HOW TO WRITE
STATEMENT OF PURPOSE
WHAT IS STATEMENT OF PURPOSE
STATEMENT OF PURPOSE or SOP is a Personal Statement of an applicant aspiring for admissions to higher studies in any academic course. Students are required to talk about their past personal and academic background, along with professional experiences, if any, and spell out the goals and ambitions of life. In this document, candidates have to justify, why this particular course at this juncture of his career is necessary and how can this education enable him to reach closer to his career goals. Universities worldwide usually ask for a 500 – 1500-word SOP.
IMPORTANCE OF SOP
STATEMENT OF PURPOSE gives admissions committees of universities a fair idea about an applicant’s potential and his drive for success. In fact, SOP is the most important tool for evaluation of a candidate as students literally draw a psycho-analytical sketch of themselves. Therefore, universities roughly give 50% importance to it in the acceptance or rejection of an application.
SCREENING PROCESS
APPLICATIONS ARE screened by admissions committees after making overall analyses of mandatory test scores and personal attributes of the candidates as reflected through their Statement of Purpose, Essays, Letters of Recommendations and Curriculum Vitae. Therefore, ignoring any of these would be a grave error, and may prove to be costly.
INDIVIDUALIZED
THE PRIMARY objective of Statement of Purpose & college admission essays is not to test your writing abilities, but to know who you are. Therefore, one should try to make it very personalized by digging out incidents from one’s personal life and not draw general conclusions. This would ensure your broad and diverse picture is portrayed before the Admissions Committees. Here, try to vividly bring out the strongest elements in you by depicting how you have overcome stiff hurdles in the past or outgrown your restricted circumstances.
MOVING UP FROM GRASSROOTS
IF YOU can show that you have risen from the grass root levels, it would prove that you are very much aligned to the realism of life and work processes. Again, if you can recall past incidents where you can show your flexibility of approach and how you adapted yourself to varied circumstances, it would demonstrate how you can outscore others.
PASSION FOR THE SUBJECT
FOREIGN UNIVERSITIES consider the degree of love and passion you have for your subject is directly proportional to your future potential of success. Your extreme sense of oneness with your area of study should be overwhelmingly reflected through the Statement of Purpose and admission essays. It should stand out as if you weave dreams in it.
LEADERSHIP ATTRIBUTES
YOUR ABILITY to inspire others and be their guiding force should project you as a leader who has the vision and far sight, which makes you unique from the rest. In your Statement of Purpose, application essays and curricullum vitae, always try to include incidents where you had donned the mantle of the leader to show a new path to others.
PROJECTS
ONE’S ASSOCIATION with designing new projects is the best way to portray the progressive inclinations of the student. Therefore, describe the various projects you might have undertaken in the past with relevant technical details. This would help you in demonstrating your drive for creating the new, rather than following the old. But one has to be careful enough to include past projects which are associated with the intended area of studies. Otherwise, they lose much of their significance.
NON-BOOKISH ABSTRACT LEARNER
TRY TO show that you are not bookish, and attribute your academic success to intuition, co-relating various phenomena and using general intelligence by perceiving things in abstraction and totality rather than studying for hours. For you believe, academically one can learn, but to excel things have to be perceived in abstraction.That is the precise Statement of Purpose Ivy League schools would love to hear from study abroad aspirants.
PURSUING A GOAL, NOT A DEGREE
TRY TO create an impression that your intention of studies is not for a degree or the University tag. It is primarily because you have an extremely innovative bent of mind and are determined to contribute something new to society at large by utilizing the opportunity of learning. For instance, think of a problem that plagues your domain of study and come up with a suggestion as how to solve it. This would prove that you really have a research-oriented mindset and would surely go in your favour. Say you are going for MS in Networking, and clogging of networks is the biggest problem that is troubling the industry. You may come up with a suggestion as to which method of research holds promise for bringing about a solution to this problem.