TakeruK

ETS only keeps your test scores for 5 years. Each July, they purge all test scores older than 5 years. Here's the text from the relevant page: Reportable History GRE test scores are part of your reportable history for five years after the testing year in which you tested (July 1–June 30). As of July 1, 2015, GRE scores earned July 1, 2010, to the present will be available in your reportable GRE score history. Scores from individuals who tested between July 1, 2009 and June 30, 2010, were purged from the GRE database in mid-July 2015. Scores from individuals who tested between July 1, 2010 and July 31, 2011, will be purged from the GRE database in mid-July 2016. Source: https://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/scores/send/. Note that this means scores do not expire in exactly 5 years, but instead, only at fixed times; i.e. A test score from July 2, 2009 was still valid until mid-July 2015 (6 years!) Since you asked for a data point/anecdote, here's mine: There was one school (sorry I cannot recall the name at this time) that clarified their 5 year policy further by saying that they require your score to be no more than 5 years old on the date of the application deadline, or whenever they receive your score, whatever is later. They had this policy because they allow people to reapply after an unsuccessful attempt without resubmitting things like score reports and transcripts, but this means they have to have a clear policy on expiry dates.

Cool. The CCV sounds like a good concept. When I applied, there was no CCV but instead, a very confusing documents with very similar sections to the CCV and then instructions to number these sections ourselves, but we still had to skip sections if we had no content. So, I think this document, for me, went Section 1, 5, 9 etc. and was super confusing and made me paranoid I was missing sections. Also, they had really complicated formatting requests, which seems to be taken care of by the CCV form. Maybe NSERC/SSHRC/CIHR got tired of students screwing up the standardized formatting and went with an automated procedure lol

This is really tricky and depends on the norms of both your field and also any agreement you may have with your supervisor/lab group. In my field, it would be very bad for a student to present work they did with their supervisor without informing their supervisor. Usually, I will also inform any coauthors if I am presenting any work we did together outside of my own department and if the abstract or talk will be archived or indexed in some way (but not necessarily ask for approval---just informing people in case they object to me saying a particular thing). So, really, it depends on who "owns" this work. Is it just you? Or also your supervisor? I understand that you are in a tricky situation because you are applying to other schools for PhD and it seems like your professor does not know. However, this seems like there are a lot of other problems going on. You really should have the support of your current professor** if you want to have a good chance at other PhD programs. So, I think the real issue is first you should figure out how to talk to your current professor about applying to PhD programs. Honestly, if the professor is a good advisor and truly wants the best for you, they would understand and support that you need to see other options too and apply to more than just their PhD program. However, you also said that you've accepted the first two parts of the application? I'm not sure what this means. Does it mean that they already requested and read references and don't need to see your Masters professor's letter? Maybe this is a very different system than what I'm used to then and this advice does not apply anymore. You don't have to provide more details if you don't want to, of course! (** Unless of course, your current professor is a terrible person and you need to get out and can explain this).

I think "Memberships" is the best place for this, based on these descriptions of the CCV sections: http://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ResearchPortal-PortailDeRecherche/Instructions-Instructions/ccv-cvc_eng.asp By the way, it looks like this Canadian Commons CV thing is some very generalized thing that is meant for people at all stages (from students to professors!) to fill out, so don't be intimidated by the sections you are not going to have content for.

I think the best thing to do is to just ask the school. You can ask the central Graduate School, not the individual department and you don't have to identify yourself so they won't trace it to your application. They would not do this anyways, but if that is a concern, then just don't give your name. I also encountered a lot of applications that say only transcripts from schools from which I received a degree was necessary, however, they had an exception that for international students, all post-secondary transcripts were required.

