How to get specific on research interests?

[brontësaurus]

I just received comments on my statement of purpose from one of my old professors, and...ouch. Here they are:

I’m not sure what to suggest. It’s unusually well-written, but I think a review committee for a Phd program at least would say that it doesn’t target specific research areas you would work on—other than the most general-- and sounds a lot like many other letters of application (even the information about depression to explain wobbly grades, surprisingly.)  For an MA program, it’s probably fine.

I have severe depression and PTSD that was untreated in college, and I mentioned it in my SOP to explain some withdrawals I have. My GPA is 3.78, so it's not super shabby, I think. Should I take this information out? It is related to my research interests (disability studies).

My second question is the most important: how specific can, and should, I get on my research interests? I don't have an MA, and I feel sort of lost where this is concerned. Any words of advice would be appreciated!

[kurayamino]

Hey brontesaurus,

I'm sorry to hear about your depression and PTSD. I think maybe the way you word this subject in your SOP will make a lot of difference on how it is received. For instance, you might not address your GPA numerically in your SOP, but explicitly state how your depression and PTSD has directly informed your interest in disability studies. As a way to explain my interest in masculinity and my background of poverty I used this sentence: ".  Had my father—who became physically disabled before my birth—had access to scholarship in the field of disability studies, or had he been able to understand social constructions of masculinity as invented, not natural, perhaps he would have found comfort and even a degree of empowerment." You may be able to address your GPA by saying that your experience with depression and PTSD while in college informed your research interests.

 

As to your second question, that's a little trickier. What I did was talk about my current interest (the thing I submitted for the writing sample) and where I wanted to take that in the future. If your current project is on disability studies then find a way to broaden that topic and make your personal story have that much more of an impact. The future research is specifically in the SOP so that faculty members can get a feel for the type of work you want to continue doing at their institution and whether they would be of any benefit to your research interests I hope this is helpful! and take heart:the SOP editing process is a real bear. I came out with quite a few scrapes and bruises during the process, but ultimately it was all stuff I needed to hear. Best of luck to you!

 

 

[ProfLorax]

What are your interests? Let's start there. 

[EmmaJava]

I can totally relate to this question, and I have received very similar feedback on my own drafts. For what it's worth, I believe that the statement of purpose is by far the most difficult piece of writing that I've ever tried, and this coming from someone with several peer-reviewed publications. I don't mean that immodestly but contextually. I am routinely told that my writing is great but that the content isn't what an admissions committee would be looking for - I think that, for me, at least, this is largely a function of trying to incorporate too much advice into the confines of too little space. I have scoured these boards and others like them to figure out what an SoP should look like, and while there is a ton of great advice, I honestly still don't know (and I'm reeeeally trying, here). After a long time, I came across a post that boiled it down to "focus, fit, future" (sorry for lack of citation, but it's somewhere in the SoP boards), and I thought that was a pretty nifty and concise formula. Well, I wrote the hell out of a "focus, fit, future" statement and (crushingly) received feedback almost identical to yours. In fact, my biggest, long-time supporter was visibly fed-up with me and dispensed with any encouragement, telling me, this time - "This isn't going to work." (Even more crushingly, she asked me - earnestly, I think - if I really did want to be an academic after all.)

How is this relevant, aside from commiserating? It think it's relevant because I finally had someone get through to me (not the aforementioned supporter, but another one that I took it to after being crushed) - a trusted source within a department that I'm trying to get into provided encouraging words in addition to the following advice:

"I wonder, then, if you can focus your statement very pointedly on the kind of work you would like to do in our program, providing a clear and detailed sense of what authors or issues you'd examine and how your treatment of them would relate to your larger commitment to [insert my focus here].  Your audience for this thing will not consist of specialists in either the area you want to study or the project you want to pursue.  So you need to convince them that you know what you're doing by writing simply and providing as much detail as you can about the means and ends of your work. 

...

We're looking for people who have a strong sense of what they want to do, how they want to do it, and how it matters to the field they want to be part of.

...

Just write as if you're talking to a reasonably intelligent family member about what you want to do in a PhD program."

So I don't really know why these particular phrasings stuck out to me, but they did, and maybe they will for you, too? The upshot for me, in relation to your question, is that I completely underestimated the level of detail and specificity that I should pour into my SoP- even after a ton of research, workshops, etc - which I had thought was actually pretty detailed to begin. Having rummaged through so many threads, there are a million other helpful ways of saying things, but this email stuck to me like glue: GET MORE SPECIFIC. I took it and ran, and as daunting as it was to completely overhaul my SoP, it led me to really connect the dots of my interests, in a specific, spelled-out way, that I literally had not done before (forehead smack!), nevermind my amazingly-written previous drafts. In fact, based on this, I'd go so far as to say that I'm convinced that at least this program doesn't need to see anything aside from very specific, pointed research interests...in other words, the "fit" and "future" are basically out of my statement, which is now 100% "focus."

