Every student or office goer in India in his/her early twenties has to go through the arduous task of writing his/her Statement of Purpose (SOP) when he/she applies to graduate schools in the US. (No one is excluded here, since everyone goes to the US to study).
The SOP is crucial, but is it really as hard to write one as you have been led to believe? Not at all.
As someone who wrote his SOP many years ago, I would say it is much like writing an unreal, satirical article. There’s hardly any difference.
Here are 10 tips.
Here are 10 tips.
1. Always begin with a proverb
Always begin with some proverb that may or may not be related to whatever you are planning to pursue. Even if there’s no proverb, make up one and put it in quotes.
For example, say something like this:
The only mystery in life is why the kamikaze pilots wore helmets.
- Al Mcguire
and then add, “it is a famous proverb, but if it were true, research wouldn’t be happening in the world. There are millions of unexplained phenomena in the universe that attract people to the magnetic field of research,” and then go on to profoundly state how the greatest joy in the world comes from finding answers to this unexplained stuff (yes, this is what gives the greatest joy in the world, not sinful scoops of vanilla ice cream in melting slurpy hot brown chocolate sauce topped with crunchy nuts) and that’s what got you attracted to this. Starting off with a proverb in your SOP is as awesome and important as opening your bowling attack with Dale Steyn.
Instead, saying stuff like “I, ______, wish to pursue ___” is like opening your attack with Vinay Kumar.
2. You always wanted to pursue research since you were in nappies
Always use the phrase, “Ever since childhood, I was fascinated by how things worked ____.”
This is to an SOP what “tracer bullet” and “down to the wire” are for Ravi Shastri. An SOP isn’t an SOP without this line. When you were in your nappies, you might have wanted to become a pilot, cricketer, a train driver, an astronaut, a police officer, the prime minister of India (Rahul Gandhi, are you listening?) etc etc, but on your SOP, you always wanted to become a scientist and you had no other goal in life. Yes, whether you like it or not, you were such a loser.
3. You have always been a topper in your school, college etc
Even if you were a last-bench sleeper, a naughty, notorious prankster indulging in everything other than studying and scoring good marks, you are always a topper in your school, at least on your SOP. So feel good about being an unreal topper, at least! Okay, if you feel that’s a bit too much even to imagine, make it “one among the top ranked students.”
If you scored 80 or 90% and above, then you were among the top-ranked students in the state. Actually, in the country. Why not?
If you scored 60 or 70 % (which is actually a crime as per lakhs of Indian families, considering pressure and competition these days) then on your SOP, you DID NOT score 60 or 70, you scored “first class.”
Also, your school wasn’t some unknown school, because…
4. Your college has always been among the top 5 institutions in the country
Your college might have been so obscure that you yourself might not recollect it immediately, but on your SOP, it is one of the best, nay, the “most prestigious” schools in the country. Or, to nail it, say “prestigious school of international acclaim and repute.” Before you lavish extreme, unbridled praise on your college, just make sure it has a website that is functional and engages a viewer for at least 2 clicks of the mouse.
Anyway, it may be possible that your college may not have had enough computers or even 24×7 electricity. But hey, this is your SOP we’re talking about, in which, your college always had excellent, “state-of-the-art” (this is THE MOST important term to use) infrastructure and a great academic atmosphere (yes, even if classes weren’t going on half the time) that was highly conducive (another mandatory key word) to learning!
Also, your work for your college fest taught you management skills that no MBA will!
5. Your engineering project shaped your skills heavily
Your engineering project (which is quite unlikely to be your own) always helped you “hone your technical skills” (Yes, use ‘hone’. It’s a sexy word) and also helped you better your time management skills (In reality, doing things 24 hours before the deadline), fostered the spirit of team work etc etc. (which, in reality, is acquired better by watching movies, hitting the pub, going on trips etc etc).
Describe the project like it’s a path-breaking, earth-shattering piece of heaven that you created.
6. For those who have work experience, your job always taught you a lot
On your SOP, your job, the lousy thing that you can’t wait to get out of, always taught you a lot. You were always appreciated by your manager. You might have been very busy looking at Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Cricinfo etc but on your SOP, even those dull excel sheets you updated taught you the art of diligence and gave you great lessons on how to exercise due care in your work and concentrate properly.
Also, your teamwork skills greatly improved here too. (Do you even know the names of everyone in your team?) Okay may be teamwork already improved in college and that’s enough, but communication skills surely improved a lot here.
7. Your work experience somehow accentuated your interest in research
You might have worked on Java, Perl, C++, whatever, but all this somehow accentuated (Yes, not ‘increased’, not ‘heightened’. No other word is better! ‘Accentuated’ ROCKS!) your interest in pursuing research. I know this is like saying, watching Lionel Messi score goals got you greatly interested in playing kabbadi, but then this is your SOP, so it indeed did.
