Be sure to mention any prizes you may have won. If you worked while in school, tell why, especially if it was for a Faculty member. If you had any special experiences outside the formal learning environment that directly relate to the field of study you are interested in pursuing e. Describe any experience that demonstrates your creativity, dependability, and independence - these are important personal characteristics that Faculty desire in their students.
Are there items that need special explanation? They will spot peculiarities they want explained. Is there a gap in your years of study; did it take you more than the traditional time to finish your degree; did you leave to work to support your family, or to care for an ill family member; did you change fields; do you have related work experience?
All these are questions that need to be answered. Unexplained voids in your record make you a less attractive candidate. On the other hand, honest explanations make you human and the kind of person with whom others will want to work. Do you add diversity to the program? If you are a woman, a member of a minority group, disabled, or have another distinguishing characteristic that may be relevant, let the Faculty know in your Statement in an appropriate way.
It may relate to your motivation to pursue a graduate degree. Understand that under American law, Faculty cannot ask questions about many personal topics. Since it is unlikely that many international students will interview in person at all the graduate schools where they submit applications, the Faculty will know you only by what you write in your Statement.
What to Avoid " While there are some things that a Statement of Purpose must address, there are some matters that generally also should be avoided. Do not be overly informal. The Statement should be formal, direct, and appropriately respectful in tone. Undue informality or attempts at irrelevant humour should be avoided. Where do I want this degree to take me, professionally and personally? How will my unique professional and personal experiences add value to the program? Develop an outline.
Write the first draft. Demonstrate your interest in the school by addressing the unique features of the program that interest you most. Be yourself. Edit and refine your work.
Proofread carefully for grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Remember that a statement of purpose should be between and 1, words. Ask someone you trust to read your statement before you submit it. Making a Lasting Impression Your statement of purpose can leave a lasting impression if done well, Pierce says. Related Articles. In discussing these, keep in mind the following:.
A statement of purpose can showcase not only your past achievements and current plans, but also your goals for the future. You can use the part about career plans to address some of the following:. It is the responsibility of economics researchers to offer sustainable and feasible alternatives and recommendations to experts in all other fields regarding their most pressing challenges such as climate change and regulation of illegal trade.
Further, the intermediary between economics research and the implementation of its corresponding results is the policy process. Because analytical research and writing are my most well-developed academic strengths, as evidenced by my GPA, undergraduate thesis, reference letters, and writing samples, the MA Economic Policy Health Specialization program is an ideal launch point for a research career in academia with branch points into policy work in the social determinants of health.
Eventually, I want to complete a PhD. The skills I aim to acquire through this graduate training are crucial to the evolution of my practice. You need to make your statement as strong, clear, and compelling as possible. To achieve this, you need to be prepared to write and re-write your statement as many times as necessary!
Carefully review your statement after every draft to look for areas you could improve or elements you might need to add or replace. To get a fresh perspective, ask for feedback on your statement from people you trust.
An academic mentor can be especially useful in offering feedback, especially one who is familiar with your academic history and your goals. If you find that you are really struggling, consider seeking professional help through the writing center at your university or through sessions with academic consultants. Read and reread your work many times to make sure it is cleanly and professionally written.
Your statement needs to be your own. While seeking feedback from others is an excellent idea, expecting others to write your statement for you is not. Remember that your statement is meant to showcase who you are and what you can do. Plagiarism is both a violation of academic integrity and a misrepresentation of what your own abilities are.
For example, I discovered my interest in research questions around public health when I read a magazine article about the importance of play in combating childhood obesity. Do not try to show off to the committee by using words that are unnecessarily obscure or too specialty-specific.
Not everyone on your committee might be familiar with your research field. Always aim for clarity above all else. If you must use a specialty-specific term, be sure to define it to ensure that both you and your reader understand what you mean when you use that term.
When you think your statement is as good as it can possibly be, take a moment to check over the following checklist before submitting:. When I was 12 years old, my sister suffered a traumatic car accident that left her with PTSD, depression, and severe anxiety. Our parents did not really understand the impact of what she was going through and as a family, we never talked about it much, though we all could witness her pain.
So, through my teen years, I watched as a beloved family member struggled with her mental health. Though I did my best to support her through the worst times and assist her in getting professional help, there were still many moments when I felt powerless and clueless in the face of her suffering.