Keep in mind that this hasn't yet proved successful for me, and that it is but one perspective. But it is a perspective that I am appreciating in a big way. I'm realizing that fit and future are, necessarily, far more speculative and beyond any single SoP writer's control - they are bet-hedging strategies that strike me as high risk/high reward and frankly even more mysterious than any elusive SoP formula, once you get right down to it. The thing that you can control, and nail, I'm now realizing, is the specificity of your research interests and methodologies, the ability to show a committee that "you have a strong sense of what you want to do, how you want to do it, and how it matters to the field you want to be a part of." That, and nothing else, is my new formula, because at least that, and nothing else, can and will be bullet-proof from here on out.

One last note. Through the processing of redrafting in this vein, I noticed something really interesting. I found myself letting go of a really "well-written" SoP. Or, rather, I redefined what "well-written" meant, at least for this piece. Well-written, for those of us who can apparently write well but also who apparently cannot provide an admissions committee with what they are looking for, does not mean the same kind of well-written that goes into our writing samples or our creative endeavors or our social media posts or whatever. No, let go of all that. Keep it well-written, certainly - do all the usual stuff to turn passive voice back around into active, remove jargon, etc. etc., but let go of your poetry and just state, as clear as day, a project that you want to make into a dissertation, how that's going to work, and why it's going to matter. For writing snobs, it's going to suck (and this explains why I have always been dismayed by those "successful" SoPs that very kind souls have shared with me; I guess when you can't know how or why those are successful, you're still stuck in a different definition of "well-written." I would encourage all of us to reconsider "well-written" pronto, at least for SoP purposes). Yes, the writing will suck, according to our other standards for "well-written," but I have accepted this as a part of the game. I am also a little relieved and more than a little excited to have actually articulated, in detailed fashion for the first time ever, a proposed dissertation project.

 

[haltheincandescent]

EmmaJava's advice is good. To add to that, as far as getting (what I assume is) the 'right' tone, level of detail, and way of talking about my interests, I read through a lot of faculty bios/statements on different departments' websites to see how they go about structuring and offering a thumbnail of their research, past achievements, and current/future directions of study. Obviously, as an applicant, yours will have to be a lot more tilted toward future work, and might have a more personal narrative weaved in, but I still think that this is a good way start thinking about how to talk about your research in detail. 

Also, as far as "Just write as if you're talking to a reasonably intelligent family member about what you want to do in a PhD program" goes, also think about how you would talk about your specific research plans to a prof in your department who works on something completely different. I think this might help with how to simultaneously present a detailed/specialized course of research and a description that will be able to be understood by ad comm members outside your field.

[brontësaurus]

Thanks so much for all your responses. I'm so grateful. Now to rewrite! 

[brontësaurus]

8 hours ago, ProfLorax said:

What are your interests? Let's start there. 

I'm interested in looking at mental illness and neurodiversity in the works of the Brontës. Here are some research questions I've come up with: To what extent do the Brontës' perspectives on mental illness reflect popular 19th century English attitudes? To what extent do they resist them? Do those attitudes draw on the emerging science of psychology, or do they draw on earlier conceptions of madness? What role does exposure to harsh natural elements play in the development of mental illness in the Brontës' works, and what, specifically, are the dangers that nature poses? What personal contact do the Brontës have with mental illness, and is it experiential or observational? 

[ProfLorax]

49 minutes ago, brontësaurus said:

I'm interested in looking at mental illness and neurodiversity in the works of the Brontës. 

That pretty darn specific (and super interesting!). Do you explicitly state this in your statement? I ended up adding a thesis statement of sorts to mind, one sentence that explicitly listed my interests and goals very early on. Something like: "At X University, I hope to study X, Y, and Z and gain the skills needed to be a teacher-scholar of English at the university-level." 

[brontësaurus]

I think I need to state my interests in a sentence similar to the one you suggest. I thought my interests were coming through clearly, but now that I look back at it, the information is sort of scattered about. Thanks for the advice!

[random_grad]

4 hours ago, brontësaurus said:

I'm interested in looking at mental illness and neurodiversity in the works of the Brontës. Here are some research questions I've come up with: To what extent do the Brontës' perspectives on mental illness reflect popular 19th century English attitudes? To what extent do they resist them? Do those attitudes draw on the emerging science of psychology, or do they draw on earlier conceptions of madness? What role does exposure to harsh natural elements play in the development of mental illness in the Brontës' works, and what, specifically, are the dangers that nature poses? What personal contact do the Brontës have with mental illness, and is it experiential or observational? 

This sounds like a nice part of a SoP, focused and to the point!

