For someone that has a whole platform based on helping students, I’m surprisingly ruthless when it comes to judgement on the requests I get.
I recently published a post on Medium about my high school journey, which I’ve been using to write a lot more of my personal reflections. At the end of my post, I made a note about the importance of students properly reaching out when asking for help.
Given my platform, it seems to be expected for me to be extremely warm to all sorts of outreach and requests. But the truth is, I receive a lot of emails. And I’ll admit, I’m a very…. critical person. I’m actually frequently known for being extremely skeptical until I’ve gotten proof otherwise, and to me, I feel that this standard for judgement also should be upheld in interactions and who I choose to support. In my career, I believe that critical thinking and discernment is what I attribute to the most important skill in my work, and because of that, I care a lot to try my best to make good calls and support what I believe holds up my values—which is why I won’t support requests that don’t meet these prinicples.
Anyways, the point is, I wanted to make a post about this to explain exactly what I’m talking about when it comes to standards that I believe are important to champion across the board. Not just when emailing me, but anyone in your work and career, which I believe upholds a culture of respect and integrity—particularly important in a field like global health or science. I’m not perfect in many of these aspects either, but it’s something that I want to strive towards and encourage more students to be conscious about.
1. Don’t ChatGPT your emails
I get this so much. Please, please, please stop using ChatGPT to completely write your emails. Now, I’m the biggest user of ChatGPT there is. I absolutely love ChatGPT. I talk to ChatGPT all the time. But, there’s a quote (generated by ChatGPT actually), that I’ve adopted as my personal policy towards generative AI tools:
We fully expect candidates to use modern tools like ChatGPT or Copilot—we use them too. However, what we care about is the quality and clarity of your thinking.
If you use ChatGPT, use it like a smart operator: for scaffolding, speed, or inspiration—not for dumping in a prompt and pasting whatever comes out. Submissions that read like generic AI sludge won’t be taken seriously. We’re looking for your judgment, clarity, and ownership of ideas.
I feel like this very much reflects my own personal policy towards ChatGPT. I don’t mind when you use it to brainstorm and come up with ideas, or to refine your writing—I do that all the time—but don’t send me something that clearly looks like you took my LinkedIn profile, copied and pasted it, and wrote “write a coffee chat email tailored to this profile.” Emojis and cringey phrases included. The questions have no depth, it’s referencing very disjointed parts of my experience and background and pulling random institution names, it doesn’t talk about why you reached out at all. When I say it’s obvious, it’s obvious because you can tell there’s no thought or depth that went into it. If your ideas are solid and thoughtful but you used ChatGPT to revise your writing, I don’t mind that at all. Just please stop sending me cringey emails with paragraphs stuffed full with emojis.
2. Don’t lie about what you’ve done
I would think this is obvious, but I’ve met lots of students that have exaggerated their claims about what they’ve done, and this happens a ton in college applications. I’d be the first to know this happens all the time for people to inflate some things for credibility. After all, I’m literally involved in the startup space at Stanford, we’re like the #1 hub for overconfidence and overinflating claims.
But I feel like there are a few key differences that distinguish between the (honestly normalized) amount of startup inflation language and outright lying. To me, one of the most important factors—have you actually critically thought about what you’re doing? Think about the implications of what happens if you lie about something. This is a lot more important than people realize. A nonprofit that lies about their numbers and reach can take away from genuine players that can make a real difference if they get more funding and attention. Trust is also a huge deal—lots of organizations have corroded the trust of partners and communities in global health, and if you lie and ruin the trust of an organization, this has huge detrimental impacts for the whole field and global developments, sometimes for decades. For example, Pfizer ran a clinical trial on an antibiotic for meningitis called trovafloxacin in Kano, Nigeria in 1996. The study had extremely questionable consent and approval processes for the study. The patients were not well-briefed on the side effects, and many ended up dead or with lifelong side effects. Because of this, the trust in global health and vaccines has been impossible to recover in Kano, Nigeria, even nearly 30 years later, and many people attribute this directly to the Pfizer study.
This is obviously an extreme case. But the principles are the same. Whose trust are you breaching, and what impact will that have for others in the future? Faulty scientific studies, “well-intentioned” actors that accidentally caused harm, all of them have caused irreversible damage in society due to loss of trust. When you work in such a high-stakes field like global health or science that directly influences people’s lives, you need to have critically thought through the impacts of your actions. Elizabeth Holmes for example, not only hurt patients, but also made it significantly more difficult for genuine players in the blood testing space as well as female entrepreneurs to raise funding after Theranos was found out. She also took away valuable resources, funding, and space for genuine researchers.