This challenging experience set me on the path to pursuing clinical psychology as a career. I wanted to question, dissect, analyze, and hopefully, understand, this mysterious phenomenon that had dominated my life for so long. From the age of 16 to 21, I worked as a volunteer at an after-school care program for children and teens from disadvantaged backgrounds.
While there, I met numerous young people, who had faced starvation, neglect, abuse, and violence, from a very young age, and who needed help to cope with the long-term effects of those early experiences. Working with these kids, helping them through events that might be unimaginable for most adults, further sharpened my interest in how trauma influences the development of generalized anxiety disorders and panic disorders, and in particular, the pre-existing conditions and underlying risk factors for suicide in adolescents with PTSD, anxiety, and depression.
Thanks to my personal and first-hand experiences with the effects of trauma, I think I can bring a unique perspective to the study of long-term PTSD in adolescents. Though my core interest in clinical psychology and the effects of trauma started as deeply personal, my scholarly curiosity and intellectual proficiency led me to academic explorations of this subject from a young age.
While in high school, I took up Intro to Psychology classes from my local community college and completed a Peer Youth Counselling certificate course from the Ryerson Center for Mental Health.
This academic exploration confirmed my desire to study psychology in college, and my coursework through my undergrad years focused on building a broad portfolio of the key areas of psychology, including Clinical Psychology, Cognitive Psychology and Behavioral Science, Industrial Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, and more.
I also took up courses in Biology, Physiology, and Neuroscience to better understand the physical pathologies of adolescent trauma. I believe this thorough grounding in the biological aspects of developmental psychopathology will help me to address the sorely needed requirement for cross-disciplinary research into effective treatment programs for trauma survivors.
Throughout my undergraduate education, I gained research experience that helped me develop the skills and knowledge I need for my clinical psychology graduate studies. For my last two years of undergrad, I worked with Drs. As a research assistant, my responsibilities included conducting literature searches, data collection, data entry, supervision of study participants, preparation of research documents, and drafting of participant assessment packets.
Thanks to this experience, I was able to develop my valuable observational and data analysis skills and learn more about critical aspects of clinical research such as programming computer tests, investigating study measures, forming hypotheses, supervising participants, and more. I also enrolled in Dr. Moreover, your program offers the chance for students to complete two research projects in the world-class research facilities associated with the XYZ University, allowing me to develop and perfect my research skills in the most appropriate environment.
I hope to complete these projects under the supervision of your faculty members, Dr. Sally Hendrix and Dr. Mirian Forster, widely considered two of the most brilliant, forward-thinking minds in trauma research today.
Their work on the endocrinological risks of anxiety development in adolescents and development of abnormal psychology in CSA survivors is particularly pertinent to my own research interests. Through all the clinical experiences and academic knowledge I gained in the last few years, my interest in the questions of trauma, anxiety, and depression continue to be deeply personal.
D in Clinical Psychology in the future. By seeking the answers to the questions of how trauma can warp an adolescent brain and what we can do to try and manage it, I hope to shed light on an under-represented area of psychology that sorely needs our attention. My undergraduate research was dedicated to understanding the ways and means of political participation for women in remote Northeast India. I became curious about the role of women as informal politicians within their small collectives where survival literally hinges on connectivity.
My time in observation of these women opened me to the idea that health and wellness can emerge from places facing serious food insecurity, poor shelter, corruption, and long distances from the center of national power. The extent to which women could draw upon their collective power and roles as givers of care in order to lobby local governments and participate legitimately in the polity was the very definition of their empowerment.
During my graduate work at [x] University, public health approaches to vulnerable populations were of particular interest to me. My research led to my questions about the role of social capital, defined in this case as a public good comprised of relationships and networks, in leading to better health outcomes amongst highly-marginalized urban women.
The mechanisms through which both groups of women, in Northeast India and downtown Vancouver, became able to rely on or reject peers, givers of aid or care, and the social and political systems in which they were enmeshed, are very similar.
I have witnessed how health outcomes can be a partial function of connectedness for women on the periphery. Public health has proven the best venue through which I can search for explicit, concrete evidence that individual and population welfare can be socially determined, by access to and power to make choices regarding housing, education, employment, income, political participation, nutrition, and transportation.
