Quark

I'm in a completely different area (literature!) but this looked good to me. My favorite bit was the parenthetical aside "where a paper I wrote on Laguerre planes consumed many happy weeks of my life" -- that made me smile:o) Your statement makes it very clear that you LOVE math, which is great. The sentence "One of the factors attracting me to Texas A&M is your diverse areas of research" seems a bit odd grammatically. Could you try rephrasing this? Something like "I would like to attend Texas A&M in part because of the diverse research opportunities available"? Or anything that could help you sidestep the grammar problem of getting "One of the factors" "is" and "areas" to all agree:o) I'm not a fan of the sentence "Any number of topics within those areas could interest me." I think you're trying to say that once you get to Texas A&M you would like to take a few courses and talk to a few faculty members before choosing your area of research. Can you just say that instead? And emphasize at the same time that you're really excited about research? I think that's the biggest problem I see with this statement right now... I can tell you're excited about math in general and also Texas A&M... but you need to be excited specifcally about doing research! Maybe it's different for math than for English, though:o) When you say "I have a good, challenging, high-paying career" I think you could remove the word "good" since it's so generic... and could would "lucrative" be a better word than "high-paying"? Or maybe you could use a completely different idea there? I get what you're trying to emphasize (that you alread make a good living but want to pursue something personally fulfilling), but it seems awkward to tell the admissions committee flat out that you make lots of money... they don't care, and they probably don't make lots of money themselves:o) I might be nitpicking this, though! You might also try rewriting the final two sentences in some way that would help you delete the "And" that starts the final sentence. It's not 100% taboo to start a sentence with "but" or "and," but I think you have to have a really good reason... and doing it in the very last sentence of the statement draws a lot of attention to it. Good luck! Edited to add: You use parenthetical asides in a couple of places, but then you use dashes for the phrase "we handle dozens every month." You might want to pick one or the other and use it consistently. I recommend dashes.