Guide to writing a Statement of Purpose!

A statement of purpose is a crucial component of any graduate program application. It explains your background, your areas of interest in school and work, and how you'll benefit from the graduate program that you're applying to. After reviewing multiple SOPs, I discovered that some common mistakes could be avoided. I will be sharing my experience with writing an SOP through this blog. I'm a Computer Science student, but most of the tips would be applicable to stem degrees in general.

I had applied to around 10 colleges for a master's in Computer Science in FALL 22 (unfortunately one of the worst admission cycles). I was accepted into the University of California San Diego, New York University Courant, and Texas A&M University. Currently, I am pursuing my Master's in Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego.

Preparation before starting your first draft:

Before writing your first draft, make a properly categorized list of all your work and achievements. This would help you to get an estimate of the total content you can write in your SOP. You can make multiple lists like:

1. Internship/Full-Time Work: All the internships/jobs you have done till now.

2. Research Work: Research papers that are published, and any research work which is in progress.

3. Academics: Academic achievements in your college life

4. Teaching: Any mentoring/teaching work(technical).

5. Extra Curricular: All the clubs of which you were a part.

Making an exhaustive list would help you select particular things that would strengthen your SOP. It's not always the more the merrier. Try to only select things in which you have done a substantial amount of work, which after reading would make a positive impact on the admission committee.?

After discarding the non-essential things, and getting an idea of what content your SOP would have, the next step would be to prepare a basic flow of your SOP. Creating a flow would help you while writing your first draft. Create a flow in such a way that it portrays your work in the best possible way to the admission committee. The flow that I followed was as follows(each point represents a paragraph):

1. Introduction

2. Why graduate school + Undergraduate academics

3. Internships

4. Research 1

5. Research 2

6. Research 3

7. Extracurricular + Mentoring

8. Why are you applying to this particular college

9. Professors you want to work under

I would suggest everyone create the flow which best suits you. After making the flow, have a rough idea about how much you would write for each point. Emphasis more on important points. I believe research work to be one of the most important factors while applying for graduate studies. So I had a heavy emphasis on the same.

Writing your first draft:

Once you know the content and flow of your SOP you are ready to prepare your first draft. Writing the first draft is the most challenging and tiresome job. You'll feel like giving up. It's not as easy as we think to write about ourselves. It would take you days to write it. Being patient and consistent would help you to prepare your first draft.

Post writing your first draft:

Congratulations! You have completed the most difficult part of writing an SOP. Now the only thing left is to go through your draft multiple times, and rewrite the parts which you feel are not good enough. Getting it reviewed by your seniors/ colleagues/ friends. Make changes to it according to the suggestions given by them. After going through your SOP several times and editing it, you will be finally done with writing your SOP.

After researching how to write an SOP for multiple days while preparing for my application process, I deduced some tips to follow while writing an SOP. All of these are my suggestions and not a thumb rule, you can follow them if you agree with them.

- Be precise and to the point: Some SOPs have paragraphs that go on explaining non-essential things. For example A story about how one was fascinated about RC cars in childhood and opened them to figure out how they work, and got interested in Electronics Engineering and then connected it somehow to doing master's. Though this sounds good but would hardly help your SOP. Instead of that, be straight to the point like: I want to pursue a Master's Degree in Computer Science. (the reason why you want to pursue it). This was the starting line of my SOP, I think it helps the committee to understand quickly what the student is looking to pursue and why.?

- No quotes: I don't know why but I have never been a big fan of using motivational/ inspirational quotes in the SOP. They sure are good but don't tell anything about the writer.?

- Grammatical error: Don't commit grammar/spelling mistakes in your SOP. Run Grammarly 10 times and check your SOP for any such mistakes.

- Respect the limit: Follow the limit set by the university. Each college has its limit. Some have 1000 words, 12000 words, 2 pages, etc. Don't cross the limit. Prepare different SOPs for each word limit. As the word limit reduces, remove the non-essential part, or rather keep the part that depicts your best work. I had prepared around 4 different final drafts each having different word limits. The most difficult one is having 500 words as a limit.

-? Correlation with LOR: Though you don't know what exactly the professors would write in their letter of recommendation, you would still have a basic idea. The work done by you under his guidance would be reflected in their LOR. Try to emphasize more your work done under the guidance of your recommenders.?

- Professors and research interests: Do mention professors under whom you would like to work. Make an honest attempt while doing so. I see a lot of students writing generic paragraphs and just replacing the names of professors for different colleges. This would not help you. If you are interested in working under a particular professor from a college, visit their website, read about their research work, see if your research interests align with the professor, mention why you feel so, and what work would you like to do with them. Be honest with yourself.

- Personal Statement: If you have to submit a personal statement to the college, remove the extracurricular part from your SOP and mention it in the personal statement.?

- References: Following is the reference material that I followed while writing my SOP. I am thankful to all of the authors.

1. Kisses of Death in the Graduate School Application Process by Drew C. Appleby and Karen M. Appleby

2. Graduate Admission Essays by Donald Asher.

3. Statement of Purpose by Philip Guo.

All the best to everyone for your application process, do ping me if you have any doubts. I am happy to help. Unfortunately, I won't be able to share my SOP.