How to Help Doctoral Applicants Write a Great Statement of Purpose

To have the best chance of revealing their strengths, would-be Ph.D.s need a clear idea of what we’re looking for

Every year, I read applications for my department’s Ph.D. program at Brown University. The ones I usually see are from people who might want to work with me either as their primary or additional adviser. Reading each application, I always start by asking myself one question: If admitted — given their experience, skills, and interests — what would this student work on? If I can guess at an answer, I ask more questions:

• Does this applicant seem to understand what’s involved in doctoral study?
• Would I be able to help with this work, or is it too far outside of my expertise?
• Would I be interested in spending several years working on and thinking about these issues?

To guide faculty members in answering such questions, graduate programs typically ask applicants to write a statement of purpose (it sometimes goes by other names). It’s not a contract, and most of us will not hold graduate students to what they wrote. In fact, we probably won’t even remember what was in the statement by the time the applicant starts the program. Nevertheless, these statements are valuable in giving a sense of the broad topics that applicants are interested in and — even more important — how they think about those topics.

Unfortunately, our instructions on what to write in these statements are often so vague (“Tell us about your interests and experience”) that many students are not sure what to include. Most assume they’re being asked for an updated version of their undergraduate-application essay. Thinking they need to convince us of their commitment and aptitude, they tend to write an autobiography. They start with their intellectual origins, sometimes going as far back as childhood, to convince us that their interest is deep and longstanding. Then they list their academic achievements and describe how college contributed to their development — a trajectory they hope to continue in graduate school.

The problem with an autobiographical statement is that it doesn’t leave much space for information about what an applicant is actually interested in working on. This, in turn, makes it hard to answer any downstream questions about how well-prepared the student is to work on that particular topic, or how well the applicant’s interests fit with our institution, program, and faculty.

I tweeted about this issue in October, aiming my advice at prospective graduate students, and generated hundreds of responses from applicants who found it helpful. In what follows, I expand on that Twitter thread and offer suggestions to help not only applicants, but also institutions. Of course, not all faculty members weigh the statement of purpose as much as I do or look for the same things in applicants. But my goal here is to avoid field-specific instructions and to detail ways to make our application instructions more relevant, explicit, and accessible in any field and for all applicants.

To find the best students, it is in our interest — as much as in the applicants’ — to make what we are looking for in statements of purpose as clear as possible. While demystifying the statement would help all applicants, it would go an especially long way toward increasing diversity in the academic pipeline. Applicants who may not have gone to a top college or had great research opportunities will usually have less relevant letters of recommendation or experience. Plus, many research opportunities still rely on volunteers, and students who cannot afford to work for free have less access to research experience. For those students, the statement of purpose is a chance to shine, to show a deep and serious interest and intellectual readiness for graduate work.

But this is not only an equity issue. With vague instructions on our websites and applications, we lose one of the main signals we have for finding talent. The interests of professors and applicants are aligned here: To admit the best applicants, we need to be able to identify them; to have the best chance of revealing their strengths, applicants need a clear idea of what we’re looking for.

A simple recipe for producing a great statement of purpose. It isn’t a matter of checking the right boxes or finding the right narrative spin. The ideal outcome of a great statement is not just “getting into a Ph.D. program,” but rather, for students to be admitted into a program where they have a good chance to thrive — to do good work that excites them, with people they gel with personally and intellectually. It helps to keep that goal in mind when writing a statement of purpose. In most fields, doctorates take too long to earn, with too low a financial return on investment, to be worth it otherwise.

So, if not a compelling autobiography, what should your applicants write? I propose we ask them to produce a statement “in three acts,” each of which would convey a key piece of information:

• A clear and compelling description of the intellectual issues that the applicant is interested in working on.
• Evidence that they have the experience that will enable them to do that work.
• Reasons why this specific graduate program would be a good place for them to do that work.

The relative lengths of the acts can vary from student to student and program to program. Acts I and II might each need anywhere from one to three paragraphs, but Act III shouldn’t typically need more than one.

• What are your research interests?
• What are the intellectual issues you want to better understand?
• A Ph.D. is an opportunity to discover something that no one currently knows. What kinds of things are you interested in discovering?

