PhD Personal Statement-Faculty Interests

[risoms]

Does anyone have an opinion about how much of a personal statement should talk about my faculty interests? Should I just include a sentence for each professor or should I go into greater detail? I'm including this as part of my paragraph talking about my research interests and why the university is a good fit.

Thanks!

[Scalia]

Would love to know the answer to this as well.

[Cosmos]

I think the idea is to explain your research interests in a light that will make you seem a good fit with whatever supervisor you want to work with. I was told to stay away from regurgitating what they list on their lab pages.. read through their stuff and offer specific areas that you might like to investigate that shows you have done your homework. I am really finding this the hardest part of the application process!

You can mention professors in ways like this: "I find the work that Dr. X did on ____ to be a striking application of _____ etc"

[lucere]

I think this actually varies a lot by school. The approach of dropping a few names of interest and expressing interest in their research is suited for large schools where students are encouraged to collaborate, explore their own interests and perhaps switch advisors after a year. There, they're probably looking for an enthusiastic student who would be a good fit for the general program, and who has primarily one "best" fit advisor, but also has other overlapping interests with other professors.

However, there are a lot of smaller privates where the faculty are extremely competitive and do not typically collaborate (even if they claim to, it's usually easy to see if this is true by looking at publication records), and so you're actually doing yourself a disservice by mentioning more than one person: it's a real risk and tricky to know things like this without being on the inside already. At these smaller, "elite" kind of schools, the approach of identifying one advisor and sucking up extensively is more likely to lead to success, IMO.