My tips for the ETH Excellence Scholarship (ESOP)
The Excellence Scholarship Opportunity Programme (ESOP) by the ETH Foundation has been one of the defining elements of my Master’s studies.
Over the past years, many Bachelor’s students have reached out to me to ask about my experience with the ESOP, and to see if I had any advice for them as they approached the application deadline.
Eventually, I thought to try to sum up some common themes from the conversations I have had over the past couple of years. The following paragraphs present a rather personal take on the ESOP and reflect only my own experiences. For up-to-date information about the Programme, please visit the official website. My considerations are mainly informed by my lived experiences and I do not possess statistics to back up my claims.
The ESOP: about
The ESOP is run by the ETH Foundation and relies on funding from individuals, ETH alumni, and companies. The ESOP includes a waiver in tuition fees, a stipend to cover living expenses in Zürich, and several events throughout the academic year. While there is no fixed number of scholarships available per year, it often floats around 60. From my understanding, there is no guaranteed number of scholarships per department or per Masters programme.
My experience applying for the ESOP
I came to know about the ESOP through the ETH website. As I was preparing my ETH application, I decided that it could be worth to investing some time to try to apply for the ESOP.
Essentially, I took a break from my regular university activities for about 3-4 days and locked myself up in the library. There, I picked laboratories at ETH that covered topics I was reasonably familiar with and interested in, and started digging into their publications. From there, I continued reading the papers connected to the material I had been reading, trying to keep track of the relations among them.
My goal was to identify some open research problem and potential solution to them (obviously this is a rather engineering oriented approach; other fields may formulate research questions in a different way).
Eventually, I settled on data-efficient approaches to generative adversarial networks in medical imaging (data-scarcity is one of the big problems in medical AI). I tried to outline possibile testing methods and relevant evaluation metrics.
Some months later, I got an unexpected email inviting me to a short interview. In my case, the interview focused on how to ensure the validity of my results and the relevance of my proposal to the field. Overall, the conversation felt more focused on the soundness of my research principles rather than on the minute technical details that could have come with my proposal.
Advice for the ESOP application
Once more: I am not informed about the official criteria used to select Excellence Scholars at ETH.
- Do not underestimate your chances: as I went on with my Master’s studies, I met a significant amount of people whom I would deem much smarter than myself. If grades are an indicator, many of them have a higher GPA than I do and have had successful experiences conducting research at ETH. Yet, most of these people never applied for the ESOP as they deemed it too competitive. While there is some truth to that, I am still under the impression that many deserving individuals do not even attempt to apply.
- Tailor your proposal to ETH: your Master’s thesis pre-proposal should probably present a project that can reasonably fit within the research scope of at least one of the groups at ETH. A Master’s thesis requires a supervisor (usually a PhD student or a Postdoc) who has at least some expertise in your thesis topic. It can make sense to approach the problem from the other side: identify labs that cover topics that are interesting for you, and look into their publications. From there you can start to delve into the literature.
- Tailor your proposal to yourself: I believe that a strong part of the reasoning behind having to write a pre-proposal is to assess whether you can think about a scientific problem. Having prior experience in a given domain will make it much easier for you to navigate the literature.
- Do not overshoot: keep in mind that probably your proposal should require reasonable time and resources for a Masters thesis. For instance, it is not likely that your host lab will enroll a cohort of hundreds of volunteers or that it will run a multi-year study. How do you determine what is “reasonable” for a Master’s thesis? You can look at existing thesis projects by browsing the websites of ETH labs or navigating on SiROP.
- Decide you are making an investment: in my opinion, it does not make that much sense to take a casual approach to the pre-proposal. To make it successful, you should aim for a relevant depth of understanding of the literature surrounding your chosen topic, and hence devote a fair amount of time to it.
The ESOP during my Masters studies
Essentially, the idea behind the ESOP is that students who benefit from it should have only to worry about classes and projects during their studies. To my eternal gratitude, the ESOP came with an offer for a temporary room in the WOKO student housing network, allowing me to bypass the unpleasant process of navigating the Zürich housing market.
Furthermore - and chiefly - the ESOP comes with a stipend that allows one to cover life expenses in Zürich. In general, I would say that the sum awarded by ESOP allowed me to live a comfortable student life in Zürich and to travel around a decent amount during my studies, while saving some money. Nonetheless, moving to Zürich still required some compromise in terms of the leisure activities I would feel comfortable undertaking when compared with my lifestyle in Italy (i.e., going out to restaurants, bars, etc).
Another advantage of the ESOP are the events organised by the ETH foundation. ESOP scholars are invited to join lab visits and company trips, or to contribute to yearly ETH foundation events. While these events are not necessarily associated with a very deep sense of belonging in the cohort, they have allowed me to start new friendships, and extend my social network beyond the people in my classes or studies.
If you would like to discuss my ESOP proposal in private feel free to contact me!