Consider who your audience is: on the committee you are lucky if you'll get one person who knows anything about this particular topic, and, due to funding consideration, you need more than one person on board for your app. Most people won't be in that subfield. So they won't know if what you're talking about is great or random. Nor will they spend a lot of time reading through the intricacies of your prose (during 1st run. they will, if you get past that stage). They will look for keywords which can help them answer some very specific questions:

1. what are your interests and how do you plan to approach them? = are you focused enough to write a dissertation + some departments require that you be open enough to try new things, so some might consider extreme focus not too good actually

2. how does it fit with this department? = who will be your advisor and who might be on your committee (=who will be charged with reading your writing sample) + have you bothered to learn about them at all

3. what have you done towards this goal? = do you actually have an idea of what it's all about or you just invented a neat topic for the SoP

and, most importantly,

4. why does it matter to the discipline as a whole? = are you aware of what's happening in your field, do you have that maturity + will you be able to publish in major journals (NB: this last point just came to mind while writing this, and I am pretty convinced that this is true, but I do not have direct evidence on that and haven't ever seen this point elsewhere, so it may be just random conjectures).

Furthermore, by your ability to show this all in a concise and approachable yet pleasant manner, they will also be able to assess your potential in scoring research grants. I've found that the way I wrote my SoP was a kindof slightly more sophisticated version of the winning apps I wrote for grant committees.

 

Now, the reason why your reviewer wrote "(even the information about depression to explain wobbly grades, surprisingly.) " may be that (s)he, too, was skimming your SoP rather than reading, which is what the committee will likely do on the first, eliminating, run. So you shouldn't blame him for that. He was just trying to recreate the conditions of real life. So, back to my point: the reason why your reviewer wrote that is because he saw you mention that and immediately connected that to what he's seen time and again without really linking it to your research interest. So, to remedy this situation, I would suggest the following (and it may or may not be relevant, as I haven't seen the original text) : do not talk about grades in your SoP. The committee's seen your grades and now they want to fly away from that ridiculous convention and look at you as a future colleague whose B+ in 2nd year won't ever matter or be known. We all have B+s. They do too. The second thing that I may suggest is to reduce the personal stuff to the minimum or even exclude that. I don't know, of course, what would be best, but at least try and see how it reads. The reason why I suggest this is because I've once been told that my project sounds like a "personal" project, which somehow was bad for that reviewer of my grant application. I'm still not sure why it would be bad, but it can be perceived as bad by some people. It would probably be hard to find out from a department's website whose opinion is what on that, but in any case, keep in mind that it may be a red flag for some.Also, there may be a conscious or unconscious bias against people "with issues" - this is something I was thinking about today, actually, when I noticed yet another time how poorly accessible was my campus and also noticed that I haven't seen a single person on wheelchair on campus. People of the older generation might still be biased. You don't want to put yourself at a disadvantage.

 

Edited November 13, 2015 by random_grad

[knp]

I have a couple thoughts about your GPA, and I hope you will find one or the other helpful. First is that not already a great GPA, even if you feel that it could have been even higher? At my institution, that would've been a magna cum laude—none too shabby!

Second, I have been told in clear terms that I am getting a superlative letter from one of my professors in part because I have been known to get Bs. (Although man, I hope he didn't put it in exactly those terms in the actual letter.) This is a baby-boomer professor with hippy tendencies. He tends to think we millennials are too grade-oriented—gee, with college getting ever more expensive and admissions ever more competitive, I wonder why?—and he likes that my transcript shows a couple risks. I would guess that that demographic and sentiment are common among admissions committees, so I wouldn't worry about them choosing someone with a 4.0 over you. Your grades are already superlative, so congratulations.

PS Interesting topic! I was just thinking about Lear's madness in the wilderness earlier today, and I'd love to read anything you ever post about your topic on the internet. As far as random_grad's points, I'm not even in your discipline, but that post convinced me even so. 

[Dr. Old Bill]

10 hours ago, brontësaurus said:

I'm interested in looking at mental illness and neurodiversity in the works of the Brontës. Here are some research questions I've come up with: To what extent do the Brontës' perspectives on mental illness reflect popular 19th century English attitudes? To what extent do they resist them? Do those attitudes draw on the emerging science of psychology, or do they draw on earlier conceptions of madness? What role does exposure to harsh natural elements play in the development of mental illness in the Brontës' works, and what, specifically, are the dangers that nature poses? What personal contact do the Brontës have with mental illness, and is it experiential or observational? 

I don't have a lot to add to this thread other than to say that this sounds like a great research project...and one that will likely appeal to a lot of academics (and, of course, adcoms).

When I read this, my mind goes immediately to Bertha Mason, which is surely one of the most obvious examples in the Brontës' works, but even beyond exploring perspectives on this original "madwoman in the attic," I suspect a lot can be done with your proposal. Good luck!