First of all, I want to clarify the 20hr/week thing you wrote. Yes, it is true that by US Immigration law, F-1 and J-1 international students are not allowed to work more than 20 hours per week during the school year (when classes are in session). However, this limit only applies to paid work hours and not all of the hours that you are working on your research project counts as paid work hours. In fact, you will often register for something like "Thesis Research" or similar course so that the work you are doing for your lab/prof/group counts as coursework instead of paid research work. In addition, this limit only applies during the school year (when you are taking courses) because US Immigration doesn't want a F-1 or J-1 student to delay their degree progress (and spend more time in the US) by working instead of taking courses. For a graduate student, this doesn't make as much sense of course, since we need to do the research work in order to finish! In my case, now that I no longer take courses, I still must register for 36 hours per week of courses to maintain full time student status (which is required for F-1/J-1 status) so the first 36 hours of work I do is unpaid coursework. Actually, the way my funding is structured, all of my research hours is unpaid coursework, and the only paid work is my TA hours. But at other schools, some of your RA work will be paid and you'll do fewer hours towards your "research/thesis course". So, if the reason you are asking is that you are worried that you are violating US Immigration law (and thus your F-1/J-1 status) then you probably don't have to worry about it. Definitely talk to your school's international office if you are not certain how you are not violating these rules though. --- However, from your post, I think you might also be asking another question: Can a professor require you to work for more than 20 hours per week? And the answer is yes. Because the 20hr/week limit is only for paid work. In order to meet degree requirements, it is almost certain that you must work more than 20 hours per week. --- And your last question: Is it okay to come into the office at 11am and/or take a few hours off in the middle of the day and come back later? This completely depends on your professor/PI/supervisor and the group dynamic. If you are in a school with a union then maybe there might be some additional rules. And, your specific school and department might have other rules or guidelines too. But in general, the federal law does not require you to work any specific hours. It is perfectly acceptable though for a professor to expect their students be in their offices from 9am to 5pm. Some professors don't care when you work as long as you do enough work---my officemate works from approximately 2pm to midnight each day. Other professors will allow deviations from 9am to 5pm but ask that you get them approved in advance. And yet others will not allow this at all and require their students to "clock in" every day like a real job. Generally, I haven't heard of many schools with rules that prevent their professors from exerting this level of control. And sometimes being in the lab is necessary for research to get done (totally depends on the field). So, my advice would be to find out what potential advisors will be expecting and make this part of your decision making process. If the level of management (or lack of management) is not a good fit for you, it would be good to find another professor! --- Finally, to give you a data point, there are generally no strict requirements on when I have to work. The closest thing to an "experiment" that I do is using the telescope to observe and collect data. Time on the telescope is competitive so when we are granted time, it's expected that I make this the highest priority---i.e. it's the only time I "have" to work. We know about telescope scheduling time at least 2 months in advance, so this is reasonable for me. (I'm just talking about research here, for my TA work, I obviously have to be there for those responsibilities too). There are also other things that are not strict requirements but highly encouraged. For example: department seminars, group meetings and spending time to meet with visitors to our group. I always do these unless something important comes up. I would schedule my social activities around seminars, but if I want to take a vacation, I'm not going to reschedule my trip to avoid missing department seminars! And lastly, I would say there are things that must happen but are very flexible on when they happen. These are things like my weekly meeting with my advisor---we decide on a new time each quarter based on the best time for both of our schedules and we move them as needed from week to week. Other than those things, I am free to work whenever I want / need to. My choice is to work 8am to 5pm Mondays through Friday. I take a 1.0 hour lunch and up to 0.5 hours of breaks during the day when I feel I need a break. This works out to be about 37.5-40.0 hours per week, which is typical of a "full time real person job". I try my best to always refuse to meet with people after 5pm (I will occasionally work beyond 5pm but I only do so when it's my choice, not because someone wants to schedule something after 5pm). I work hard but take advantage of my flexible schedule to do things like schedule dentist appointments in the middle of the workweek to avoid crowds and sometimes even take an hour off in the middle of the day to do grocery shopping etc. I make up these hours in the evening or weekends as necessary. But I do all of this because my advisor and I have talked about expectations!

Another thing that can vary from field to field I guess! I think in this context, abstracts are not short papers, but instead, the thing you submit in order to present at a conference (in my field, almost all abstracts are accepted at least as a poster presentation; oral presentations are competitive). For our field, some conferences have 1 paragraph (200-300 words) abstracts, such as AGU, AAS, DPS etc. while others have 2-page abstracts (e.g. LPSC, EPSC). In my field, for undergraduates applying to graduate schools, I think you should list conference abstracts that you were a coauthor of, even if you did not present the material. Like Eigen said, you are a coauthor for a reason---your work is being presented. In addition, it's common that conference presentations will eventually become a paper, which you will still be a coauthor on, so all the more reason to include them. And, especially for undergrads, it's common that the funding situation would be such that the undergrad cannot present so that the professor will present the work that the undergrad did. In my field, the standard convention is to mark the "presenting author" with an asterisk or something when you list them in a CV. (Some conferences in my field allow the presenting author to be someone other than the first author). Once you become a graduate student though, you will start presenting a lot more at conferences. You will soon run out of space to list every single presentation you did and you will definitely not have room for presentations that you were a coauthor but someone else presented. So, you would start calling this section "Selected Presentations" and only display some of them. But until then, I think it's a good idea to keep presentations that you did you present!

