D. Malorkus

Vanderbilt requital e-mail arrived about an hour ago. Went 0 for 9 last year. Am awfully pleased.

Fourthed, and counting on it.

Thwarted by Carla Trujillo, Ph.D.! Though: the hopes-dashing Dr. Trujillo does also say "1 to 1 ½ pages." With judicious character spacing, a page and a half single-spaced can easily fit a thousand words.

Am I suffering from wishful blindness or has Berkeley quietly relaxed the word/page limit for its SOP? My spreadsheet says "~500 w. or 2 pp." for the SOP and the Personal History Statement, and I must have gotten that from somewhere, but when I went to double check earlier, I couldn't find a length requirement listed anywhere. I've checked on the SOP and PHS sections of the online app., the admission and prospective student information pages on the department's website and the department and grad school's admissions FAQs. I feel like it must be right in front of me or that it's somewhere I'm not looking, and I'm not seeing it or remembering where it is because I don't want to have to squeeze another 200 words out of my SOP. On the other hand, I really don't want to squeeze another 200 words out of my SOP.

I'm writing a new paper, tailored to complement my SOP. It's been three years since I finished my MA, and the work I'm proposing to do now is pretty different from the work I was doing before. I've been reading and taking notes towards the paper since August -- at this point, I've done about as much research as I did for my MA thesis -- but I'm only just starting to write it. I recommend this approach to anyone who likes the application process okay but wishes it were more stressful.

Seconded. And the idea of a Dropbox folder is an excellent one.

Claptrap: thanks. Sebastian, Lorax: you're certainly right, there's no formula. (This is not, thank god, the writing section of the GRE.) What I'm after is, more, whether there's anything slipperier than a formula -- a tone or type of decorum or sense of audience or... something -- that a lot of successful SOPs have in common. Whether there's anything about those SOPs that it would be useful to get a feel for. Probably, mostly, I'm being neurotic and looking to reassure myself that what I'm writing is in the ballpark of what's been acceptable in past cycles. This process seems to make everyone neurotic, so maybe other people are, too?

I'm in the process of turning a big, unwieldy pile of notes into a draft statement of purpose. One problem I'm having is: I don't really know what a successful SOP looks like. I've read a fair amount about SOPs and have some sense of the different forms a good one can take, what should go into each of these, what shouldn't, what the standard mistakes are, and so on -- but I've never seen a real SOP that really got someone into a program. I think it would be super helpful to look at some. You learn a genre by reading in the genre. So, after months of lurking here, I'm piping up to ask: does anyone savvier than I am know where to find examples of successful SOPs online? Would any current Ph.D.s be willing to share the SOPs that got them where they are? (There were a few very generous offers to this effect in a from earlier in the year.) More generally, how has everyone gone about learning to write the SOP? It's such a weird genre. I'm asking all this for the obvious self-interested reasons, but also because there must be other GradCafe-ers in my position. I can only speak for myself, but I'd be most grateful for whatever help anyone can offer.