SOP - How technical can I get?

[pogopuschel]

I am applying for a program in Computer Science and with to talk about two of my past research projects. The question is, how technical can I get in terms of what parts of the system I have worked on? Does anyone have experience with this?

Thank you!

[gilbertrollins]

I'm in social sciences. I would say, as long as you're not using a bunch of jargon that's deeply specific to a subfield of com sci that committee members aren't likely to be familiar with, it's fine to be technical. You want to strike some balance between signaling that you have a competent technical grasp, but aren't impossibly unable to communicate with colleagues and such.

[thenerdypengwin]

Well, who is it that reads the SOPs, the grad board or people in your field?

[TakeruK]

You can get as technical as you think someone in the same department but does not work on the same topic. When I wrote my applications for astronomy programs, I assumed the people reading the SOP may be studying galaxies, cosmology, star clusters, etc. while my explanations were about asteroids. But remember that you can word things so that different people can understand it at different levels. For example, I might have written a sentence like "We used the numerical integrator SWIFT to compute...." This way, someone who works on my topic will know exactly what I'm talking about since SWIFT is one of the standard packages, but someone else in physics/astronomy can still get the idea that I did a numerical computation. Sometimes it's great to mention proficiency in certain skills because that might mean you're able to jump into things much faster!

In addition, I should note that you don't want to get too technical in the SOP anyways. You don't need to explain everything you did. I kept each project to about 5 sentences, and my focus was on what I got out of it (i.e. what skills were developed, what knowledge learned) and the "results" of the project (that is, which publications, if any, and what were my role in producing the publication, as well as how does my result contribute to the field overall).

[TeaGirl]

You should be technical enough so that you seem to know your stuff and so someone in your major will understand, but not too technical that either the big picture is lost in detail heavy sentences, or that someone in a somewhat different computer science area won't understand. SOP's are generally read by professors, and they may not be working in your direct area of interest.

You should definitely place each project in context, stating the goal, your role, and what was accomplished.