It’s almost December, so it’s about that time that people kick it into high gear to apply to graduate school. I’ve had a few of my close friends reach out to me and ask me to review their statements of purpose, to which I told them they were crazy for trusting me to know such a thing. But then again, that’s what I did two years ago to my 2nd year PhD friends, so maybe it’s not so crazy. I’m writing this to compile a list of thoughts I had on writing statement for graduate school applications.

  1. The “Statement of Purpose” is aptly named - it is a statement of your purpose. What is it that you want to do? And implicit to that question, why is it that you want to do it? Consider this as your thesis statement for your argument. For example, “I want to do a PhD so I can become a professor that does research in X”. Alternatively, “I want to do an MS to position myself better for Y job”. Every sentence you write afterwards needs to build to that point.

  2. Don’t tell people that you’ve been in love with your subject since you were a young lassie (really, I’ve read something like this). It’s cliche and people will instantly throw your statement away. Get right to the point and state your purpose in the first sentence.

  3. Be aware that most statements get looked at for maybe 3 minutes, max. There are a lot of great applicants, and professors have fairly limited time. You want to make sure that if someone is skimming your statement quickly, they can pull out the important points fairly easily. I like to do this by having the first sentence of each paragraph immediately say what the point of that paragraph will be, without forcing the reader to tease out the details.

  4. Mostly for Research Statements: Make sure it is clear what you want to do research in. Level 1 is simply saying you want to do research. Level 2 is putting in some work to ask a few questions about the research that you’d like to do. Level 3 is when you have done a deep literature dive and found a problem area specifically that you want to tackle. That is awesome, but by no means required (I got barely to Level 2 in my statements).

Overall, these are some guidelines for writing a good SoP. I’m attaching the SoP I wrote for graduate school here, primarily because I found that there was a lack of SoPs available when I was applying to graduate school in CS. I have tons of other thoughts that I don’t have time to write down here, so I’ll just leave it at that. If you have questions, feel free to email me at dkumar11@illinois.edu.