hello!
I am a first time poster (currently fretting over my application to Cornell) and the above posts have me mortified. I worry that I've gone too far in the other direction and treated my SoP a little too much like a project proposal. I'm a bit of a neurotic—and I know this time of the application cycle is ripe for neurosis—but I can't help but wish I had found GradCafe a little earlier... a reminder to personalize my SoP would have been useful.
But, the SoP has been written, submitted, and reviewed by my professors, so I suppose there's not much I can do.