Is it okay to be straight to the point from the beginning?

[newellrd]

I am preparing my PhD statement of purpose and cannot decide which is better - starting it with my professional anecdotes or stating my research questions in the first sentence? After weeks of rewriting and rewriting, I decided to take the latter (starting with "the key research questions that I want to address through my PhD ~") but am afraid if it sounds less persuasive and comfortable to read. However, if I take the former approach, it gets too lengthy... Just wonder which approach most of you take for your successful PhD statement of purpose, it would be VERY HELPFUL and APPRECIATED if you could kindly share the first sentence or the first paragraph of yours, if possible. Thank you! 

Edited February 21, 2021 by newellrd

[lemon-cmd]

Hello there,

There are four tips I can give you. First, you need to avoid the "running through your resume/cv" process in your statement of purpose. This particular essay is meant to illustrate your preparedness, interest, goal, and independent. Thus, ask yourself these questions:

1. Why PhD?

2. Why research?

3. Why am I interested in the topic/field of study?

Second, focus on building or revolving your experience to your statement of purpose. The three above questions should allow you to develop some sort of a story. However, the first two should be implicit or understood through reading your SOP.

My third tip is to take a look or search up if there are any requirements on the SOP (e.g., word count, page limit, etc.) for each institution, but you can generally keep it 900 to 1100 words or 2 PDF pages. I believe it would be good for you to write it in LaTex as well.

My final tip to you is to start your introduction with the particular topic you are interested in spending the next four years in research. For example, my interest is language, machine learning, and NLP in general. I began with ...

Language is the bridge that links human beings together. With it, we externalize the outputs of our internalization through our voice and writings based on a convention of syntax, forming a depiction of our pragmatics. I believe, by understanding the interconnected neural processes that enable our ability to comprehend and learn our language, we can uncover the mystery behind our intelligence. My goal is to study and improve the attention gating mechanism for the recurrent neural network to alleviate problems pose by multiword-expressions (MWEs) in natural language processing (NLP) tasks.

Note that, my experience is in cloud computing, but I done a lot of independent research on my own time to gain a good insight on a specific topic within NLP which developed my interest. In my essay, I focused on making very clear that I am serious and independent as a potential PhD student. Anyway, the next paragraph after the introduction would be focusing on why the particular topic is salient to you and your field, and why it attracts you to the university. From then on, you can go over your experience and how it prepared you for PhD and brought you to your interest.

I hope this helps!

 

Edited March 11, 2021 by lemon-cmd