I see the centrality of connectedness, to institutions and peers, to the processes that enable an individual to access, choose, and influence. My current work as a policy analyst with the Public Health Agency within the Strategic Initiatives and Innovations Directorate is focused largely on reducing health inequalities by mobilizing action on particular social determinants of health. These enablers, including social networks as a form of social capital, are sometimes lumped, and incorrectly so, with the more tangible determinants, such as housing and nutrition.
I see these enablers as characteristics of favorable environments in which health can be positively affected: in families, neighborhoods, schools, communities, etc. My proposed dissertation research would fall into the broader goals of studying the social mechanisms by which parental social connections impact the eating behavior of their children as well as the way in which these mechanisms may vary across local neighborhoods.
My particular interest is the potentially causal nexus between maternal social networks, neighborhood environments, and the transmission of eating behaviors to children. In effect, my role would be to help operationalize maternal adversity and identify potential moderators on the effects of maternal adversity on obesity and eating behaviors of children.
The application of network theory analytical techniques will be a new endeavor for me, but I am attracted to the study of populations that are not necessarily bound by their geography but by common circumstances, such as maternal adversity, and, potentially, common health effects related to obesity and food behaviors. I want to understand the links between the nature and degree of ties between low-income women and how these ties affect norms related to obesity and food.
The School of Kinesiology and Health Studies is an excellent institution that is well-equipped to support new graduate students interested in innovative ways to explore social challenges. It is here that Dr. Moore is developing an important critical mass surrounding this particular way of examining social networks as enablers of obesity and food behavior outcomes among marginalized women and their young children.
My prior individual research experiences were qualitative in nature, relying on grounded theory and warranted assertion analysis techniques common to sociological research. I have experience as a research assistant on a larger project studying large, linked quantitative databases of provincial health and corrections data in my home state.
Also, I have a sufficient course work history in statistics and epidemiology to be able to make the leap to more advanced quantitative techniques, given access to graduate courses on the subject. Social network analysis is a fascinating way of quantifying social capital and social networks and I am very enthusiastic about the opportunity to study these methods and methodologies under Dr.
My parents left everything behind in Bangladesh — their papers, property, lands, family, and friends. It was an erasure of not only their personal history but the history of generations who came before them. As I grew up, I became passionately interested in the history of my ancestors, perhaps as a way of making sense of my own experiences as a second-generation immigrant. My mother started crying when I asked her for these details and photos; it was a traumatic reminder of all she had lost.
I consider this genealogical tree my first history project, as I combed through the internet using the meagre information my mother gave me to supplement my bare project board with a few details.
But it fueled a passion in me for finding out all about where I had come from, and from there, I developed my interest in the social, cultural, military, and economic history of south-east Asia. I pursued this interest all the way to college, majoring in history with a minor in anthropology, and it was in my undergrad years that my general interest in the history of south-east Asia crystallized into an interest in the politics of historical interpretation, especially in regard to women in pre-modern south-east Asia.
I credit a wide range of authors, thinkers, and historians with molding my interests and refining my analysis. On the other hand, the philosophical and sociological theories of Edward Said, Gayatri Chakrovorti Spivak, and Homi Bhabha provide the philosophical framework for how I approach my writing.
I have always followed my intellectual curiosity to take on challenging coursework and build a solid academic foundation for my intended pursuit of historical research. My professor also allowed me to complete independent studies and research projects in selected areas of my interest such as African American history in Canada and History of Hebrew Scriptures.
The study of such diverse historical topics helped to provide greater context to my primary area of interest; I found many interesting parallels between the experiences of oppressed populations in different parts of the world. With my personal background, academic proficiency, and focused historical interests, I think I represent an ideal candidate for ABC University. I look forward to working in an environment that encourages diversity, forward-thinking research, and cutting-edge investigative techniques.
In particular, I am very excited to work with Dr. Nina Gupta from the History of Southeast Asia department. One day, I hope I can become a professor at a top university such as yours, so that I can continue my research into the rich and untapped veins of history just waiting to be investigated, and pass on my love for the subject to interested young minds.
One of the greatest gifts my parents gave to me, very early on, was a keen sense of just how unique my childhood was. Whether the Coptic, Luxor, or the Grand Egyptian, the first thing I wanted to do each afternoon after getting out of school was to zoom into cool air of a museum. How did I end up here? What was the nature of my relationship to this rich and vast culture that both fascinated me and exacerbated my feelings of being somewhat alien in its midst?
