Addressing my irrelevant undergraduate background in SoP?

[Indecisive Poet]

Hey all -- I hope those of you getting in gear for new programs or returning to programs this month are finding that transition smooth and exciting!

I have a couple of very particular questions that I'm wondering if anyone would like to share thoughts on. Generally, I'm wondering whether it's a good idea to give an account in an SoP of how I came to my current interests and what my personal-intellectual background has been like, or whether I should just explain what I'm interested in (without the why) and why the program is a good fit for that.

The particular bit:

As an undergrad, I had no idea I'd be interested in grad school and really wasted my own time. I did well grade-wise and made a couple of faculty acquaintances, but I took a lot of film classes and medieval literature classes because that's what worked with my schedule at the time. I'm 100% uninterested in both (though in a highly abstract way, my affinity for the medieval period did lead me to my current interests -- but this is loose and largely irrelevant). I will be applying for PhDs with an MA, so I'm not sure I even need to discuss undergrad at all in an SoP. Do I need to justify somewhere in my statement why I took these classes or how they can be narrativized into my current interests? They really can't be; I found my interests after I finished undergrad. Which brings me to:

I spent my gap year after undergrad independently reading and otherwise learning/researching about my fields of interest. This is my "narrative" about how I found my current interests and focus period. I don't have an "I took Professor x's course and we read y and I became interested in the problem of z" story. Luckily, I am about to begin my MA and all of my seminars and my dissertation will be in this period/these areas of interest that I found over gap year. Should I feel obligated to address, explain, or justify any of this in my SoP? Should I fudge it and say it was all Professor x's class my 2nd year of undergrad? Or does none of this matter because I don't need to talk about it anyway? I'd certainly feel more comfortable just diving into "here's what I'm interested in researching."

I've read several statements from successful applicants at a top-15 program and a few of them did include "we looked at x in Professor y's class and it ignited my interest in z" openings, but I'm not sure if that's the norm.

Thank you all!

Edited August 10, 2018 by indecisivepoet

[jrockford27]

No, you do not need to justify it, not at all.

I applied to grad school with an SoP that said I wanted to study popular media during the late cold war.  My transcript included such lovely diversions as "Chaucer," "Transatlantic Modernism," and "Daily Life in Early Modern Europe."  If I were on the adcom I'd be more suspicious of a transcript that showed no desire to experiment.

Edited August 10, 2018 by jrockford27

[Indecisive Poet]

@jrockford27 Did you also take courses in media studies/20th century? I suppose my thought was that breadth is one thing, but only having taken 2 or 3 literature classes outside of a clear emphasis on film and medieval lit is another... and incidentally, not a single class in the period I am now specializing in.

[dr. t]

There's no such thing as wasting your own time, because there's no sort of objective arbiter of what you should be doing at any given moment.

You have the answer in front of you. For the purposes of an SOP, these are all parts of who you now are, and you're right that an adcom may wonder why you took fifteen courses on Chaucer (ugh) if you're applying to work on ecocriticism in postwar Vietnam or something. Frame the narrative as progress, e.g. in my investigation of X, I became curious about Y. It doesn't really have to be true, so long as it isn't false.

I started as a mechanical engineer before I did history. In my SOP, I handled this by talking about how my first history courses fired my interest, but also noted that my earlier coursework has helped me as I became interested in quantitative and digital history.

[AP]

2 hours ago, indecisivepoet said:

Hey all -- I hope those of you getting in gear for new programs or returning to programs this month are finding that transition smooth and exciting!

I have a couple of very particular questions that I'm wondering if anyone would like to share thoughts on. Generally, I'm wondering whether it's a good idea to give an account in an SoP of how I came to my current interests and what my personal-intellectual background has been like, or whether I should just explain what I'm interested in (without the why) and why the program is a good fit for that.

The particular bit:

As an undergrad, I had no idea I'd be interested in grad school and really wasted my own time. I did well grade-wise and made a couple of faculty acquaintances, but I took a lot of film classes and medieval literature classes because that's what worked with my schedule at the time. I'm 100% uninterested in both (though in a highly abstract way, my affinity for the medieval period did lead me to my current interests -- but this is loose and largely irrelevant). I will be applying for PhDs with an MA, so I'm not sure I even need to discuss undergrad at all in an SoP. Do I need to justify somewhere in my statement why I took these classes or how they can be narrativized into my current interests? They really can't be; I found my interests after I finished undergrad. Which brings me to:

I spent my gap year after undergrad independently reading and otherwise learning/researching about my fields of interest. This is my "narrative" about how I found my current interests and focus period. I don't have an "I took Professor x's course and we read y and I became interested in the problem of z" story. Luckily, I am about to begin my MA and all of my seminars and my dissertation will be in this period/these areas of interest that I found over gap year. Should I feel obligated to address, explain, or justify any of this in my SoP? Should I fudge it and say it was all Professor x's class my 2nd year of undergrad? Or does none of this matter because I don't need to talk about it anyway? I'd certainly feel more comfortable just diving into "here's what I'm interested in researching."

