Applicants
ASFP 2023 is done!
All matched applicants were sent their feedback on Thursday, November 2, 2023.
Don’t see it? Check your spam or junk folders, and if you still don’t see it, reach out to applicant-support@asfp.io.
Planning to apply to psychology PhD programs in fall 2024 and want to get ASFP editors’ feedback on your statement? Get on our applicant email list here, and we’ll email you in fall 2024!
Table of contents
Eligibility
Detailed Timeline
Preparing Your Statement for ASFP
Submission Portal
Prioritization
Conditions of Participation
Who is Behind ASFP?
Further Questions?
Sign Up for Email Updates
Eligibility
Applicants to ASFP must be applying…
to psychology PhD programs,
this year,
in categories of psychology in which we can provide feedback (clinical, developmental, affective, social, and/or cognitive psychology).
Additionally, our feedback will be most useful to people planning to apply to psychology PhD programs in the United States. Expectations and application materials differ by country, and so our feedback could be incorrect for non-US applicants. If you are applying to non-US programs, we do not recommend this program for you.
Note that ASFP is only for applicants to psychology PhD programs. Please do not submit statements intended for other programs (e.g., Masters’ programs, PsyD programs, Counseling, Education, Neuroscience, Social Work, etc). For more information about how these programs differ from each other, see our Program Explainer.
While the above defines eligibility for ASFP, we have limited capacity, and so may not be able to accommodate all applicants.
Detailed Timeline for 2023
Monday, October 23, 6am PT (9am ET) - Statement submission portal opened.
Note that the timing of when you submit your statement during the submission period has no bearing on priority. In other words, submissions on the first day and last day are treated equally.
Thursday, October 26, 6pm PT (9pm ET) - Statement submission portal closed.
Within 24 hours of the portal closing, all applicants will receive an email indicating whether they were successfully matched to editors.
Saturday, October 28, 7am PT (10am ET)- Application statements were sent to editors.
Editors will receive for each statement a) a random ID code associated with that applicant, b) the statement text, c) any notes or questions from the applicant (optional), and d) the categories selected by that applicant. Editors will spend roughly half an hour on each statement they edit, reading & providing feedback.
Wednesday, November 1, 6pm PT (9pm ET) - Feedback was due from editors.
Thursday, November 2 - Editors’ feedback was reviewed by the Core Team and packaged to send to applicants.
Friday, November 3, 9pm PT (12a ET) - All matched applicants received feedback from two editors by this time.
Feedback will be emailed, and will contain the editor’s role (faculty or graduate student) and the text of their feedback.
Because of this very tight timeline, there will be no opportunities for applicants to revise, change, or replace submitted documents or information, nor for the ASFP Team to follow up with individual applicants if anything in their submission is not accurate or complete. Please double-check before submitting that everything is correct and complete to the best of your knowledge. Submission is your responsibility.
Preparing your statement for ASFP
Write your personal statement draft with a particular program in mind. While we understand that applicants may be applying to multiple programs and tailoring statements to each, we ask that you only submit one statement on which to receive feedback. We hope that because our feedback will be about how to effectively communicate about yourself in the application, it will be helpful to all of your statements.
i.e., in the paragraph(s) where you discuss “why this program and advisor”, name a specific advisor & program/university.
To mitigate conflicts of interest, applicants must indicate both the single institution that the submitted version of the statement is tailored to (i.e. which university is mentioned in this statement) and all ASFP faculty editors to whom they are planning to apply (i.e. the professor mentioned in the submitted application statement and all other professors to whom they will be applying, if they are ASFP editors).
No editors from that single mentioned institution will be asked to review that statement, nor will any of the ASFP faculty editors mentioned by the applicant. We do this to protect everyone (applicants and editors) from conflicts of interest, in which the people helping applicants could be the very ones who will later have decision-making power over that applicant.
You may also submit a generic, non-tailored statement draft (i.e. that does not contain specific names of a university and PI), though note that we will still ask you to indicate all ASFP faculty editors to whom you are planning to apply, and that submitting such a draft may limit ASFP editors’ ability to provide feedback on how well you are discussing your fit with and interest in the proposed graduate institution and PI.
