This is not entirely the teacher’s fault according to me. Teachers are overwhelmed with a bunch of requests for recommendation letters. The students typically give minimal or no information about themselves. They simply go to the teacher an year or two after finishing their college and smile at the teacher asking for an excellent letter that praises them. How can the teacher help you if he/she doesn’t recollect any specific things about you? You can’t expect the teachers to keep a note of all the hundreds of students they teach every year.

The point here is NOT to copy paste recommendation letter from the internet and modifying it like most of the indian students tend to do. Those copied letters are useless as they say nothing about YOU as an individual. They speak of somebody but you.  And if you go straight to your teacher and ask for a letter, you may get nothing but an abstract letter that doesn’t pinpoint to the activities that you did.

Don’t give up. Don’t copy paste. There is an awesome solution to this problem. Take a print out of the document below, fill it with necessary details and give it to your teacher. This will help your teacher/professor write an essay that exactly describes the activies that you actually did and gives precise description your character.  Credit goes to Baylor university.

Coming back to the topic,  let me give a disclaimer first. This tip is only useful for those aspirants who have written Statement of Purpose on their own and are ready with a basic draft. I am certainly not a proponent of plagiarism and unoriginality.

The biggest difficulty that an average Indian student faces after having written a basic draft for SOP is polishing it. How to add Business English to it? I mean how to add words that make the essay sound professional, polished and sophisticated? What to write when you run short of ideas to write?

Don’t worry at all. Just get a prospectus book of a University that offers the degree that you wish to pursue. Prospectus Book only. Not an ebook or website of the University. Now go to the pages where there is an explanation for why you should study at that University. This page(s) is very important to you.

Let me explain you with an example how to proceed. Here is a quote from Kingston University”s Business Programme Postgraduate prospectus.

We know that undertaking postgraduate study is a major commitment and we want you to succeed, whether you are hoping to use your qualification to stand out from the crowd when applying for jobs, to help you gain that all-important promotion, or simply to expand your knowledge of a subject that interests you. We pride ourselves on offering you top-quality teaching, support and resources, and are keen to provide you with a programme that suits you and takes into account your work and life commitments.

Now edit these lines and write it from your perspective. Here is what I wrote for starters.

I am committed to undertaking postgraduate study as I wish to stand out from the crowd when applying for jobs. I also wish to expand my knowledge in a subject that interests me — XYZ subject. I believe that ABC programme at your University suits me taking into account my work and life commitments.

I hope you got the point. All the Universities in the world market their study programmes with the help of marketing material and prospectuses. They explain in great detail how an educational degree from their University can benefit you in your professional life. A simple trick is to take inspiration from their ideas and make them yours. The more prospectuses you refer, the more ideas you get, the better. But beware, don’t use the prospectus of the University that you are applying for!

Is this not a KEKA idea?

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

Below, I have listed five of the common but weird reasons for which people come to study in the UK .

1. Dowry

   Many Indian families wish to give their daughters to a person who has studied overseas or holds a good job overseas. Overseas tag when attached to a bachelor’s profile increases his “market-value” in the marriage circles and fetch him a lot of money as dowry. Take the case of my roommate who thinks it’s absolutely worthless studying here in the UK. He enjoys his life most of the time than study. One day, I got a chance to speak to his father. I told him about my concern about his son’s future. His response was a bit unexpected. He coolly said, “Don’t worry beta, let him enjoy his life. I have everything planned for him when he gets back to India. I’ve arranged a girl for him in my community. Her father is going to pay 30 million rupees as dowry as he studied in the UK.” I was like whoa man I should have a dad like that.

2. Sham Marriage

   This is one of the desperate reason for which people come to study in the UK. Acquiring permanent citizenship in the UK takes a long time. For an outsider, it takes at least 10 years, that too after satisfying the complex point system to qualify as a citizen. But there are some loop holes by which immigrants can get a permanent citizenship in less than 5 years. The most prominent loop hole is a sham marriage. This is an agreement of marriage between a British or an European Union citizen and an non European immigrant. Few students come to the UK with the sole reason of settling in this country quickly to enjoy the benefits of being a British passport holder.

3. Dependent Visa

   Work permit in the UK is not so easy to get when you apply it from India. But, there are ways by which people can legally work full time in the UK. One such prominent way for married couples is the dependent visa scheme. One of the person from the couple especially the girl comes to the UK as a student and applies for dependent visa of her fiance. Once he gets into the country, it will be comparatively easy for him to get a job and settle here. The husband of the girl about whom I had mentioned above, is now doing a full time job as a sales assistant in a retail clothing outlet earning around 2000 pounds a month.

4. Part time work

   Minimum wage level in the UK is 5.73£ p/hr which is equivalent to around 400 Indian rupees. For people who are keen in earning money and have an average academic scores tend to come to the UK on a student visa. With part time jobs being not too hard to find, people tend to look out for earning more working odd jobs rather than studying.

5. To be one of them

   This might seem a little out of context, but is definitely true. With a lot of western culture already imbibed, a modern Indian always fancies being one of the westerners. This might not be the sole reason of coming to the UK, but it is definitely one of the subconscious reasons. This inner desire becomes profound after landing in the UK. People tend to change their way of speaking, dressing sense, eating habits and also some of the cultural habits like clubbing, one night stands, binge drinking and drugs to mingle with Westerners and eventually adopt to be one of them.