Okay, let’s get a bit practical. Maybe it did not interest you in research, but it provided you with proficiency and expertise (awesome words alert) in programming languages, which are key prerequisites when it comes to conducting scientific research. So you decided the time was ripe (Yes, baisakhi season it is) for you to take the plunge into the awesome world of research. See, not so unreal and yet amazing, no?
8. Pursuing research in X university is a dream come true
Or instead of saying it so plainly, you could say, pursuing research in X university is everyone’s dream and you are no different. Finally, after blowing your own trumpet for what seems like eternity, you’re down to the begging part. You might have gone on and on about your awesomeness until now, but over here, you yearn and crave for a chance to gain knowledge and give your best. (Yes, on your SOP, gaining as much knowledge as possible is what you’re craving for, not the green card, okay?)
By the way, X is most probably the university you heard about only a few months ago, or the only university you have a chance of getting into, if you have a not-so-great GRE score, but this part of your SOP is like proposing to your girlfriend – you have to say that X is the greatest thing since sliced bread and make them feel that they are your world.
Just be sure to check the university name before you submit your SOP though. In other words, make sure you put the right X, because sometimes, people send SOPs intended for Carnegie Mellon to Stanford and so on.
9. You’ve always loved the research in Y group, under Prof Z
(When I say his, I mean his/her. I am not sexist)
Okay, you’ve looked up this professor yesterday, and taken a glance at the title of one of his paper publications, but on your SOP, you’ve been his devotee, passionately following his work for months. Also, you were totally blown away (okay, not ‘blown away’, say ‘fascinated’. Or if it’s used already, say ‘highly impressed’) by his work and want to pursue research especially on that topic (list the paper).
Yeah, I know if he asks you stuff about it, you’re screwed, but this is not an interview. It’s an SOP, so you’ve stalked him for many months and you know so much about him that you’re the next best thing that can happen to him.
Also, the research group (Yeah, you can’t recollect what it is called off the top of your head, it’s okay) has always been awesome and most importantly, the work they do has coincided with your interests the most (Yeah, remarkable! This coinciding of interests is mandatory and most important).
10. “To sum up”: Re-iterate your awesomeness
Yeah, in the last paragraph, say “To sum up” or “Summing up” and then state your awesomeness again – say you studied in the best school, best college and that you want to continue being awesome by studying in this extraordinary university.
Well, that’s about it. Good luck to all aspirants. Writing a good SOP usually gets you admitted into a good US university, but for those it didn’t, don’t worry, the hours and days of effort you put into your SOP won’t go waste, because it comes with a couple of other positive ramifications:
1. It gives you the talent to write satire and articles for sites like The UnReal Times.
2. If conflated with some discombobulating words from Barron’s (‘discombobulate’ is the most popular word among all lists, btw) you are THE PERFECT spokesperson the Congress party needs now, more than ever. Go for it!
Writing the Statement of Purpose
The statement of purpose should convince readers– the faculty on the selection committee– that you have solid achievements behind you that show promise for your success in graduate study. Think of the statement of purpose as a composition with four different parts.
Part 1: Introduce yourself, your interests and motivations
Tell them what you’re interested in, and perhaps, what sparked your desire for graduate study. This should be short and to the point; don’t spend a great deal of time on autobiography.
Part 2: Summarize your undergraduate and previous graduate career
a) Research you conducted. Indicate with whom, the title of the project, what your responsibilities were, and the outcome. Write technically, or in the style of your discipline. Professors are the people who read these statements.
b) Important paper or thesis project you completed, as well as anything scholarly beyond your curricular requirements.
c) Work experience, especially if you had any kind of responsibility for testing, designing, researching or interning in an area similar to what you wish to study in graduate school.
Part 3: Discuss the relevance of your recent and current activities
If you graduated and worked prior to returning to grad school, indicate what you’ve been doing: company or non-profit, your work/design team, responsibilities, what you learned. You can also indicate here how this helped you focus your graduate studies.
Part 4: Elaborate on your academic interests
Here you indicate what you would like to study in graduate school in enough detail to convince the faculty that you understand the scope of research in their discipline, and are engaged with current research themes.
a) Indicate the area of your interests. Ideally, pose a question, define a problem, or indicate a theme that you would like to address, and questions that arise from contemporary research. This should be an ample paragraph!
b) Look on the web for information about departments you’re interested in, including professors and their research. Are there professors whose research interests parallel yours? If so, indicate this. Check the specific program; many may require you to name a professor or professors with whom you might work.
c) End your statement in a positive manner, indicating your excitement and readiness for the challenges ahead of you.
Essential Tips
1. What the admissions committee will read between the lines: self-motivation, competence, potential as a graduate student.
