What does a letter of intent for a conference application look like?

Question

This is for a conference application https://www.hcm.uni-bonn.de/index.php?id=5007

I'm not sure what a letter of intent is supposed to look like.

Answer 1

This is not a conference but essentially a one week training session. It is well funded by the German government. They want to know what you want to do with the knowledge that you are going to gain by participating. They might have fees and / or expect you to pay your own way, but this type of workshops are heavily subsidized, so they want to spend their money wisely.

Your letter of intent should briefly give your situation ("I am an assistant professor in my first year". or "I am in my third year of Ph.D. studies"), explain why you think that participation is going to be helpful ("I am modeling the growth of coconut trees as an optimization problem based on sentiment analysis of crabs and have therefore been trying to solve the fourth Hilbert problems numerically.")

The more details you give without being wordy, the better for their decision making process. You do not want to get an invitation if you would only be bored because it is over your head or because you already know all this. If you are in the sweet spot, it is a great opportunity and you might actually get some useful contacts out of it. By limiting the letter to one page, they force you to concentrate what you want to say. Usually, the evaluators are academics, who know the field, so there is no need to explain how the wheel works.

(And sorry for getting facetious about the crabs.)

Answer 2

Guessing that this is more of a workshop (tightly focused, everyone contributes) than a conference (more general, many observers), I'd guess that they want you to say something about what you might be able to contribute to the ongoing discussions.

If you are a student, you might mention your own research if it is applicable. In general, your interest and background in the topic. If you are still in "learning" mode on this then you might not be able to talk about much more than interest, I'd suppose. But they are likely looking for the majority of participants to be contributors.

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Of course, it would be entirely appropriate to ask them.