
- A top-level director from the company that acquired our startup who mainly talked about my work at this new company.
All signed through DocuSign and merged with the Document Certificate PDF. I couldn’t find the so-called Audit Trails at all so I attached this 1-2 page summary doc called Certificate. Apart from one of the LORs, I did not provide explicit CVs of the authors but let them introduce themselves in the first page. Always made sure that they have added links to their Google Scholar and LinkedIn profiles.
MC Evidences (4 items)
- MC1: Led growth of a product-led digital technology company: Talked about the startup, our patent where I was listed as one of the innovators, screenshots of our main source code repo back then and some more information about how my work impacted the acquisition process and the UK economy therefore. The source codes are/were not public so I simply shared screenshots of contribution statistics. Provided links to our patent from the gov uk webpage, screenshots to the acquisition announcement.
- MC2: Expert role panel participation or assessing work of others: Used invitation e-mails and later acknowledgements of my work as programme committee member in various NLP conferences as an academic researcher. Shared screenshots of the reviewing website showing that I had papers assigned to me.
- MC3: Significant Contributions to an Open-Source Project: Used a specific open-source project (not work related, spare time activity) where I had contributed some PRs, bugfixes and one particularly important feature. Shared links to all of these through Github and also shared some relevant tweet screenshots highlighting my work back then.
- MC4: Commanding a high salary and other remunerations: Screenshots from my payslips, assigned stock options, bonus payments, etc. A comparison through Glassdoor screenshots and finally a screenshot of organisational chart showing my position at the company and my leads.
OC2 Evidences (2 items)
- Evidence of contributions to an open-source project: Yearly screenshots from my github profile showing intermittent code and PR review contributions to various repos. Later in the docs I also shared links to specific PRs, code reviews that I did throughout the last 5 years in various repositories (5-6 of them)
- Significant Role in the Editorial Board of an Open-Access Peer-Reviewed Journal: This is a spare-time activity that I was doing since 2021 for an open-access, open-source Computer Science journal with the objective of assessing the reproducibility of experiments in CS papers. Shared github links and screenshots to a couple of papers that I had reviewed there.
OC4 Evidences (3 items)
- Significant published paper(s) in top-tier peer-reviewed journal(s): Links and screenshots of two journal articles that I had co-authored when I was doing my postdoc. Further links to google scholar showing their citation counts.
- Track Record in Academic Research: A global overview of my academic career with google scholar link to my profile. I highlighted the quality of the venues published through screenshots and links to Google Metrics. I also shared links to github repositories relating to some of my publications for the community to use the underlying codes for those papers.
- Impact of my PhD studies to the field of AI/NLP: A summary of my PhD studies and my thesis. Screenshots showing > 10 citations to my thesis. Highlights of one paper published during my PhD that got a best paper award at an important conference. Screenshot of my PhD defense report signed by the examiners describing the importance and the quality of the work done. I also highlighted the track record of these examiners by providing links to their google scholar profiles.
