First sentence of SOP

[Clinpsyc01]

I know pretty much everything I want to say in my statement of purpose/statement of interest... Except the first sentence. I have no idea how I should begin it. I don't want it to be too abrupt, and I also don't want to start with one of those grandiose statements about my longstanding interest in the field. 

What did you guys do? 

[day_manderly]

Ohhhh... I'll share my experience and vent along the way if that's ok with you.

I thought the last sentence is the worst. The 2nd is bad, too. And the 10th. Like, really. SoPs are a pain in the ass.

At first I went with 'Applying to This Great School is an informed decision'. I wanted to show straight away that I meant business. Then somebody pointed out that was self-evident (that the decision was informed). I had a blank there for a while, waiting for the insight to strike me. Now it goes like this 'My interests are...' (a bit more elegant in terms of prose, but same meaning). That's it. The structure of my 1st paragraph:

My interests are at the crossroads of sultry goodness, smoldering nerdiness, and comparative hotness*. The profs at This Great School (especially at the Awesome Division) explore the same stuff, and also the School is so very international (in the case of my field that's ultrarelevant), so it's the shit for me.

And then I go on to describe my background, PhD research ideas, and plans for the future.

*closely related fields

Edited November 21, 2016 by day_manderly

[fuzzylogician]

I started with my research question, then expanded on my interests more generally. I had all kinds of attempts at so-called "hooks" but those all were liked by some but not others so eventually I gave up and went with a straight and to the point approach. 

[TakeruK]

I also second the suggestions to start with your research interests or your research question. Don't worry about being "abrupt", because the people reading your SOP are reading your SOP in a pile of like 10s or hundreds of other SOPs.