2. Emphasize everything from a positive perspective and write in an active, not a passive voice.
3. Demonstrate everything by example; don’t say directly that you’re a persistent person, show it.
4. If there is something important that happened to you that affected your grades, such as poverty, illness, or excessive work, state it. Write it affirmatively, showing your perseverance despite obstacles. You can elaborate more in your personal statement.
5. Make sure everything is linked with continuity and focus.
6. Unless the specific program says otherwise, be concise; an ideal essay should say everything it needs to with brevity. Approximately 500 to 1000 well-selected words (1-2 single space pages in 12 point font) is better than more words with less clarity and poor organization.
“Every person is born with an innate flair, the moment your realize it you become a great
person”. It was at high school, that my fascination for electronic gadgets coupled with a desire to
be a skilled programmer, prompted me to choose Computer Engineering as the major for my
Bachelor’s Degree.
During my undergraduate studies, I realized that the curriculum was exhaustive enough to give
anyone an in-depth theoretical background of every subject, but as an Engineer is it enough? I
needed to have something extra in my repertoire. In pursuit, I started involving myself in many
projects like ‘Time Table Editor’ and ‘Online Adaptive Tests’ and also got myself the tag of
Database Associate’, IBM Certified (DB2 Universal Database V8.1 Family) but my crowning
achievement was to be my final year project at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, the
institute for the academic elite of the country. I started my preparation for the entrance exam by
studying JAVA and updating myself with the latest in Network Security as this was to be the
theme of my project. After passing this first hurdle and another two rounds of rigorous
interviewing my dream was realized.
At IIT, as a part of a four-member team we were allotted a project titled “A Framework for
cascading payments in P2P”. The idea was to build a prototype framework for online payment in
P2P systems using Gnutella. Our project proposal was also accepted by the Red Hat Scholarships
program, which is the first ever open source program of its kind.
While working on my final year project at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai , the feed
back from my project guide instilled me with confidence with respect to my programming skills
and Computer Science fundamentals. This realization backed up with an excellent organizational
talent acquired through active participation in extra-curricular activities like, organizing the “Cric
Superselector” event (model based on the Superselector of ESPN), my winnings in
intercollegiate events like ‘Junkyard Wars’ and ‘Kwiz Arena’(Technical Quiz), and also my
voluntary services for ‘The National Asssociation for the Blind’ followed by many more, all
these brought me to the conclusion that I wanted pursue something that had a blend of both
disciplines, Computer Science and Management.
Sample Statement of Purpose
Management Information SystemsThe answer to it was a Graduate Program in Information Systems. An information system is
defined as “A structured, interacting, complex of persons, machines, and procedures designed to
produce information which is collected from both internal and external sources for use as a basis
for decision-making in specific contract/procurement activities”. The advent of applications like
high-speed transfer of images, video telephony and teleconferencing, coupled with the
availability of extremely fast processing elements, has virtually led to an information explosion.
Hence development of such highly efficient computer systems to manage large volumes of data
is extremely crucial for intelligent decision-making.
Hence now on the threshold of completing my Bachelor’s degree, I thirst for such a program that
would help me to acquire a higher level of knowledge, leadership skills and problem solving
ability to tackle the most diverse and intricate problems. I realize that a Masters degree in
Information Systems Management will enrich me by transforming me into a complete
professional and providing me with the raw materials necessary to get a winning edge over
others.
Having spoken my academic interests and other abilities, I would now like to talk a bit about
myself. I come from a family that gives a lot of emphasis to education. My father and grand
father both being engineers, have provided me with the best of the guidance to help me grow as
an individual. My hobbies too are as varied as my interests. I love reading books on Paranormal
Science and also performing magic tricks for my friends and family.
My passion in Paranormal Science was aroused when I attended a seminar on ‘Miracle Sciences’
at school. But at that point of time, the topic was conceptually beyond my grasp. The
‘grandfather paradox’ seemed like a fairy tale. But after years of reading, books and articles by
prominent scientists like Carl Sagan, Kip Thorne and Ronald Malett I got a grasp of the subject.
This prompted to write a technical paper on the same, which covered the theoretical possibilities,
practical limitations, available and proposed technologies to build a Time Machine. I was
selected to present this paper at ISAAC’03, PROTOCOL’03 and TECHTRIX’03 which are
intercollegiate tech fests organized by the IEEE and Computer Society of India (CSI).
