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purpose
From: thane
Thanks for all of the quick responses!
following in my compilation:
1. original query
2. SOPs
3. Remaining comments
"Bragging" is a personal style. Some people feel comfortable and some don't.
Someone may be get selected to graduate school by bragging, but whether he/she
can complete his/her graduate work is another story. I still remember there was
a guy sponsored by Bell Lab in my class when I was at the graduate school.
He is "Mr. B.S.". I did the first project with him and the other woman.
After two weeks, we told him that we do not want him as our partner.
He B.S. or bragged about anything he wanted but no one was willing to do projects
with he any more.
Best wishes to your graduate study!
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I've been told they want you to state a specific topic you would be
interested in, even if you really have no idea. You can change your
mind later in most schools without much trouble. Some schools may
use this to assign you an advisor, though, so be careful to do it in
such a way that this will likely work out for you if you are applying
to a school that assigns advisors before you get there.
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My impression is that the statement of purpose isn't very important in
the decision to admit. When I participated in admissions I read all
of the statements and some of the others on the committee also did
this, but many committee members ignored it all together. At least
for this school (in the "top five") what counted most were the
quantifiable things: grades, letters, and GREs. The statements are
useful for two purposes: explaining any anomolies in your record and
helping the committee determine what area(s) you are interested in
order to gauge how many students in each area will be entering the
department. Of course most forms require you to state your area
somewhere other than the letter, but this is a useful place to mention
the names of faculty members with whom you would like to work, if you
are familiar with what work they do. This strategy is useful only if
you've had some kind of contact with the faculty member, but can
backfire if that faculty member doesn't know you and isn't impressed
by your record.
Other than these two things, I would be sure to state any kind of
research experience you have had, and put it in its best light. The
committee wants to accept people who can show they have strong
potential for excelling in research. Of course this advice doesn't
apply if you are trying to be admitted for a master's degree, as
opposed to a PhD.
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Kay I'm no expert, but when I did my statement of purpose I assumed the
purpose was for the dept to which I was applying to see whether
there was a good match between my interests and the interests of
someone on the faculty there. I just described the kinds of questions
I found interesting and issues I wanted to study, all in pretty
general terms, and I was pretty upfront about the fact that I
wanted to explore several areas before settling on one. I hope
some folks who have been on the other end of the process will
answer and say what they looked for.
(By the way, I did get into a top-3 dept, so I think my statement
wasn't completely wrong-headed.)
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Kay,
In my opinion, a statement of purpose is where you tell the professors why
you want to go to graduate school. When I read applications, I want to
know *why* this person wants to go through the pain of several more years
of very difficult classes, a lot of "hoops", late late nights for no pay,
etc. Why do you want that unpleasantness for the next 6-8 years of your
life when you could be out making $40K a year for a 40-hour work week what is it that *you* want to do in the world that you can't do without a
PhD? What makes you think you want to do whatever-it-is and what makes you
think you can't do it without a PhD?
BTW, this doesn't apply for a masters - a masters is short, not that much
different from an undergraduate degree (there not as painful) and gets you
more money when you get out - so the motivations are pretty obvious. PhD
programs on the other hand are much more difficult, much longer, and mostly
degrading and demoralizing unless you have a "vision", a "burning desire"
that will see you through. The statement of purpose is the place to discuss
that burning desire.
You can use my name.
Bonnie
Bonnie E. John
Assistant Professor
Computer Science and Psychology Departments
Human-Computer Interaction Institute
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh PA 15213
Phone: 412-268-7182
FAX:
412-681-5739
E-mail: bej@cs.cmu.edu
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The essay should indicate what you want to study and why. It is used
to determine if the applicant's interests have any relevance to what
the department can offer, if the applicant seems to have any true
interest in the subject, and the depth of the interest. Bad statements
convey the attitude of "graduate school is what comes after 16th grade",
or "I didn't like physics so I decided to try something else". Good
statements do not brag (tangible accomplishments should be documented
as grades, awards, etc. in other parts of the application), but they do
relate experience with desire, e.g. "liked theory courses, especially
interested in graph theory, have experimented with traveling salesman
algorithms." The statement should have some indication of how graduate
study fits into post-graduate plans (something more than "it would be
good to have a graduate degree.")
