SOP length...how approximate is "approximately"?

[CAPoliSciPhD]

Update - Amazingly, I finished this SOP. This department is kind of slow though because everything has to be mailed to the department! First one where I cannot submit SOP online (There may have been one other but I can't remember now).

Anyway, 250 words is usually about 1 page with 1 inch margins. Now, this is usually beneath me (and I think I'm doing this the opposite way that the 'bad' students use this feature) but I made the margins .9 bc when you print it out, you can't really tell the difference. So I'm over the 250 words but I'm still one page, and I don' think it'll be a big deal.

If it IS, I just have to say that maybe this is the kind of dept I don't want to end up at ANYWAY! ha...(like it's up to me or something....lol)

[dragynally]

Update - Amazingly, I finished this SOP. This department is kind of slow though because everything has to be mailed to the department! First one where I cannot submit SOP online (There may have been one other but I can't remember now).

Anyway, 250 words is usually about 1 page with 1 inch margins. Now, this is usually beneath me (and I think I'm doing this the opposite way that the 'bad' students use this feature) but I made the margins .9 bc when you print it out, you can't really tell the difference. So I'm over the 250 words but I'm still one page, and I don' think it'll be a big deal.

If it IS, I just have to say that maybe this is the kind of dept I don't want to end up at ANYWAY! ha...(like it's up to me or something....lol)

What you did isn't too bed...its the people who think that when a school asks for 250 words and they turn in 1,000 words who worry me. What makes them think the adcomm won't notice?

[CAPoliSciPhD]

yeah, that'd be a little extreme. My original SOP was 600 and I knew that'd be too large for this program. (It's a safety school that I don't really want to attend, but I figured I should at least follow the directions somewhat or risk getting a rejection from even my safety!)

[slothy]

I can't believe this thread is dragging on an on... anyway I ended up discussing the Columbia word limit with someone who has extensive Ivy adcom experience and he said not to worry about it "*at all*" (asterisks his) and decided to take his word over anonymous Internet people, although I do still worry a bit about that decision. I do agree with the gist of the comments here that total disregard for word limits doesn't reflect well on one's ability to follow directions, although I also tend to feel that directions from graduate schools (rather than departments) are to be taken with a grain of salt. I did, however, make sure that my statement didn't exceed two pages to make sure it didn't stand out *too* much.

One of my departments belabored a 500 word limit extensively on their webpage, and I took them very seriously. I started from scratch and truly do feel that I lost a significant amount of substantive content and placed a lot more faith in them closely examining my CV than I felt comfortable with. Maybe I'm just a terrible writer, but for me it's a lot harder to make oneself stand out when one has to condense four years of research work into 3-4 sentences. I felt like I was just name-dropping without conveying any understanding of my potential mentors' work than couldn't have just been gleamed from a glance at the department's directory, which I think is a real no-no with these sorts of things, but oh well....

[dragynally]

Well the consensus is that word limits are an 'at your own risk' situation. I think we can all agree on that...right?

[lotf629]

rising_star, I want to respectfully disagree with you. I see your point, but at times, I think it's important to address blips. I had a 3.96 in my major in a top-ranked school, then suddenly failed out (literally failed out) because my family lost our primary source of income and our house, and I had to pick up several part-time jobs. Back in my masters, I got my GPA back, hit high GREs, etc., but my cum. GPA was still a 3.0 (due to my spectacular blowup at the end of my college career). Everyone I talked to, including several faculty members at my top-ranked masters institution, told me to address the situation very briefly in my SOP in order to keep readers from wondering what the hell happened. So I did, but, of course, it took some words.

I didn't belabor the situation, nor do I think that you should take the space to explain a drop from a 3.5 to a 2.9 one semester, or a drop due to a bad break-up with a boyfriend, or whatever, but there is such a thing as a genuinely extenuating circumstance. In the same way, at times a discussion of one's methodology is really pretty important to the case one is building for "Why Your Program and I Are Such a Good Match." Maybe I'm playing devil's advocate here, but I stand by my original statement that there is often more than 500 words' worth of information worth including in a statement, even if it's necessary to omit some of it out of respect for program guidelines.

I do think that your overall point (as I understand it) is a very good one: namely, that in order to hit the word limit, it's important to recognize that what seems like essential information to you may be inessential information from the standpoint of the program, or at least extraneous to the task of writing your statement, which should be tightly focused and should do no more and no less than answer the damn question.