For the abstract, keep it short since most people will just skim it to decide if they want to go. Very few people will read it deeply. You can also be a lot less formal for a talk abstract than a journal paper. Also, think of a good and interesting title too, some people will only read the title and not the abstract! Remember, the main point of the title+abstract for a seminar talk is to simply convince people to attend your talk! I looked for the same thing at my old undergrad school. Here is an example of what a typical abstract for a seminar might look like in physics (assuming your field isn't going to be that much different in this regard): Source: http://www.phas.ubc.ca/thin-film-alchemy-using-strain-and-dimensionality-unleash-hidden-properties-oxides Guided by theory, unparalleled properties—those of hidden ground states—are being unleashed by exploiting large strains in concert with the ability to precisely control dimensionality in epitaxial oxide heterostructures. For example, materials that are not ferroelectric or ferromagnetic in their unstrained state can be transmuted into ferroelectrics, ferromagnets, or materials that are both at the same time. Similarly, new tunable dielectrics with unparalleled performance have been created. Results of fundamental scientific importance as well as revealing the tremendous potential of utilizing multicomponent oxide thin films to create devices with enhanced performance will be shown

I agree with everything Crucial BBQ said and I definitely second/highlight this part. I feel like sometimes when I say "explain how you would fit in with existing research groups", it sounds like I mean "Write an extensive paragraph explaining how you and each professor will be the best fit ever". Instead, as Crucial BBQ says, you should just simply describe your interests and then, in one or two sentences, link them to professors/labs as demonstrated here.

I agree with brown_eyed_girl that for some schools, the abbreviated name is so commonly used / the way the school brands itself that it's a good idea to use the abbreviation. In fact, I might even argue that spelling out UCLA would sound like you are not familiar enough with the school. My current school is a little like this too. I was on a search committee for a (non-academic) position and when reading cover letters, the other (more senior) committee members did point out when candidates didn't use the name that we prefer to refer to ourselves as (it's all over the websites and official documents) and/or when they spell the name wrong! However, I think you are ever in doubt, it's always always safer to go with the full official name as fuzzy suggested. It's much better to write "University of California, Los Angeles" than something like "U.C.L.A" or "UC-LA". And one final tip: Almost every school has an "identity" page or "brand guidelines" type pages. These webpages contain the logo and other official markings for the school. They set the guidelines on how to use the logos, which colours are the correct colours etc. Following the spelling and formatting of the school name on this page will ensure you get it right. Here's the example page for UCLA: https://brand.ucla.edu/ And as another example, here's a school that clearly prefers using its full name (even though colloquially, we might say UT or U of T): http://universityrelations.utoronto.ca/sc/u-of-t-branding/

As fuzzy said, it's okay to ask questions! You definitely want to ask the questions fuzzy suggested about the audience, the length, the level of detail. I'll expand on the last point a bit. In my field (but not in my current program), sometimes prospective students/applicants are invited to come and give a talk to a particular research group, or as part of the same seminar series that current graduate students present in. It's really important to understand the context of the talk. Part of this is knowing the audience, but another big part is knowing the purpose of the talk series you're participating in (if any). A talk to a particular research group should be more like what you've been doing in your Masters group, where you are talking to people at a high level of detail, especially the technical details of exactly how and why you did things the way you did. However, if you are presenting in a Journals Club or department seminar type series, then you should keep your talk at a "higher level". This means spending lots of time motivating the research question and the background. Spend only a little bit of time on your methods---say the key words that will tell the experts in the room what kind of techniques you're using but don't spend too much time that a non-expert would be bored or confused. Also, usually the goal of these types of seminars is for people to learn something cool and new from outside of their field, so be sure to focus your time on what the question is, why it's important, your main results and how your work fits into the current understanding. Finally, the request for an abstract for an announcement makes me think this is more like the second case I described (seminar series instead of research group). Sometimes you can find the website for this seminar series on the department pages. You can take a look at previous abstracts to see what has been presented in the past. Some seminar series even puts the slides that the speakers used online, so flip through them too. One danger is that you have no idea which talks were well received in the past, so I wouldn't just copy the same style (since you might copy someone they didn't like!). Instead, use this information to understand what the audience has been seeing before.