Having said all that, I'll go on to venture the opinion that the essay
isn't very important. Most statements are so very bland and careful
that they are disregarded.
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Kay,
I'm so sorry nobody came forward with a copy of the compilation! Perhaps
someone would offer her copy after your plea. I know the sort of anxiety
one has when writing a statement of purpose, I had been there myself.
Some books in the library/book store can be useful in pointing out what
sort of things faculty and school officials are looking for in an applicant.
I remember one book says that while writing an UNDERgrad essay the emphasis is
to appear MATURE, in writing a GRADuate essay, on the other hand, the emphasis
is to appear PROFESSIONAL. You can certainly talk about what interests you
and what you've acomplished in your college career, but more importantly you
have to project yourself as one who's eager to pursue graduate studies in the
field: you have to show that you love CS and you know what you want to do in
grad school. I know that last point must sound unreasonable (how do you know
what you can do in grad school?), but as my advisor at MIT used to say, "We
know regardless of what students put on their applications they're going to
change their mind some time along the way, we never expect them to really do
what they say they'd do on their essays. It's just that we'd like to hear
what sort of interests and professional aspirations they've, and what they
think of their work and CS in general." Something like that. You know,
faculties just want to see whether the applicant "has a clue" or not.
Also make sure not just the content but the presentation is equally
professional: I'd definitely get it printed on a nice laser printer, 10-12 pts
Times font + 1-1.5 spacing would look good.
Good luck!
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Kay,
When I applied to grad school almost 6 years ago, the story I heard
was that it didn't really matter what you said in your essay, as
long as you had an idea of what you wanted to do. I had no idea what
I wanted to study, so I picked a topic that sounded interesting and
wrote about that. I also tried to talk about my past experiences,
including internships and a small research project at school, and why
I thought that they would help me in grad school. I also talked about
why I wanted to go to grad school, and I think I even mentioned my
extra-curricular activities (I was involved many student organizations)
saying that I had learned how to work with other people very well
(alot of research is done collaboratively). If I can find my old essay, I
will send it along. I think it's on a Mac disk somewhere. It must
have been okay, since I got accepted at the top three schools (in EE).
I did not end up studying anything even remotely related to what I
wrote about in my essay.
Now I am almost done with my Ph.D., and this year I sat on the admissions
committee at Berkeley. I read about a hundred applications, and I think
that the advice that I had gotten was actually not too bad. The way
that the process works is that the applications are sent out to the professors
to read, which professor reads your app. is chosen by the area of interest
stated in your application. The most important part of the application is
the letters of recommendation. If another professor at a good school thinks
that the student will make a good Ph.D., that goes much farther than GRE
scores or even grades (although both are important). Most people don't have
such letters, and so grades and scores factor in more heavily. From
what I saw, the essays were mostly a +/- sort of thing. A really good essay
might get you a +, a really bad one will work against you, but most of them
are middle of the road and don't count for all that much. If your essay
is really specific about exactly what you want to do, that could work
either for or against. If one of the professors gets excited about
your ideas, you have a much better chance to get in. (If you really have
such great ideas, you might be better off telling the professor you
think will be most interested over email. Don't depend on luck for the
right person to read your application.) However, if you say you really
want to study a very specific problem in area X and the department
feels that they have no faculty in that area, or the one person in that
area is on sabbatical, or not taking any new students, or very short on
funds, or that person is just not interested in your specific problem
(and thus is not excited about having you as a student), then you will
have a worse chance of getting in.
What you might not know is that admissions are done by area (at least here
at Berkeley). The department can admit N students. Area 1 gets n1 slots,
area 2 gets n2 slots, etc, and each area decides which students to admit.
Since there are some areas with lots of students applying, it is very hard
to get into those areas. Some areas have very few students applying, and
thus it may be "easier" to get in. It really works against you though, if
you apply to area 2, thinking that it will get you in, and then try to
switch to area 1, which is more popular. In the most popular areas, it can
be really hard to find an adviser, get funding, etc. That is why they do
the admissions by area, they actually admit only as many students in each
area as they feel they can support (both financially and with advisers).
