How to talk about research in your SOP?

[nt1996]

I've been struggling in my SOP with figuring out what to focus on when talking about the research I have done. I'm trying to find a balance between talking about the techniques I know, what the research is actually about, and what I learned that helped me think like a scientist. I'm leaning towards not really talking about the techniques at all since I have a section about that in my CV. But I'm struggling with how in depth to discuss the details of the research. Right now I'm talking about the conclusions we found in the project (including molecule names and all that) and I focus more specifically on the work I did and the conclusions it helped us reach. Does anyone have suggestions about how much we should get into the nitty gritty details about our research in our SOP?

I have also been reading around that we should try to show the adcomms in our SOP that we have certain qualities instead of telling them. I've found this difficult because I have wanted to include sentences like "this experience helped me develop my ability to think critically about problems," or something along those lines. If anyone has suggestions about how to successfully show that you have certain qualities without explicitly stating it I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you so much for any feedback!

Edited November 6, 2017 by nt1996

[Bioenchilada]

You don't really want to get into the nitty gritty of your project in your personal statement, especially if you have multiple experiences. What worked for me was just mentioning the techniques/assays that I did in passing rather than going through the specifics of each experiment. I also feel that saying things like "this experience helped me develop my ability to think critically about problems" will be fine if you add a bit more meat to it. 

[L543]

I applied last year. In my SOP I had one paragraph talking about the goals of my project, what had been accomplished so far, what conclusions we had drawn, and what I was going to do going forward. I talked about the skills I developed in my research, but I didn't give any super specific details about the techniques I was using. 

[TakeruK]

I would suggest that you cover three things in a description of your past research experience: 1) the main research goal/question, 2) what you specifically contributed and 3) what you specifically achieved (either solely or as part of a team).

I think techniques is actually important because that's part of how you "show" instead of "tell". On a CV, you might list the techniques but you probably don't have space to show the committee what you know. Later on, you should condense your research experience part of the CV to not really list many things at all besides where and when you worked but as an applicant, having bullet points for these items is okay.

An example of "showing" instead of telling: Let's say you wanted to tell them you are able to communicate scientific results clearly and effectively. You might mention that as part of the project, you regularly presented updates at group meetings, or that you presented at monthly collaboration telecons, etc. For critical thinking ability, you can discuss your role in the analysis and interpretation of data. If you did something like create figures for a paper or wrote part of the discussion section, that's valuable critical thinking right there. For less tangible things like this though, the committee look for critical thinking from your PI's LOR too.

For the last thing (achievements), I think you have the right idea but I want to also emphasize that you should explicitly say what you personally did as well as what the team did. For example, many people might write that their work lead to a paper, which is awesome! But it would be even more awesome if the applicant also wrote what they contributed. Did you perform the analysis that led to the key result? Did you write parts of the paper? etc. And if you presented the work at conferences, make sure to include that too!