Fair enough. My spouse and I also decided that we did not want to live in separate cities so we also share the same philosophy But these are just personal values. Just want to point out that I have many friends who are married and choose to live apart because they feel like having one partner compromise for the other would not be fair in their relationship. It doesn't mean their marriage isn't important to them! But I know that won't work for my spouse and I. Location is also important to us and we actually plan to live in a very specific geographical region when we "settle down". So this will highly impact the places considered after graduate school. I'm still serious about working in academia but I know that with geographical constraints, it may not be possible. Like you, when it comes to post-graduate school plans, the plan is to just apply and see what happens. Ultimately though, settling down and raising a family in our hometown is more important to us than an academic career. You also mention commuting to school only a few days a week. This is definitely possible but challenging! Almost impossible in the first two years though, so you have to keep that in mind. But usually, once the coursework is complete, it's possible (but still challenging) to schedule all of your on-campus appointments (e.g. meetings, TAing, office hours, seminars, colloquia, etc.) in 3 or 4 days. I have a friend that actually commuted across the border (1 hour drive) into Canada for their PhD work (spouse's work required them to be in the US). Instead of working 5 8-hour days, she usually tried to work 3 or 4 10-12 hour days. So things like that are definitely possible. Good luck!

What field are you in? In many fields, there are very few spots open for Spring semesters, so if it's too late for you to apply for Fall 2016, it might make sense to wait until Fall 2017. The subject GRE is only offered a few times a year (Sept, Oct and April, I think), so keep that in mind too. I would recommend that you take the Subject GRE in April (in case you want to retake it), which means you want to give yourself time to study for that and space out the General GRE. If you are applying for Fall 2017, that means you will be submitting applications a year from now, Nov-Dec 2016. If you take the Subject GRE in April 2016, then maybe a good time for the General GRE could be February 2016 or after the Subject GRE, maybe in the summer June/July 2016.

It says (on the left) that you are in Physics. This means that, more likely than not, you will receive a work computer for your office/desk/lab! So, I don't think you need to worry about getting a computer that will run ObscureWare-II because if they want you to run ObscureWare-II, they will provide such ObscureWare . Also, some programs will give you money to buy a computer when you get there (the Astro program at my school grants every incoming student $1500 for research supplies and the majority of them use it to buy themselves a nice laptop). However, it's also more likely than not that your new department will be mostly using Linux computers. At least, the computing clusters you'd connect to and the workstations at your desk will very likely be Linux. Of course, your work habits aren't the same as mine. When I started my MSc (on an Astronomy thesis in a Physics department), I was doing computational/theory work. My desk computer was an iMac that my supervisor bought but the majority of my work was done on a linux computer part of a big computing cluster. I found that Macs, with their Terminal and Unix based OS, are very very good at interfacing with Linux computers and it makes things very very intuitive. So, if you are planning to do some work on your personal computer (whether you prefer working at home [or want the option] or want to be able to work when traveling [if you go with a laptop]) then I would highly recommend staying with Mac. However, if you are not planning to do any work on this computer whatsoever, then you should go with whatever operating system will meet your personal needs. And whether or not to get a desktop or laptop: Personally, I am okay with only using a laptop at home (desktop at work). I don't need to own my own desktop computer because I don't do things that need one. I can't afford to have both a laptop and a desktop and since a laptop is portable and more useful, I usually just buy a laptop. Some things to note: 1. You may or may not know that Macs computers format their hard drives differently. If you have been using your external hard drives formatted for your Mac, they might not work on other non-Macs until you reformat them (i.e. lose all content). But I think there is a format compatible with both Macs and others (however, the optimal and default format is the Mac-only one). 2. From my and my friends' experience with Macbooks, 3 years is when problems will start to appear and they won't last much longer than 5-6 years. So, your current laptop is closer to the end of its life than the beginning. It may or may not last through your whole PhD. So, it might be a good idea to replace your laptop at this point. 3. Apple's education discount can get you Macbooks for a pretty good price. Definitely within your price range. 4. Apple computers cost about 30% more than other computers that are about the same power. I'm generally willing to spend about $1000-$1200 on a laptop and the computing power that buys me in a Macbook is good enough. Even though the same money can buy a more powerful computer, I'd rather pay for the aesthetics and the conveniences detailed above than extra computing power (since I need the former but not the latter). Overall, your description of the work you do sounds a lot like me and if your preferences are like mine, I'd suggest one of the 13" Macbook Pros. Scrolling to the very bottom, there is a model without the retina display that retails for $1100 but buying through a school can get you a price between $950 and $1000. If you have more money, as it sounds like you might, the $1300 Macbook Pro with retina display is really nice.