There’s a delicate balance between inflating out of optimism versus inflation that’s outright lying and harming people. It’s not a matter of just whether or not you ever get caught, but what happens as a result of the claims you make. I feel like the precision of language in this space has honestly been one of the most stressful parts of the startup world, particularly as I’m consciously aware of the impact of my language. In normal life, if you accidentally say something imprecise, it doesn’t usually matter all that much. But now, I feel that I’m always deathly terrified that if I accidentally say something wrong, everything can go up in flames in legal hell. Like someone says, “you implied that you were going to hire me full-time,” while I say, “I was just trying to be encouraging,” small differences in language are now infinitely more critical.
3. Don’t give vague asks that I have no idea how to help with
Now that the big two offenders are out of the way, these are a couple small ones that don’t reflect poorly on you, but just lower your chances of getting a response. The first one is having very vague asks or unclear reasons why you’re reaching out. I know, it’s a pain to personalize your emails. And honestly, I struggle with that too, because I hate writing emails and at some point my brain just goes on autopilot, and I really want to send the same email and just spray-and-pray. But since being on the receiving end of many of these emails, I’ve realized that when someone sends you an email that you can tell could probably have gone to pretty much anyone else, you read it and think, “I’ll respond to that when I feel like it.” Which is probably never. Also, be specific with your asks. Why is this the person that is best suited to help you, and what do you want them to help you with?
When student researchers say they emailed hundreds of professors and got no response, this is probably why. When I was in high school, I sent out 9 emails and got 6 responses from those, out of which I did get a research position. Tailor your emails even when it’s a pain and you would rather eat glass than write another email.
4. Don’t use me to outsource your decision making
“Should I do [insert activity] or not?” Students should please stop asking me this question. Or asking Reddit or strangers on the internet this. Like I don’t know, I’m not your mom. You know yourself better than I would from one email, and you’re the one that needs to know how to take accountability for your own decision-making. If you say something like “should I do science fair?,” obviously, my answer, based on my experience, is going to be yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s applicable to you at all. You also can’t take action on every single good option to pursue. Obviously, it would be a great idea for me to receive a Rhodes Scholarship, become an Emmy award-winning actress, solve world hunger, release a chart-topping rap album, and win the Millenium Prize, but that’s clearly not feasible for me to do even if I ask each mentor if I should pursue each of these individual objectives. If you want to ask actually helpful questions that help you make informed decisions, you can ask something like, “What factors led you to decide for or against [a certain choice]?”
This also applies to advisory relationships. I’ve had to learn this through trial-and-error about how to be a good mentee, so I’m also trying to work on this, but I’ve learned that a good mentee is not someone that updates their mentor on everything they do and asks for feedback at every step, but rather, someone that can take good feedback and extrapolate it several steps forward. Don’t ask your advisor every five seconds if you should apply to [insert program] or not, or if you should do [insert experiment] or not. Give them meaningful questions at important junctions and figure the rest out yourself. Obviously, be responsible and keep your mentor in the loop about any significant decisions, but for small, day-to-day decisions or things they would know less about than you, don’t try to outsource your decision-making to someone else.
5. Use proper punctuation and grammar
This one is a bit more controversial and it’s not that big of a deal, but I do err on the side of formality. For emails and LinkedIn messages, try to use proper punctuation and grammar. This isn’t a text message—don’t email a professional in all lowercase with no punctuation or grammar. I know this is becoming more trendy professionally, especially in Silicon Valley and in startups, but maybe I’m just old and think to myself, “kids these days, don’t even know how to write properly anymore.” This obviously doesn’t apply to text messages and Instagram bios. I text in lowercase and use lowercase in my bios as well. But yeah, if you meet a cranky old soul like me, it might go better for you if you use good spelling, punctuation, and grammar.
Real talk though…
This is most of my list for now. Perhaps if someone offends me badly enough, you can make the list enough for me to update it with another item for next time. Jokes aside, this is not to discourage anyone from reaching out—in fact, I love meeting enthusiastic people who are also passionate about what I love. But, my goal for posting this is to encourage better standards and integrity in the professional world. And I’m not saying this from my high horse. These were lessons that I had to learn personally and make mistakes in order to learn from, as the professional world can be incredibly confusing to enter and know what the norms and expectations are. But ultimately, as my blog has been meant to share insights, advice, and lessons I’ve learned throughout my journey, the integrity of how I work is a fundamental value that I’ve developed and hope to help foster among students.
