Yolanda Chen

I am an AI researcher with a PhD and a postdoc at Weill Cornell Medicine, and I have published 34 peer reviewed papers, 23 of them as first author, at venues including ACL, CVPR, EMNLP and AAAI, with an h index of 17 and over 1,000 citations. Before that I did research at Microsoft Research Asia, ByteDance and Tencent, and I now run my own AI company. That background matters for one specific reason. Most PhD admissions coaching is done by people who are good at writing essays. I am someone who does the work your target programs are actually evaluating you on. When I read your statement of purpose, I am reading it the way a faculty member deciding whether to fund you for five years reads it: is this person asking a real question, do they understand what is already known, and will they still be productive when the first idea fails. Most applicants I meet do not have a credentials problem. They have a positioning problem. They list what they did instead of showing why it mattered and where it leads. That gap is fixable, and it is most of what I work on with clients: choosing programs and advisors that actually fit, turning scattered experience into a coherent research story, building a recommendation letter strategy, and preparing for interviews where you will be asked to defend your own ideas. I work with applicants across AI, computer science and computational fields, and I am comfortable working in English or Mandarin.