Unfortunately, my answer is to second what GeoDUDE says about funding. The main way students are funded are either TAship or RAship via their supervisor's grant. Since this faculty member has no grants for this work, it will be a big problem. By the way, even if you have external fellowships (like the NSF or NASA ones), they don't always cover 100% of the cost. But these are very competitive and if the faculty member says you are not competitive for in-school fellowships, it's unlikely that you will be competitive for external ones. Sorry to say that. I think you can be competitive for the fellowships in the future, given you do well in a PhD program. The NASA NESSF is generally awarded to people in later years anyways. But right now, your undergrad GPA will play a large role in fellowship decisions so it will be difficult. GeoDUDE wrote about the future and constraints due to geography. I don't think the fact that you will have future geographical constraints should stop you from pursuing graduate school now. There are things you can do with a PhD besides academia and even if you are serious about an academic career, it's still possible to do so while constrained to your husband's military assignments. Yes, it will be harder though. But since you won't know where he will be assigned and you won't know for certain what your and his career goals will be in many years, I wouldn't say no to a PhD now only because of this reason. That said, it looks like there are three potential options I can see moving forward: 1. Find another faculty member at this school that will be willing to take you and has funding for you. This might mean broadening your research interests and finding ways to demonstrate fit with other faculty members. Follow the money, so to speak. 2. Consider other schools in other locations. Just putting that option there---each couple has their own decisions to make about whether they want to do long distance and whose career takes precedence at this point in time. 3. Wait and hope this faculty member is successful for grants in future years. In the meantime, you can try to get additional research experience to make yourself more desirable as a student to other faculty members (I say "other" because your top choice faculty member already wants you). Maybe your top choice faculty member does not have funding to pay you as a PhD student researcher but maybe they can pay you as a part time (maybe even just 10 hours/week) staff researcher. I do not think taking classes as a non-degree student will help you---you already have a Masters and demonstrated you are able to succeed at graduate level classes.

When I supplied this material, I often had two choices: If it was just a text box to fill in, then I just wrote the content right into the box. If it was a PDF to be uploaded, I did not format it in any way. It was just 2 paragraphs typed into a Word document then saved as PDF. I'm not saying this is the best or even a good way to do it, but I felt that it was just a few sentences so I did not want to deal with the whole "format like a letter" thing because the formatting would take up twice as much space as the actual content and I thought that would look silly. Also, in my field, the SOP and other essays were just text on a page. The only formatting was a title and my name / page numbers in the header.

A research proposal for what? Is it part of the application package? If so (i.e. you want to update an already submitted research proposal/statement then it would make sense but often unnecessary). But if it's not something the program asked for, then you shouldn't send them an unsolicited research proposal.

At one university, a graduate student was picking me up but I didn't know what they looked like and they didn't know what I looked like. My host was waiting for me right by the doors that lead into the baggage claim area while I was standing by the baggage claim area waiting for my host to appear from the doors to the outside. So, we walked right past each other without recognizing it. Then, we each waited about 20-25 minutes for the other person. The baggage area and the door where the host was waiting was just barely out of sight of each other so neither of us could find the other person that was awkwardly waiting and looking around. It wasn't until the rest of the flight left and there were only a handful of people left that my host found me (and I didn't think to go back to the doors to the boarding area to find him). So, yes, more communication/description of anyone picking up prospectives/candidates would be great. Maybe even have the host introduce themself to the candidate via email a week beforehand too! I also think it's really important to have a "host" feel to your prospective students. My program is small enough that we usually have the candidate's 10:00am meeting person walk them to the 10:30am meeting place etc. This is literally a 30 second walk for most cases since we all live on the same floor of the same building. However, I think it creates a sense that the school/department/faculty cares about the student, and I think it's also nice to have a faculty member you've been talking to for the last 30 minutes introduce you to the next faculty member. At my current school, the airport is really far away from the school--it would be a 40 minute drive each way so it's not reasonable to have students pick up prospectives. Also, reimbursing current students for this mileage would cost the school even more than paying for a shuttle. So, prospective students are given suggestions on how to get themselves from the airport to the hotel (linked to the shuttle service with the campus discount code). Prospective students are offered help from our admin staff to make these arrangements if necessary but almost everyone prefers making their own arrangements.