A few always end up switching, but they do try to keep it balanced. But if
you honestly don't know what you want to study, and you can find out what
areas are easier to get into at the school you really want to go to, you
might want to consider this.
My advice to you, if you don't really know yet what you want to do, is
to choose a topic that sounds interesting (nothing so narrow as a Ph.D.
topic, but an area that is well-defined enough) and learn something about
it, try to read a couple of papers, or better yet talk to people at your
school who are working in that area. Then write a general essay about why
you think the topic would be interesting to study, and what skills/experiences
in your background/schoolwork would help you do research in that field.
It probably helps if you know enough about what is going on at the schools
you are applying to to be able to mention that in your essay. Most people
don't do this at all. I don't think you don't need to "brag" in the sense
that you just detail all your accomplishments and assert that you're going
to be the hottest new grad this year. Definately you should sound intelligent,
interested in or even fascinated by the topic you have chosen, and also
confident. Like I said before, you should talk about how your past experiences
will help you in grad school. Try not to sound wishy-washy, or like you are
going to grad school because you don't know what else to do, and you have
no idea what you want to study.
==========================================================================
my statement of purpose was quite definite in what i
wanted to do, and while that apparently was appealing
to some (ie, berkeley offered me a 3-year graduate
fellowship for the phd program in cs, and i got
an nsf 3-year graduate research fellowship),
to others, i was 'too focussed' (hertz fellowship
interviewer). my impression is that being
very focussed will make you appealing to those
who agree with your focus, and unappealing to
those who disagree with your focus. if you
say it all fascinates you, and have great
grades and letters and gre scores, then i
can't imagine anyone being unhappy. they'll
probably try to recruit you for their favorite
field/research project.
========================================================================
Kay,
Thanks for offering to make this compilation.
Remember, the
Tasteful humor
Good luck!
===========================================================================
I would suggest you try to be as specific as you can about something
that excites you in your statement of purpose. Being specific, gives them
something concrete to evaluate you on. I did something along the lines of
the following:
My interest in CS began when I found that the most interesting
discussions in a linguistics course (on syntax and semantics)
were not those among linguistics students but rather the CS grad
students in AI. I dicovered that computers can generate examples
and test theories much more effectively than can humans, making
weaknesses obvious much more quickly than is possible using traditional
methods. I began taking CS courses to equip myself to use this tool
and over time, my fascination with computers continues to increase.
Simulation and modeling are analytic methods that are appropriate
to many types of problems. I'd like to develop these areas, using
computers. In the long term, I would like to either continue developing
tools or use my understanding of the tools by applying them to set up
and solve real-world problems.
=============================================================================
I'm just a graduate student, but my advisor has served on and chaired
our admissions committee and he has been very open about why they ask
for a statement of purpose and what they look for in reading them.
According to him, the number one purpose of this essay is to determine
(as much as possible) that department and potential student will form a
good match.
There are two main issues here. First, no school does everything. It
is extremely unlikely that you will be able to complete a dissertation
in a topic that is not supported by at least one professor in that
department. For example, I think that my institution is a pretty good
one - but we don't do robotics at all. If you think that robotics is
an area that you will likely want to explore, you should be applying to
a school that does robotics, because you simply will not be able to do
that here.
Assuming that the department does the things that you want to do, the
second major issue is whether the professor(s) that you are likely to
want to work with are accepting students at this time. I once saw a
student travel halfway around the world in order to work with a
particular professor - only to discover after he arrived that the
professor in question was not accepting new students.
Finally, I don't believe that anyone expects you to know exactly what
you want to do. But they do expect you to have done some basic
Application
document. You need to show it to the people who will write your
reference letters; you should also show them a resume. You do
this because it is your job to teach them what letter they should
write.
After you give them this information, you deserve to get some
information from them, so you need to ask them some questions:
a)
b)
c)
d)
e)
jmankoff@cs.oberlin.edu, csmc@cs.oberlin.edu