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Updated June 8, 2022You’re reading an excerpt of Admitted by Soundarya Balasubramani. Written by an Ivy League graduate from India, this is the proven guide for students worldwide looking to pursue undergraduate or graduate study abroad in the U.S., Canada, or Europe. Purchase for instant access to the guide and other exclusive resources—including sample SOPs, sample resumes, scholarship lists, and a private community with other readers.
Graduate school is not easy, to put it mildly. You are putting yourself through financial debt, cultural transformation, grueling hours of schoolwork, and possibly developing imposter syndrome.* All in the hopes of getting a job that will pay off for all your hard work.
thinkWhat is it that motivates you to go through this?
What questions are you trying to answer?
What ideas have constantly knocked on your mind imploring you to explore further?
Note that this question is extremely important if you’re applying for a doctorate degree, which stretches on for five years or more. Nevertheless, even for a master’s degree, you need to have an idea of the research that you want to pursue.
It is best for both the department and the student if there is some match between the student’s interests and the department’s research projects. It is a good idea to do some research on each graduate school’s research projects and tailor your personal statement accordingly. Statements that praise our department on its excellence in a topic where no current research is going on raise a red flag to the committee, and these applicants are generally rejected.Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology
This ties into what we mentioned for the previous question. Unless they see a fit between your interests and what they can offer, they would not be motivated to pick you. This question is also a place for you to go back and write down all the questions that have grabbed your attention while you were running a model simulation during your internships or sitting through a powerful presentation at a conference.
Elucidate how you plan on getting these questions answered during your graduate school, either by working under a professor’s wing or by leveraging the industry partnership program at the university (or both).
One of these days, while I was trying to implement a self organizing map, I wondered if a hardware implementation of the neuron exists. Isn’t the massively parallel architecture of the brain the reason behind its ability to process petabytes of data daily and swiftly? Google eventually gave me something: a silicon brain project, a chip that mimics the neuron; but I didn’t get as many search hits as I would’ve really liked. […] The brain’s processing needs to be simulated using a new architecture that is vastly parallel like the neural mesh of the brain itself. Has it already been simulated like this? I need more knowledge on the subject to answer such questions. This thought is only related to a subset of the vast subject that is artificial Intelligence. There is so much still to do in artificial intelligence that Russell and Norvig, in their book Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, state that “several full-time Einsteins” can work on it! I want to be part of the academic community diving into artificial intelligence.
—Doctorate Student in Computational Neuroscience
This stellar essay, along with many more, can be found in the Resources drive.
The nail in the coffin for the two questions above is your response to this one. Expressing your interest in a topic that is being worked on by the university would bear no fruit if you don’t have some relevant experience already in the said topic. A best-selling author does not start out asking publishing houses to look at her manuscript without spending years conducting painful research and writing relentlessly.
You need to show tangible work you did, along with the results.
We have admitted some students because of projects they talk about in the SOP, but we want to see results (publications, etc.) and what the faculty letter-writers have to say about it. The SOP itself is not driving this evaluation, but may help to put what you have done into context for us. The SOP is your chance to tell us what you want to do (at this point) and why, and to put all the other information in the application into some sort of contextual or narrative framework that helps us make sense of what you have been doing.Professor Emeritus, CMU