I've read several statements from successful applicants at a top-15 program and a few of them did include "we looked at x in Professor y's class and it ignited my interest in z" openings, but I'm not sure if that's the norm.

Thank you all!

I agree with @telkanuru

As an international student, I had not read ANY of the professors that you should read to apply for grad school. Everything was entirely new to me, including "justifying" myself to the people. The purpose of the SoP is that you explain who you are, the questions that you have, why those questions are interesting, and how do you think you may answer them in X program. The default "response" to the last bit is that by studying under Dr. Y, you'll shed light into questions of [insert]. 

I think you should exploit the fact that your story "lacks" the cliché "I've always been passionate about literature". Your story is interesting because it is not a conventional narrative. You come to this field bearing questions that are not limited to the field. That's what we, as humanists, want to do: explore questions important to humanity. 

Onward!

[jrockford27]

2 hours ago, indecisivepoet said:

@jrockford27 Did you also take courses in media studies/20th century? I suppose my thought was that breadth is one thing, but only having taken 2 or 3 literature classes outside of a clear emphasis on film and medieval lit is another... and incidentally, not a single class in the period I am now specializing in.

I actually did not take a single course that would have outrightly identified me as a scholar of film/media. I came to the study of film/media through my study of English literature, so in my Literary Theory Class I found myself writing about popular film, ditto textual analysis (though, for better or worse, my Chaucer papers were straightforward literary analysis! ) My personal statement and writing sample identified me unambiguously as a film/media scholar (working within the context of English studies).

Obviously I have never been on a graduate admissions committee, but based on what I've gleaned from my conversations over the last five years I have a hard time believing they spend too much time trying to read the tea leaves of your transcripts as long as your substantive materials are compelling and show promise. The primary reason for this may be that when you get to a PhD program you're going to end up specializing so narrowly that your undergraduate work isn't really going to do a whole lot to prepare you for your specialty anyway apart from providing a little bit of fertile topsoil (that's my experience, anyway). 

The exception might be if you say, changed majors after you were well underway, or are applying to an English PhD and only did an English minor, or majored in something else altogether. 

Edited August 10, 2018 by jrockford27

[Indecisive Poet]

So I guess my follow-up question is: is it most common to include a narrative of some kind in the SoP and has anyone had success not doing so?

The kind of statement that appeals most to me is one that explains my research interests, why the program I'm applying to is a good fit, and probably something about my M.A. dissertation (which will also almost definitely be my WS) -- i.e. "here's what I wrote on for that, and I see the next step in that line of inquiry being ____." But I suppose that format doesn't leave much room for any kind of a "hook" (though I'm not sure anything about my academic/personal background does either).

I may very well be moved to add in anecdotes about classes/professors/papers/texts over the next year, but what if I were to focus entirely on the problem I want to look at instead? One of my undergrad professors looked at my MA statements and suggested I focus less on my interests and more on classes I've taken, a departmental award I won for a paper (on Anglo-Saxon lit, ha), accomplishments, etc. Is this also good advice for PhD statements? I guess a brag statement feels different from a statement about my academic interests and the idea of writing the former kind of rubs me the wrong way. But I wonder if I should be striving for more of a balance. Like (roughly speaking) a narrative paragraph, a paragraph explicitly laying out what I want to research, and a fit paragraph.

[punctilious]

18 hours ago, indecisivepoet said:

But I wonder if I should be striving for more of a balance. Like (roughly speaking) a narrative paragraph, a paragraph explicitly laying out what I want to research, and a fit paragraph.

I think this is roughly how my husband did it. Happy to send you his as an example if you PM me.  

[Indecisive Poet]

Will do, @punctilious. Thanks so much for the offer.

[dr. t]

Yes, that's more or less how I did mine. It flows pretty naturally - Where you're from, where you want to go, and why you think that's a good idea.

[Indecisive Poet]

@telkanuru - Thank you! Noted, and will work on this structure.