This is, by far, the most vital component of the statement of purpose — but not because it defines exactly what a student will work on for the entire doctorate. Research interests can and very likely will change. But this section gives applicants an opportunity to show that they know how to think about research in our area. Our application instructions should lead students away from just naming subfields (e.g. “I’m interested in developmental and cognitive psychology”) or overarching topics that are too big to study as a whole (e.g. “how children learn language”). It’s OK to start there, but on their own, such broad phrases sound to us like keywords someone could get from browsing a course catalog without actually taking the courses. A statement of purpose that fuzzy would not typically give us enough information to admit the student.

Instead, ask students to articulate open questions they are interested in pursuing within the field (for example, “When children learn two languages at the same time, do they use what they learn about one language to help them learn the other?”). The key is to show, not tell. Anyone can say that they’re interested in a topic, but the strongest applicants show that they can articulate thoughtful questions and that they have an idea of how to answer them.

The most important thing to convey about Act I: Whatever people write here should be the real and actual reason that they are applying to graduate school.

As most of us can recall, it’s not easy to figure out which research questions you find most interesting — it often takes years after your undergraduate degree — but trying to do that is critical to being happy in the doctoral program you end up in. Because the purpose of a Ph.D. is to do something new, what you end up working on is necessarily going to be pretty specialized. Applying without knowing what you’re interested in carries a big risk. You might get accepted into the program and a few years later realize you just don’t care about this little corner of knowledge all that much. At that point, it may or may not be possible to pivot to something totally different. The more you can articulate your core interests before you apply, the better the chances that you won’t face this situation later.

Here, again, the best interests of students and programs align: Everyone wins if applicants think of Act I as a description of the kind of work they are most excited to do. Yes, that may change once a student is in the program. But when an interest is genuine and runs deep, it probably won’t just disappear. Applicants with well thought-out interests usually end up being Ph.D. students with exciting research programs that they can trace back to their intellectual origins through a winding but enriching path.

• What experiences, skills, and background will enable you to carry out graduate work on your proposed research interests?
• If you have written a thesis, worked in a lab, or helped an adviser who did something similar to what you hope to pursue in your doctoral study, please describe this experience and explain how it relates to this program. If your past research experiences are different from what you want to do for the Ph.D., how might that background be relevant? If you’ve previously done research on a different topic, is there an intellectual thread that links this to your Ph.D. application? Are there methods or practical skills you learned that you can apply to the new topic?
• If you have little or no research experience, how does your previous work or life experience connect to what you propose to work on in this program?

Scholars have many good reasons to become deeply and seriously interested in a research topic, and it is worth encouraging applicants to think through the connections between their past experiences and future goals — and specifically to draw a clear connection between the relevance of their experience to the research interests described in Act I.

One function of Act II is for applicants to demonstrate that they know what they’re getting into. For example, if they are applying to do research with infants, do they understand how frustrating that can be? Are they prepared for their perfectly designed experiment to be foiled by a participant’s socks being more interesting (not to mention tastier) than anything they wanted them to look at or play with? If a student has already worked with infants for a year and is still excited enough to apply to a Ph.D. program to continue doing that, that’s good to know, not just for the faculty member reading the statement of purpose, but for the applicant who wants to reduce the risk of having to do work they don’t actually like.

Act III: Fit. This section of a strong statement of purpose is the one that will change from application to application, because it’s about how well the prospective graduate student fits with the department and its faculty. The key questions that Act III should answer:

• How do your scholarly interests match with the department you are applying to and/or with two to three of its specific faculty members? (It is almost always a very good idea to mention and explain how you might be advised by more than one faculty member. A department will want to ensure that a single faculty member won’t be your only advising option. What if that person leaves? What if you don’t get along? What if they’re not taking students this year, but someone else who could be relevant is?)
• What are your reasons for applying to this program, specifically?

If applicants do a great job in Act I, we will usually be able to see how and whether their research interests fit with our own. Act III, done well, can help us see the fit even better, showing us that the applicant knows something about the kind of work that we do.

Over years of reading these statements, faculty members develop clear preferences about what information we would like to see. The vast majority of applicants, however, have never seen a statement of purpose before they write their own, nor have they been taught directly what the genre conventions are. By laying out clear instructions for applicants, we can help rectify inequities in graduate admissions and beyond. Of all the truly challenging access issues in higher education, this one should be an easy fix.

Original article: https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-to-help-doctoral-applicants-write-a-great-statement-of-purpose

Roman Feiman is an assistant professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences at Brown University. He is on Twitter @RomanFeiman.