500 words? Are they Serious?

[anonacademic]

This is intriguing to me - you only get 700 words after writing about your interests, past and future research, and fit? My fit paragraph is like 250 words. Would you like to exchange SOPs so that perhaps we can learn from each other?

Alas, no, I will have to decline for now. If I "scrubbed it clean" of identifying factors, there wouldn't be anything useful left! This is nothing personal, I simply have a keen interest in remaining anonymous

I usually write a lot initially (my first five drafts of the SOP were long - three pages at least without a fit paragraph) then simmer it down once I've got all the information I need to. It helps that my writing sample directly links to my past and future research, too, in terms of being concise. I've been "simmering" since late summer." Working in the opposite direction takes just as much time, but I was stupid and forgot this school's requirement until soon before the deadline. Hence my difficulty bouncing from 500 to 1,000 words.

In the end I worked it out to 850 words, which seems reasonable. I expanded my past and future research, but took an extra paragraph to talk about fit on top of the one I already had.

Edited for clarity!

Edited December 13, 2010 by Chumlee