Remove your name from your statement draft (if your name is part of the text, please replace it with generic text, e.g., “J. Doe”). The feedback process is designed to be ‘double-blind’ - editors will not know your name, nor will you know their names.
While this is purely optional, we strongly suggest getting feedback from someone else before submitting to us. The better or more complete your statement is at the time of submission, the more helpful our feedback will be.
Note: You may submit your personal statement in whatever form it’s in (e.g., full draft, partial draft with an outline, bulleted big ideas), but the more complete it is, the more concrete, specific, and useful our feedback can be.
Application statements must be submitted as plain text (i.e. text copied & pasted into a box on the submission form). No files (e.g. Word documents, PDFs) will be accepted, primarily because the metadata in such files could compromise the double-blind editing process.
You can read more about how to prepare the psychology PhD application statement in our Applicant Tips document here.
Submission portal
Submissions are closed and ASFP 2023 is finished. The submission portal opened on Monday, October 23, 2023 at 6am PT (9am ET) and closed at 6pm PT (9pm ET) on Thursday, October 26.
The timing of submission does not affect the chances of being selected! The first and last applications submitted within the submission window have identical priority, all else being equal.
Prioritization
All applicants who meet our eligibility criteria (see above) can submit their statements to ASFP for feedback. Applicants will be matched with editors based on the categories they select and their assigned priority.
In short, we will be prioritizing statements from underrepresented minorities and from individuals who don’t have access to informed mentorship for PhD application materials. More concretely, priority will be determined on the basis of two yes or no questions:
Do you identify as an underrepresented minority in psychology?
Do you identify as someone who does not have access to mentors who can give informed guidance and support for PhD applications in psychology?
For more details on both questions, see FAQs.
While we will collect additional information about each question to which you answer ‘yes’ for our own analysis purposes (to understand who ASFP is serving), only the ‘yes’/’no’ will be used to determine priority for this program.
The timing of when applicants submit their materials during the submission period has no bearing on priority.
In 2020, AFSP received 281 applications and was able to provide feedback on 155 (55%) of those applications. In 2021, we received 313 applications, and were able to provide feedback to 272 (87%) of them. In 2022, we received 371 applications, and matched 305 (82%) with editors. This year, we hope to significantly increase ASFP’s capacity to serve even more applicants! Unfortunately, it’s impossible to say how many applications we’ll receive in 2023, let alone how likely any given application is to be successfully matched with editors.
Conditions of participation
During the submission process, applicants will be required to read the following conditions carefully and confirm that they understand and agree to each.
Feedback does not guarantee admission to any PhD program (including the universities from which our team members or editors come; ASFP is in no way affiliated with admissions at any institution).
Statements need multiple rounds of revision; just because you’ve tried to address the feedback given here, that does not mean the statement is as good as it can get.
Feedback from the ASFP editors is provided in good faith, but we are not professional editors and might unintentionally give bad advice. Use your common sense, and always seek multiple opinions on your writing.
Editors will seek to give honest, constructive, and informed feedback on the efficacy of the statement, and what might make it better. It may not be gentle or positive, but all feedback is provided with the belief that this application can get better and that you can get into graduate school.
Feedback will not include copy-editing; in other words, editors will not be fixing grammatical errors or changing specific words.
Who is behind ASFP?
ASFP began in 2020 with members of the Department of Psychology at the University of Denver. In 2021, we first expanded to include core team members and editors from over 70 different universities across the United States. You can read more about why we’re doing ASFP and the team that’s organizing it here. Our editors are listed by category here. Note that ASFP is not an official program of any university, nor are we affiliated with the admissions offices of any university in any way. This program is an independent effort, conceived, planned, run, and supported entirely by volunteers.
Further questions?
Please read our FAQ. If your question is not addressed in the FAQ, please contact us.
Sign Up For Email Updates
Are you interested in being an ASFP applicant in fall 2023? Sign up HERE and we’ll be in touch!