Crafting an Effective Graduate School Statement of Purpose

[Jeremiah Givens]

Hello everyone,
I'm currently getting my grad school applications put together right now (PhD program for physics), and I could really use some help editing my statement of purpose. If anyone would be willing to look it over and give some suggestions, I would really appreciate it! Also, if anyone just has general advice on what or what not to include, I'd love to hear anything you guys have to offer.

P.S. I don't know if this matters much, but the schools I'm applying to are CU Boulder, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, MIT, and Harvard.

 

[jedishrfu]

Welcome to PF!

First, we can give you some general ideas of things to include and exclude but it wouldn't be good to send it to anyone at PF to personally review because well you may have personal info in it that shouldn't be disclosed.

Here's some samples I've found online and you can search for additional references.

http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~natalia/studyinus/guide/statement/st1/outline.htm

http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~natalia/studyinus/guide/statement/samples.htm

One thing to make sure you do is to have impeccable English. Use a spell checker and grammar checker like Grammerly on it to make sure things are okay. Poor English will detract from what you want to say.

 

[osilmag]

The Purdue Online Writing Lab has resources to help with grad school SOPs.https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_...applications_statements_of_purpose/index.html