SOP without POI from Dept

[DarlingNikki]

Quick questions folks: For one of my schools, they don't have a list of faculty on the website and I'm not familiar with ANY of them. How do I elegantly leave this portion out of my SOP while still relaying my interest in their program?

[kaister]

Just curious...why do you want to apply there if you don't know the faculty and what type of work they specialize in? Granted, I'm not familiar with the criminal justice programs, so maybe it's different, but I decided on what schools to apply to based on what faculty was there.

[DarlingNikki]

Hi Disillusioned: You ask a very valid question. I based my applications on a number of different factors. Short answer to your question is that the desired schools were chosen based on their overall program and whether or not they had specializations in the areas I'm interested in. The problem with this specific school is that they don't have faculty decriptions on the website (it's under construction). I guess in all I'm trying to get away from actually reading a number of scholarly papers.

[kaister]

Is there really no where you could look up the just a list of the names of faculty there? Is there some sort of classes schedule you could infer faculty from? Scholarly papers are a great way to find out what type of research the program's faculty are interested in, I would recommend looking at some. If you're interested in a Ph.D., browsing scholarly papers shouldn't be such a cumbersome task. You don't have to read all the papers, just skim them to get an idea of what's going on there. However, I do not recommend basing your idea of current faculty on papers, because if they are a little dated, they could not be working there anymore or not mentoring students, etc. I hope you can find something...and if you are at a lost, you could email the department and ask for a list of current faculty, they should give you that. Good luck.