This intersection of cultural and political analysis expanded as I got older and began to unpack the complicated colonial forces that played a part in both early and contemporary Egyptology. As I matured as a student, I became able to articulate questions that had hitherto lived as abstract uneasiness in my head. Curators and guides of many Egyptian museums were reluctant at first to really open up about the pervasive presence of English and North American archaeologists in the 19th century's antiquarian boom, but I was fortunate to have longstanding relationships with many such officials, both through my own wanderings and my parents' work.
As I began to ask more pointed questions, and gained the ability to explore museum records on my own, I became overwhelmed by how drastically the Egyptian archaeological "industry" had been shaped by British colonialism, and how this resulted in a still-developing tension between international exhibition and the local or indigenous preservation of civilizational artifacts. My undergraduate work in anthropology has sought to develop a number of theses in this regard, most importantly the need for efforts of artifact repatriation and return from the British Museum as a step toward more complete reconciliation after centuries of extraction.
Throughout my undergraduate research with Professor X at [undergraduate university], I sought to utilize careful historiographical analysis to better support repatriation efforts popularized by former Egyptian antiquities minister Dr.
These efforts helped mobilize the X museum in Boston to return a priceless bust of Prince Ankhhaf under Dr. Returning to Cairo for the first time since I was 13 years old was incredible but bittersweet in some ways. If admitted to this PhD program in anthropology, I would seek to capitalize on this personal experience. To this end, I propose utilizing modeling techniques common to digital-archaeological projects in Egyptological studies to support a more culturally-focused analysis of the flow of expropriation during the heyday of colonial extraction in the early 20th century.
I believe that object-oriented models of provenance can be utilized to support analysis of ongoing repatriation discourse. I feel especially passionate about forming long-term relationships with faculty given the scarcity of nuanced scholarship that addresses the intersections of anthropology, political science, and archaeology in Egyptological studies.
Teaching and research have guided every step of my journey so far, and I know without a doubt that this is my path forward as well. My road to mechanical engineering began with my dad unceremoniously kicking me out of the kitchen. This became a running joke in my family that, rather than knives or other sharp objects, I had to be kept away from screwdrivers, lest I end up taking the whole house apart. This all changed when I discovered desktop computers, and specifically GPUs, which I found endlessly fascinating in their ability to be easily disassembled and modified.
Although my free time during high school was indeed spend huddled over computer hardware much the way my childhood was, I became interested in the capabilities of redirecting the work capacity of hardware, and in particular the ability to reorganize the way hardware acceleration can be optimized to assist in Computer-Aided Engineering CAE tasks in manufacturing.
During my undergraduate work at X University, I developed an interest in machine learning while working on Dr. In both my senior thesis and independent study blocks, Dr. Specifically, I want to build on the considerable research on GPU acceleration I undertook during my BS in order to further expand upon shifts in both manufacturing and product design.
As abstract as this work has been in many ways, its end result would be to streamline workflows for product engineers that will greatly speed up the process of dealing with intractable problems relating to bottlenecking by physics computations.
Note: Your intended project should contain the promise of presenting something fundamentally new and important to the literary world. Here you have to be futuristic. Talk about the big picture.
What do you intend to do with the knowledge and network you would have acquired in the MFA program? Do you want to go on to teach creative writing professionally , If yes, where do you have eyes one?
Do you want to start a publishing outfit or a literary magazine? What other career plans do you have? Do you want to go back to your job?
If yes, how would the degree help in making you better at your job? Note: Ensure you close your grad school statement of purpose on a hopeful note. Show preparedness to start. Exude confidence. Express anticipation on getting in. Hopefully, these statement of purpose examples have given you a clear idea of what a successful personal statement looks like. But also, craft your SOP with the following tips in mind.
There is no hard and fast rule in writing an SOP. Just ensure that yours is well-knit, with flowing ideas and a fantastic rhythm. Keep it organized and clear. Stick to the manuscript formatting guidelines. As with everything else, make your submissions error free. Your writing sample largely pre-determines the success of your SOP. So, ensure your writing samples matter and are on the verge of saying new things.
Trust your story, your style and voice. The adcoms can tell when everyone sounds the same. This also helps your personal statement stand out from the rest. It matters so much that you have the right motive and that you show promise. Do not play small. Play confident.
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