In my field, I think the most important considerations when evaluating research experience are the quality of the work you did and how difficult it was to attain that position. For example, if you are in a country with very limited research opportunities and/or a rural US university with little research positions open, I think it would be weighed more since it was a lot more competitive to get. On the other hand, at my current school, almost all undergrads who want a research position are able to get one, so that is less impressive (however, the work they do is very impressive so it's not like they are disadvantaged!) In my field, a good fraction of graduate students come from Chinese universities. I don't know anything about CAS though---most of my Chinese colleagues were at Shanghai University or Peking University. Maybe someone in your field can help you decide between the three options, but in general, I think the two factors I said above are more important in evaluating research positions for graduate school applicants than simply the location of the country (of course, this is probably different if your field of study is specifically tied to a location!)

Just remember---universities have no incentive to not award their whole allocation. And top students will get offers from multiple places. So if the numbers look discouraging, e.g. your favourite school only has 10 awards, remember that it's not that you have to be the top 10 students who apply, but instead, the top 10 students who will take the offer :)

My understanding is that for separate sections/essays to explain special circumstances, there is no need to use up all of your word allotment if you are able to say everything you need to say. I think your current paragraph has all the necessary details (I'm not left with questions after reading it). There may be a disadvantage to writing more because then you are going really in depth about something that doesn't really matter (i.e. academic probation from community college years ago doesn't really matter now that you have a 4.0 in the last 3 years).

Yes, if this is a paragraph is a special section to discuss things like this, or in a personal history statement or some other document that is separate and in addition to the SOP, then I think it's fine, keeping in mind my point #3 above. Sorry to misunderstand!

Since we can't really get into the heads of the admission committees, it's hard to say for certain. But from exposure and experience with academia, here are some thoughts: 1. The SOP is not a document that is explicitly about your character (but see #3 below). It's not like a personal essay that one might have written for college applications or a scholarship/fellowship. The SOP is a piece of academic writing that demonstrates the reason you want to go to grad school, the reason you want to become an academic in your field and the reason why this particular school is a good fit for you. 2. There's not a lot of space in the SOP for expressing the above point. 150 words is already 20% of the document. I do think you did a good job of turning the negative into a positive, but 20% is a lot of space and now you've "spent" a chunk of your space talking about a failure. Or, another way to think about it is that the main outcome of someone like me reading this paragraph is neutral---that is, you bring up a negative and then you cancel it out. I think you intended it to end up as net-positive by demonstrating your growth from a failure. However, it doesn't read that way to a third party, and even if I read it as a slight positive, you could have spent those 100 extra words saying something else that is just purely positive. 3. Generally, most people do not think the candidate is the most reliable source of character descriptions of themselves. Also, the words you use (e.g. "immature" or "fortitude") are subjective terms that mean different things to different people. How do I know that my definition of fortitude is what you really are? This is why another common suggestion for SOPs is to show, don't tell. You don't need to tell them that you've changed as a person. Instead, say that you were on academic probation, and then say your GPA in the most recent semesters is a 4.0. This shows your passion and work ethic very clearly. Also, as a reader, when I see this, I can then draw my own conclusions about your character, using the adjectives defined the way I know and I can then build my own understanding of your character. That is, to clarify, admissions committees certainly do look for "non-cognitive" measures (or "character") in their applicants. We just had a conversation about this yesterday with some faculty members. They want people that are driven and motivated. They want students who can take initiative and demonstrate leadership. But you don't show these things by saying that you have these attributes. You demonstrate them by providing examples and telling your story.

This paragraph is 150 words, which is a big fraction of the "standard" 750 word SOP (at least in my field, 750 words is standard). I think you could shorten it to less than 75 words (maybe even 50). I would follow brown_eyed_girl's advice to remove stuff about your character.

Ah, I missed that you have a Canadian Masters already. Well, I hope that the numbers still help someone else who is reapplying.