The statement of purpose, or SOP is the MOST important part of your graduate school application. This goes for if you’re applying to PhD programs, MA programs, Law School, Medical School, Business School, MFA programs… the list goes on.
Your application will have a huge number of different components to it: letters of recommendation, a writing/work sample/portfolio, a CV, and so on. The important thing about a statement of purpose, however, is that this is the only part of the application in which you get to show off who you are. This is your opportunity to tell the admissions committee what you’re about in your own words.
Different types of programs will call for different types of SOPs, and you should follow the instructions of the given program you’re applying to. This post is focused on people who are applying to research-heavy programs, such as PhDs.
What is an SOP?
An SOP is what might be considered a personal statement in undergraduate admissions. Some programs even call the SOP a personal statement, but make no mistake: it is NOT a personal reflection! This isn’t like when you were 17 and writing your common app essay. This isn’t meant to reflect who you are as a whole human, but who you are in context of the program you’re applying to.
SOPs are meant to highlight who you are as a researcher and a scholar, and illustrate what you can bring to the scholarly community at this university. The admissions committee wants to know where you’re coming from, and who you might be able to develop into from your time with them.
Note that this doesn’t mean that you need to know what your dissertation will be on necessarily. Especially in United States, and especially in the fields with long time to degree, like some programs in the humanities, you may be in a given program for 5 to 7 years. The admissions committee knows this, and also knows that you will likely develop, grow, and change over the course of your time there. Any project that you propose now will likely change.
What you do need to know at this stage is, generally speaking, what your area of interest is and the general field that you want to work in.
Parts of an SOP
A good SOP will answer these questions:
What am I interested in?
Do I know the field?
Do I have the appropriate training to do research in this field, or do I know what training I need to get before I start?
Why do I want to study at this particular university?
- What are my interests?
The easiest way to answer these questions is in a 4 to 5 paragraph or segment structure. Opening segment addresses the big issue: what am I interested in? In this section, you should talk through what you want to study and how you got there. Most people come to their area of study through prior research, so if that is the case for you, that is an easy place to start. You will want to highlight the work that you’ve done in the past and the unanswered questions that you still have from that work. Is there something that you wished you’d had time to investigate? Did you learn anything while doing research for a prior paper or thesis that you grew curious about and would like to investigate further? These are excellent places to start. Talk through your thought process in more detail than you think you need to: the true value of a good SOP is that it allows the admissions committee to see not only what you think, but how you think.
This opening section will answer the first two questions that I posed above. First, it will answer the question of what you’re interested in, and by talking through how you got there it will also demonstrate that you know your proposed field of study.
2. What is my training?
The next question to address is the question of training. Again, you do not need to know everything you would need to write a dissertation at this stage. The point of graduate school is to train you, after all. However, it is good to have an excellent sense of what you would need to know in order to do the research that you want to do. Prior training includes languages, archival skills, any programming or computer skills that you may need, close analysis, and/or any other methodological skills. The idea is to demonstrate that you know what you need to know how to do.
For example, you may need an extra year or two of language training, or a reading language, in order to do the work that you would like to do. That is very achievable either in the summer before you get to graduate school, or in the first couple of years that you’re there. It is okay to say in the SOP that you are going to spend the next summer doing this language work. What you don’t want to say is that you don’t speak the language, and have never taken a class in the primary language that you want to be doing your work in. That is not achievable within the span of your degree program, and suggests that you don’t have a good sense of what it takes overall to do the research that you want to do.
In sum, training refers to any skills that you need in order to do the work that you are proposing. You probably have these skills even if you don’t realize that you do. Go back to the first section and think about what you had to do in order to do that prior work that led you to the work that you want to do now. Most likely, there are skills in there that you don’t even realize you have.
3. Why do I want to study here?
And finally, the last section of the SOP is the fit section. The first sections can more or less stay the same for every program that you apply to. However, this last section needs to be individualized to each school. Admissions committees want to know why you want to study at their program in particular. Most of the time, people think of this section as where you want to mention the names of professors you want to study under. This is absolutely a reason why you might want to study at a particular program, but it doesn’t need to be the only one.
Any reason that a program is a good fit for you is a good thing to put in the fit section. This could include access to archives, historical resources, language classes, galleries, specific technology or labs, funding for travel, or partnerships with overseas or other universities. Anything that attracts you to this program and that you think would benefit you as a developing scholar can be mentioned here. In some ways, this is the most arduous part of the application, since it needs to be rewritten for every university, but in others it is also the easiest, because all it takes is a little research.
Conclusion
Most programs have a fairly short word limit for SOPs, usually between 500 and 1000 words. This is not a lot of space to fit a lot of information, so it’s best to be judicious about what details you choose to include. Try to cut down on flowery writing if you can. That said, though, the SOP is an excellent exercise in crystallizing what you want to do in graduate school, and also a great way of figuring out which programs truly are the best fit for you.
Since the SOP is such an important part of your application, I recommend that you start this first, even before you start working on your writing samples. This way, you can write a draft and then set it aside while you work on the other parts of your application and then come back to it with fresh eyes.
And finally, I always recommend having somebody look over your SOP before you submit. It is always a good idea to have external eyes on a piece of writing before it goes out into the world, and it will cut down on your stress and anxiety as well.
You can go to your university’s career or student support office to get this done if you are still a student, or if you are not, you can ask a former professor or a professional like me to take a look and make comments. You can find all of my SOP and graduate support services on my graduate admissions support page.
I hope this was helpful, and good luck!