Applying to Graduate School? - Tips for a Strong Statement of Purpose

For those who are about to begin or are in the middle of the often daunting and mystifying task of writing your Statement of Purpose for your application to graduate school, have I got some great news for you. Here are some crucial pieces of advice, tips, and secrets to accomplishing the feat of creating a strong Statement of Purpose. [Note that while the following advice may be used with the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences in mind, the overarching points are useful for many more fields.]

1) Some key definitions: The Statement of Purpose is frequently and misleadingly called a Personal Statement. To clear up an all-too-common misconception here, the graduate committee does not care one tiny iota as to whether you grew up on a hilltop in the middle of the Rocky Mountains where you where raised by a fundamentalist Brach Davidian who killed your uncle in front of you, thus scarring you for life. Nor do they care about whether you are a disabled lesbian Latina refugee. By "Personal" Statement, they only care about what you, "personally," plan to research in graduate school; they care far less about the why, unless it is very succinct and directly related to your interests.

2) By "interests," the committee is NOT looking for what you're kind of, sort of interested in. For instance, it would not be wise to go on and on about how you are interested in "the media." You have got to narrow your interests to something with a bit of nuance to it. What about the media interests you? Then, what about that interests you? When you can finally come up with something much more complex, like, "my interests lie in examining ways in which the media exploit the plight of orphans in war-torn regions," you might have something.

3) Go further. This is where the "nuance" comes into play. Sure, it's easy to point out how something big plays on something small, and how that is bad... but is there any way in which that same situation can be seen as good? What if your "interests lie in examining ways in which the media exploit the plight of orphans in war-torn regions in order to increase both ratings and awareness?" Now we're talking.