This article is a part of an ongoing series of articles on the Statement of Purpose(SOP). These are not just guidelines, but important donts that you should keep in mind while editing your Statement of Purpose. Should you commit any of these ten deadly sins knowingly/unknowingly, you shall face an outright rejection! (This is a not a prophecy, but a word of wisdom gained through experience).
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Don’t mention incorrect university references
This point has to be taken care of when you are applying the same SOP to more than one university for admission. People tend to forget checking their SOP for wrong references of universities. And they unknowingly send their SOP that is customized for a specific university to another university. For example, let us say you wrote an SOP keeping in mind, University of Southern California(USC). Let’s say that you write in your SOP about a professor at USC that you are looking forward to meet. You send the same SOP to another university say University of California, Berkeley without removing the reference to the professor at USC. When the admission committee finds the name of a non-existent professor in your SOP, they come to know that you have committed a mortal sin. They reject you outright — no matter how worthy your application may be. Be sure not to mention wrong references of names of buildings or departments in your SOP.
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Don’t ever copy paste
Never copy content from the sample SOPs found on the internet. Remember that those SOPs that you have downloaded from the internet can be also accessed by the selection committee. And don’t conveniently copy text from your friends SOPs. You never know, your friend might have copied from the internet. You might be feeling smug about your achievement of editing a copied SOP enough to make it look like an original one. But you can’t cheat the software that checks plagiarism. Almost all the international universities are equipped with advanced software that checks for plagiarism. Plagiarism is a serious offense in international universities of the UK, US and Australia. Serious enough to throw your application into a recycle bin.
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Don’t distort facts
While writing your SOP, you may get tempted to slightly amend your GRE scores or college grades to impress the SOP reader. You might think that there’s no harm distorting the scores slightly. Don’t ever do that. Never. Don’t mention false scores or fake grades. Don’t furnish wrong credentials. I have known so many students who furnish inauthentic certificates issued by non existent companies. Few students feel its perfectly fine to furnish false references, fake experience certificates. You may do such things if you want to put your admission to jeopardy. Be aware that most of the universities randomly cross check your references. They call your college/company that you mentioned about, and find out whether the reference was submitted by an authentic source. So never distort verifiable facts and objective things.
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Don’t commit spelling mistakes
This is the easiest way to get your admission *rejected* — write a couple of spelling mistakes or grammatical mistakes. Let’s discuss an example. Wear the shoes of a Selection committee member of a university. You come across an SOP where the student writes that he feels that higher education is impotent. The student wanted to mean important, but unknowingly misspelled the word. The spell-check that comes with the word software is not much useful. Because it can only correct wrong spellings, it can’t read your mind to find out the word that you meant in that particular context. The word impotent hazardously clears the spell check. Result — Your application becomes “impotent” to the university. Be damn sure to proofread your SOP for such misspellings and grammatical mistakes. You don’t want the selection committee to feel that you are a semi-literate person.
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Don’t criticize someone or something
Don’t rationalize your poor grades by blaming your college infrastructure or your teachers or your room mates or the education system. Don’t speak bad of someone or something in your SOP. Don’t use sarcastic tone in your SOP. Don’t blame anyone for your failure — may it be your team mates or your guide. Take responsibility for your failures. Criticism and blaming is a bad trait for a student. The members reviewing your SOP would instantly imagine how in future you’d blame their college for your failures. Consequently you get an instant rejection.
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Don’t portray yourself as a loser
There is no success without failure. Nobody is perfect. Even the highly successful people are not infallible. But, it is highly not recommended to talk only about your failures. You may sound like a life-time-loser if you speak only about failures. You may be a loser for few days but not for a life time. So it’s Okay to mention few of your failures provided you also talk in detail about how you overcame those failures. How you converted those failures to successes. You should sound like an emerging winner. Never expect sympathy or empathy from the selection committee by writing a sad SOP which tells how you have been failing continuously. And more importantly, don’t write that you are expecting your life to dramatically turn into a success by getting an admit at a desired university. The university review members know well that a loser remains a loser no matter what facilities he/she gets, until he/she works hard to overcome failures.
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Don’t be the sole reviewer
There is a nice analogy to explain this point. Bathroom singers like me, feel that they sing really well. I sometimes feel I should have become the Indian Idol by now. But when my friends hear my voice, they insist me to stop singing right away. They tell me that I suck at singing. To me, my voice may sound perfect, but what’s more important is how my voice sounds to others. Similarly, the SOP that you wrote may look great to you. Don’t become too complacent. Ask your friends to review your statement of purpose. Take multiple reviews of it. Your friends see your SOP in a different perspective. They would come up with interesting fallbacks in your SOP that you might never have thought about yourself.
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Don’t abuse flowery language
Flowery language when used subtly at the right places and in the right context, takes your SOP to the next level. Agreed. But over-usage of bombastic language makes the review experience of SOP reviewer, an annoying one. Many students come to think that their SOP would stand out, if they embed sophisticated words. Every 7 out of 10 students abuse flowery language. They write that they are superior species on the earth with dying thirst for knowledge. That they would turn the world upside down given a chance to prove their skills. Remember that a lot of students do this puffery. Do you think that an experienced reviewer who reads hundreds of SOPs an year in an average would be impressed to see a lot of sophisticated buzzwords forcibly injected here and there? In fact they hate such bloated SOPs which don’t have any material in them. Try to add some objective material that speaks about you. Include a few adjectives that truly and precisely describe you in academic angle. Don’t just push words randomly into your SOP for the heck of it.
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Don’t make it too lengthy or too short
Until and unless the university explicitly mentions a word limit or page limit, there are no limits for an SOP. That said, it would be a pain for the reviewers to read a 10 page biography. They wouldn’t be happy with a one page summary either. Try to fit your SOP in 2 pages and limit it to 1500 words. This is not a hard and fast rule, but just a pointer for writing a decent SOP. If there is a limit specified by the university, be sure to follow their guidelines. Don’t sideline the university requirements.
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Don’t write in an ego-centric tone
Your project was a success because of your single handed efforts. You have been successful in life because of nothing or nobody but you. You feel that you are Okay and all the others in your college are not Okay. The whole universe is centered at YOU. What do you think, such an attitude would grab you an admit? Never, a fair reviewer can easily see through your attitude that you steal others credit. So don’t steal credit of your team. Give due credit to people. Be modest while describing your achievements in your SOP. Use the word “we” instead of “I”, wherever you speak about team achievements in you SOP.
After I had finished editing this article, I had emailed it to a friend of mine for review. He had replied me telling that only 0.001% of students write their own SOP, rest of them copy and paste stuff from sample SOPs found on the internet. I replied him back telling that those 0.001% who write their own SOP are the ones that get admitted to the Top colleges.
One of the most important goals of this article is to unsettle the copy pasters — to make them think in the perspective of a member in the university admission committee — to boost the chance of their selection to their dream university. I wrote this articles to let the students who break their heads trying to figure out why their application got rejected by the universities they had applied for.
Special thanks to Srimannarayana Karthik and Sreerama Muthya for their contribution to this post. We hope that these pointers help you to improve your chances of selection.
About the Author: Sridhar Jammalamadaka is the editor of this blog, Interview Mantra. He is a professional blogger from Pune, India. He is an experienced programmer with expertise in Java, C and Micro Controller programming. He enjoys playing cricket and piano. Through this blog, he wishes to gather a large online community of aspiring Indians - students and working professionals. You can find him on Twitter at @sriavr 