How did I write my Statement of Purpose?
Having selected the university that we will be applying to, next comes the most important part of the application process- writing your statement of purpose. Your SOP can either make or break your chances of being admitted into the university u wish to attend. There is this common misconception that an SOP does nothing but test your English and whether u are capable of putting together those 'is's along with the 'was's and framing something through which u can brag about how good and qualified u are. If that is the case, then what is the purpose of the essay questions that we answer in the GRE, GMAT and TOEFL?
The SOP does more than that. What we don't realize is that colleges ask us to draft an essay talking about our qualities mainly because they want to know what kind of a person the applicant is. They can find out or qualifications through our grades and exam performances. It really doesn't matter to them if we get a 1200 or a 1400 in a GRE. A guy with a 1200 odd score has a better chance of going to his college of choice than a 1400 guy if his SOP is better than the higher scoring candidate's.
There are some common mistakes that we do which can affect our admission choices. First, we take the SOP for granted and end up drafting a last minute essay full of grammar and spelling errors. If we send this to the university, the opinion that they get is that, we are careless and do not take efforts into doing something and as a result, they get the idea that we are not interested in their university because, if we really were interested, then we would have taken the effort to draft something really good and worth mentioning right?
The second mistake is that we prepare a general essay and custom tailor it to the requirements of the university we will be applying to. Though this is not a bad idea, it does have some drawbacks. For one, we will not be able to do a back ground study of the university and draft our essay. Two, there is always a possibility that what u have spoken in the essay does not match with the questions asked by the University.
As a safe practice, it is always better to go through each university's program website and list out the requirements in a file and use that as a future reference. I have attached a spreadsheet which I used to gather my details in. Hope this helps.
Once we have all the details, lets get down to writing the essay. For example, lets think that u need to draft an essay within 1000 words. It is not necessary to restrict urself to that limit in ur very first draft itself. Write down all u can think of the first time. It does not matter if it goes to even four or five pages. We can always review and cut down on the pages with each draft. Infact, an SOP is never perfect the first time. It just keeps getting better and better with each review. When I say review, I dont mean that u have to do the reviewing process. Send out your SOP to someone whom u think is good enough to comment on ur work. Send it out to multiple people so that u get an overall opinion. Improve ur essay based on those comments. To make all this possible, it is very crucial to have atleast a month for preparation and fine tuning of the SOP.
NEVER EVER do the mistake of copying content online and pasting it into ur document. The admissions committee is smarter and much more adept than u think. Don't think that u can get around them with plagiarized stuff. Much more than how good ur essay is, an university values the originality of ur work But make sure that u write ur essay without as many errors as possible. They will not select u just because ur work is original but contains dozens of errors :P
One important thing that u should keep in mind is that u do not put in stuff into ur essay that can be controversial in any way pertaining to religion, politics or society. Also, it is better to take a neutral stand if in case u want to talk about God in ur essay. Who knows what religious views ur application reviewer has :) The last thing that u have to ensure is that u stick to the format specified by the program u are applying to. Find out the document format type, font size and type, line spacing, the header and footer details and anything else that u are likely to miss.
That is all I can remember right now. I really hope this helps.
Cheers and Good Luck
Karthik Venkatachalapathi :)