So I have a couple of students who need suggestions on how to write their statements for graduate school. (Yes, yes, yes, I've given the whole fucking "are you totally serious?!" speech and told them that they have a better shot of landing a job in this crappy economy than in academia. Statistics-wise, at least). Of course, I wrote a kick ass one... once. Long time ago. Circumstances, I'm pretty sure, were quite... different.
I wanted to give them that absolutely fabulous page full of relevations from RMS last spring. I'm such an idiot for not printing it out. *headdesk*
So I ask... what suggestions would you give to a potential applicant, especially for PhD, on how to write a statement of purpose? Dos? Don'ts? Serious pet peeves? Particular favors? Ya know, these kids are actually real deal and I want to do them right with full of honest advice from real professors, not the stupid career services who don't deal with academics, only bloody corporate recruiters.
My three step solution for the grad students: 1. get a loaded shotgun. 2. stick it in your mouth. 3. pull the trigger....YOU'VE DONE THE COBAIN!
ReplyDeletea) Stop introducing personal information, as if your future adviser wants to know about your faith or hobbies. Especially your stupid faith.
ReplyDeleteb) This is the first of many professional documents. Treat it as a professional would. The unspoken message should be: I am serious, I am capable, I am willing.
c) Start with a hook and not an introductory-style paragraph. Suggestion: Do some first hand research on your own: if applying for Sociology, begin with some personally-researched statistics about a compelling social situation and then go on to talk about why you are so excited to study this and similar aspects of sociology.
At least, those that start with are the ones that interest me. And those that use A or B are in the tossing pile.
Oh yeah: and be concise.
Doesn't it largely depend on the discipline?
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ReplyDeleteA statement of purpose should describe one's purpose. I hate whenever I get applications from students who say, “I'll do whatever you tell me to do.” (Quit giggling, I don't mean, “I'll do ANYTHING to improve my grade.”) Students who have little or no purpose will need to be closely supervised. They invariably prove to be major time sinks, and they become mediocre colleagues, because they are uninspired.
ReplyDeleteA statement of purpose should therefore give a plausible, easy-to-understand answer to the question, “If admitted (or hired), and given a modicum of freedom and the resources available in our department, what would you DO?” It’s embarrassing not to have an answer for this. In addition to this written version, I recommend a student also have a snappy, verbal version of this answer, to be used during an interview.
To come up with these answers, it will help to know something about the concern to which one is applying, be it an academic department, business, or anything else. Therefore researching the department’s people, research, and other resources is a must, much like with applying for any job.
It will also help to know oneself: what is the student interested in doing with her or his career? Much of this, as noted above, is discipline specific. If the student is applying to a program in astronomy, for example, what exactly does the student want to find out about the Universe? Even if this does not match the department’s interests and resources exactly, as long as it isn’t a total mismatch, it sure beats, “I’ll do whatever you tell me to do.”
For scientists, Peter Feibelman writes more about this in his book, “A Ph.D. is Not Enough.”
In addition to a clear account of the candidate's interests (and how those emerged), the statement needs to make a case for why the student wants to pursue graduate study in the specific program to which he or she is applying. The Ph.D. is one of the last true apprenticeship systems. If the student's interests/goals are not a good fit with the advisor's, the whole thing is likely to go bad.
ReplyDeleteThat is not to say that the student should say "I want to work on exactly what you work on." That's usually a real non-starter too. Only the biggest losers want to make clones of themselves. Rather the student needs to show that he or she has thought about why the prospective mentor's expertise, and the department's collective expertise more generally, is a good match with his or her tentative interests (I say tentative because a lot of stuff happens in the first couple of years that can often send the student in unexpected directions).
Departments and individual advisors always have certain strengths and weaknesses. No individual or small departmental group can do everything or cover every possible angle of a particular field. So if the match between candidate and departmental strengths is not a good one, then the application is likely to meet with rejection. Sure, the prospective advisors can work some of this out themselves just by reading the statement, but by making a case for fit, the candidate is showing that he or she has actually put some work into figuring out why to apply to your program.
In my experience that is, more often than not, the difference between the very best applications and the merely good applications.
Nice, Archie! I'd add that the "interests and how they emerged" and "fit with the program" are more important than the "potential mentor," in our dept. We do occasionally have a laugh at applications that burble on about the student's wish to apprentice him/herself to Professor X, whom we know to be mostly in absentia, a horrible mentor, no longer taking graduate students, or whatever. Mention a handful of faculty members or an area where the department is strong, but don't hitch your wagon to a star.
ReplyDeleteRight on Marcia. And that's another reason why it is neither pushy nor out of line to get in touch with prospective advisors before you apply. That's how you find out that Sally Superstar isn't taking students, or Wally Walks-on-Water is a real asshole to deal with.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Marcia and Archie. When I applied to grad school, I was rejected from two R1s because the one person in each department whom I could have worked with was going to be on leave, long term-ish. I was sufficiently naive about the application process that it never occurred to me to find out about these things. And, of course, my application letters were apparently too narrowly written for those programs to know what to do with me otherwise. I always tell students to be careful about naming specific professors in their statements because there are too many unknowns involved.
ReplyDeleteAnd I agree with the "don't go touchy-feely" advice. At the same time, though, I tell students to sound like themselves and not to try to fake a professionalism that they really don't have. When I was an instructor at an R1, I had a really sharp undergrad who wanted me to read her application statement. She was determined to get into an R1 and I was convinced that she had the stuff to do it. However, when I read her statement, I was baffled: it was an endless drone of technical jargon, drawn from some very esoteric areas of the discipline, and while she stated that she would be "excited" to continue her research in these fields, it was pretty obvious that she didn't know much about them (or have an deep grounding in the issues that were at their foundations). Turns out that she had gone through the past couple years of a top journal in the field, read some abstracts that sounded sexy, and tried to craft them into something that would make her sound cutting-edge. I talked her down from this, and pointed out that the particular journal she relied on, despite its prestige, is notorious for producing technical babble on arcane subjects that many profs in the field just don't want to deal with. So, lesson: don't sound like someone that no-one wants to deal with. Be honest about who you are. Yes, we want you to be smart and interested, and to have a foundational formation in your field, but you are going to be a student, after all. We don't expect you to know it all already.
I did actually get into the program that I really wanted to get into. A couple years later, my then-adviser said that he remembered my application because I was one of the only applicants who actually answered the question that the application posed. We were supposed to discuss our strengths and weaknesses as candidates; most people, apparently, ignored the "weaknesses" part. So take heed, young scholars.
I can offer this, from my own experience - if you have some "difficult spots" in your background, like a long absence from school, a couple of bad semesters, or a lot of major-switches, deal with them head-on. Get out in front of it, but DON'T try to sound "pathetic" - "oh, my undergrad experience was so hard, won't you please help me get into the oasis of grad school" isn't going to be useful, not least of which because everyone will assume you are wildly misinformed about what grad school is LIKE.
ReplyDeleteI had a couple of trouble-spots, and I just said something to the effect of, "Yeah, well, it took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do, but, seriously, now that I'm here, in [major], I can honestly say that I've seen the elephant and THIS is where I'd like to end up." Be honest, be a bit contrite if your particular issue involves some major screw-up on your part, but do not fish for sympathy, do not lay the blame elsewhere, and make it clear that whatever issues there were, they're in the past.