Sample Statement of Purpose
Management Information SystemsIn the near future, my aim is to attain an advanced education in Information Systems through a
Masters Degree Program. It will provide me the intellectual stimulation, guidance and creative
energy to work on the cutting edge of technology in today’s computing field. In pursuit of these
goals, I decided to apply to the MISM program at Carnegie Mellon University and hence turned
down an offer, received through campus recruitment from Tata Consultancy Services, one of the
biggest and most prestigious companies in India. I learned from the University website that the
MISM department is noted for its “hands-on” approach to graduate education, complemented
with a strong theoretical program. I look forward to working with your distinguished faculty and
interacting with students from diverse cultures for a global outlook.
My long-term goal is to put my footprints in the field of System Designing through contribution
of original ideas and translating those ideas to develop high end applications and products. In this
endeavor, I hope to contribute significantly to the human society by improving the quality of life
and standard of living.
Sample Statement of Purpose
Management Information Systems
Dr. xxxx
Phd, IIT Kanpur
Statement of Purpose
My background in engineering and management has prepared me for a career as a researcher
and faculty. My aptitude and talent in interdisciplinary research is a great advantage to me as
a researcher. After a fulfilling period as a faculty after my B.E degree in Computer Science, I
felt a strong desire to pursue a career that combined IT with management and teaching with
research. This led me to joining the IME department at IIT Kanpur, which provided the best
post-graduation program for an aspiring young researcher and faculty.
My doctoral dissertation was conducted under the guidance of Dr. Veena Bansal, titled
“Bridging the Information Gap between Requirements Engineering and Configuration phases
in an ERP Implementation”. The motivation for this research topic was that various
researches stated that 90% ERP projects spend more than their allocated budgets and
exceeded the time schedule for implementation. The success rate of ERP implementation is
below 30%. There are many factors that can be attributed to the low success rate of
implementation but one main factor is the complexity of the ERP package itself. As there was
not much academic work done in this area, my initial research effort was to find the
underlying reason for the complexity of ERP packages and to quantify the complexity. This
research effort leads to a publication as a book chapter in Springer series, 2008.
(http://www.springerlink.com/content/l264055127332117/). One of the takeaways of this
research effort was that there exists an information gap between Requirement Engineering
and Configuration phases in an ERP implementation. This information gap could be
minimized by capturing configuration specific requirements while gathering requirements in
RE phase. Existing business process modeling and data modeling techniques were analyzed
and it was concluded that these techniques could not model configuration specific
requirements completely. Hence, a model called DAMC (Data Activity Model for
Configuration) was developed and validated by ERP professionals for the same. The research
presented as a paper was given the best doctoral paper award at the annual international
conference of SOM held at IIT Kanpur, 2008. It was also published as a book chapter in
Springer series, 2009 (http://www.springerlink.com/content/n64740378t3qn722/). The
dissertation was examined by eminent persons like Dr. Micheal Rosemann , Head of
Information Systems School, Queensland Technical University, Australia and Dr. Ravi
Shankar, Professor, IIT Delhi. The M.Tech dissertation titled “Similarity Search and its
Applications” mines the time series for similarity search. The similarity search finds out the
data sequence that differ only slightly (within user defined parameter) from the query
sequence. A model for this was developed in Java and was tested for the time series database
collected from National Stock Exchange and automobile industry.
Along with the research work, I have been fortunate to gain wide range of teaching and nonteaching
experiences. Teaching has always been my career goal, on completing B.E
(Computer Science) was offered position in the industry through campus interview , but
chose to be a Lecturer in Dept. of I.T, G.H.Patel College of Engineering (GCET), Anand,
Gujarat. While there for 3 years and 7 months, I taught courses for all the years of
undergraduate classes for CS/IT and also designed a new elective course for final year
students. As a TA at IIT Kanpur conducted regular laboratory sessions for M.Tech and
M.B.A students.I have been an active member of the academic and social communities at IIT Kanpur and
GCET. I was the Phd representative of IME department for DPGC for 2005-2006. At GCET,
I was a student guide for academic as well as other activities and also served as the warden of
the girls’ hostel for about a year.
I worked as an IT-Officer (Part time) with Symbiosis after submitting Phd thesis. Primarily
coordinating the working of the IT & ERP committee, taught me managing and handling the
IT related infrastructure for various Symbiosis institutes. The ERP committee work involved
vendor selection based on the requirements gathered for Symbiosis International University.
Subsequently took a sabbatical of 2 and half years to raise my children who are now 5 yrs.
and 2.5 yrs. I am presently working as a Faculty at International School of Business & Media
(ISB&M), Pune and teaching the ERP course for MBA students. I was a visiting faculty for
the QIP sponsored short term course on Enterprise Resource Planning Systems conducted
from June 18th
-22nd, 2012 at IIT Kanpur Dr xxx
My teaching skills, proven capacity for rigorous coursework in both CS and Management, the
research capabilities I have gained doing original research, and my initiative and experience
in student bodies and work make me a good candidate as a faculty at IIT Bhubaneswar.
Dr. XXX
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