BICAR announces WRITE: Office Hours. Our team of accomplished application writing advisors are trained in BICAR's proprietary WRITE model to provide personalised instruction for:
High School Students applying to Colleges and for Scholarships
Postgraduate Students applying to MPhil, MA, and/or PhD Programs, as well as for Scholarships
Artists and Curators applying to MFAs, Residencies, Galleries, Biennials, and Grants
Professionals applying for Jobs
Institutes applying for Grants and Funding
Depending on your application requirements, we'll work with you to compose singular:
Personal Statements
Statements of Purpose
Artist and/or Curatorial Statements and Portfolios
Project Descriptions and/or Research Proposals
Cover Letters and CVs
Budget Proposals
Get in touch for an online consultation so we can understand:
What applications are you writing and why?
What are your deadlines?
What stage have you reached in the application thinking/writing process?
We'll work together to tailor and cost a program that will ensure you submit your applications on time, with confidence, and within your budget.
BICAR will pair you with an expert from our team who is the right fit for the kinds of applications you are writing. Your advisor will work with you to create an Office Hours schedule, calibrated with your submission deadlines, and will stay with you throughout your application writing journey.
In your first session, you and your advisor will review the entire schedule of the 'targets' that you will accomplish to finish and submit your applications; your advisor will provide instruction on how to reach your first application writing goal.
In subsequent sessions, you and your advisor will revise your completed target and you'll learn how to reach the next one.
Before you submit, you'll have final meetings to edit and polish your applications so you'll make your deadlines on time, with confidence.
How does WRITE: Office Hours work?
BICAR walked me through the process of writing application statements in a structured and conversational manner, starting from ways to approach the writing, how to style the writing, and how to keep the reader engaged with the writing. We carefully dissected different parts of many sample essays, making it easier to understand the flow of application writing content, styles, and genuine strategies. Before working with BICAR on my applications, I never knew the important list of ‘Dos and Don'ts’ when writing applications! The pedagogy also covered the difference in content requirements for a Personal Statement, Statement of Purpose, and Cover Letter. Participants shared our respective drafts and received valuable feedback. My key takeaways were: what to include and what to omit in admission and scholarship application essays, ways to highlight the strengths of my personal and educational experiences without boasting, and how to outline my career goals in a way that fit with the institutions and funding bodies to which I was applying.
- Khushboo (MFA Candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London; Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation Scholarship 2022)
Name
Why WRITE: Office Hours?
Our track-record! For the past four years, we've offered students, artists, professionals, and institutes group workshops in application writing with a remarkable success rate!
Many students pressed us for further, private instruction and after a year of testing, we are confident that our personalised, one-on-one Office Hours program will complement the results we realise in our group workshops.
We're cost-flexible! We don't charge a fixed sum upfront because different application writers require different assistance depending on where they are in the writing/thinking process and how much time they take to advance.
We cost per hour of one-on-one instruction and are only keen to ensure you submit the strongest applications on time, with confidence.
If you finish your personalised program earlier than we anticipated in our consult, we'll end early, with pleasure! If you need more time before you submit, we'll adjust.
We work with students to assure the applications you're writing fit with the institutions to whom you’re applying.
Writing anxiety about the success or failure of applications often results from the fact that we don’t take the time to figure out whether our audience – for whom we’re writing applications – is actually the right one for us.
Admissions committees and jurors read this lack of fit in your writing almost immediately and reject you.
We’ll work with you to ensure a fit between you, your application writing, and your audience.
The writing principles you’ll learn in Office Hours are foundational; they’ll stay with you forever.
You’ll not only get one-on-one guidance in how to write the specific applications you’re composing at the moment, you’ll receive a lasting education in the often daunting task of writing about yourself non-narcissistically: how to write about you in relation to what you want to accomplish in the world with others.
Rohit Goel is Director/Professor of the Bombay Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR). He is the editor of Future Perfect: Catastrophe and Redemption in the Contemporary (Kaph 2023) and co-editor of Lacan contra Foucault: Subjectivity, Sex, Politics (Bloomsbury 2019). Rohit created the curriculum for BICAR's renowned WRITE Program, including the course on Writing Successful Applications. For the past eight years, he has served as a juror on Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation Scholarship and Grant committees. He is also a juror on 421 (Abu Dhabi's) Curatorial Development Program and was a member of the University of Chicago's Department of Political Science's Faculty Hiring Committee, as well as an interviewer of high school students applying to Harvard College.
Rohit has taught courses in critical theory at the University of Chicago, Sciences Po Paris, the American University of Beirut, and Jnanapravaha Mumbai. He received the Fulbright IIE and Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) fellowships to pursue years of Arabic language study in Syria and was awarded the Fulbright DDRA and Andrew C. Mellon Fellowship for PhD dissertation research in primary sources in Lebanon. He completed his BA from Harvard College and, as Harvard University’s Paul Williams Fellow to Emmanuel College, was granted an MPhil in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge.