Kartik's MSCS Statement of Purpose Guide
The Statement of Purpose is the single, most important piece of the grad school admission process that is
entirely in your control.
By the time you come around to writing your first SoP draft, your GPA has been set in stone, your research
projects are completed,
and your GRE scores have been sent to most universities. Since the SoP is still in your control, it has the
potential to make or break your admissions. You should take this very seriously.
Personally, I spent around 3 months, from October - December 2023, on my SoP. I believe it had a significant
role in getting admissions from multiple, top-10 Computer Science schools, since I don’t have significant
research experience.
In this post, I will focus on how to craft a compelling Statement out of your life experiences. Articulating
these ideas into a coherent structure would be a whole other post, but I have left helpful resources down
below.
Step I: Introspect
You have decided to take a massive step in your life, and are likely going to be leaving at least one of your family, friends and job behind to take up the arduous task that is grad school. If you haven’t already, I want you to ask yourself,Is this the right decision for my larger goals in life?
Spend around an hour meditating on this. You will notice that it surfaces a lot more questions:
- What do I want to do in life?
- What am I looking to get out of grad school?
- What other alternatives do I have?
As you do this, also try to gain some clarity about what you want to study within the larger field of Computer Science. It’s completely alright to switch later on, your new experiences in grad school might change your interests, just try to make a best effort for now.
Step 2: Draft your autobiography
Now that you are aware about your decisions to pursue grad school, I want you to further introspect and write down every single experience, academic or non-academic, that has led you to this decision. For brevity, I want you to limit yourself towards the final years of high school, your undergraduate years, and your work experience. Within your chosen time horizon, I want to emphasize that you write every single experience. As you do so, also think about:- What was the work you did?
- Why did you do it?
- How did it impact you?
- How did it impact other people?
- Your general state of mind during that time.
2019 (First year of undergrad)
4. During these years I didn’t really know “How to Learn”, even though I was scoring immensely well. I didn’t have a clear purpose, I was studying because I was told to. I didn’t want to study more, I enjoyed programming.
2020 (Second year, Pandemic)
6. Utilized Covid Time to watch a lot of Andrew Ng Deep Learning videos. Astonished when I realized he was actually a co-founder of Coursera.
2021 (Third year, Pandemic)
4. SWE Internship @ Azure Networking Microsoft to simplify configurations on routers. First Big Tech exposure, I was hungry to prove my worth. I used to overwork like crazy, ended up being one of the only people who got a full time offer without any interview rounds. My director and I ended up chatting about Distributed Systems and whether AI could take up Systems jobs. Came out to be quite prophetic with OpenAI, as I decided on pursuing the very same area.
7. Covid Part 2 → Newfound interest in Distributed Systems. I played around with ML last year, but I felt like it wasn’t “real programming”. I instead wanted to write code to difficult problems. However, as my project and Work Ex ended up revealing the two often go hand-in-hand.
Notice that I’m not restricting myself to enumerating “impressive” things. Projects or events that seem
insignificant in isolation might make the difference in the right context, so list down anything and everything
that sticks out in your memory. Seeing all these life events together will help you group them to make a
stronger impact once you start drafting.
4. During these years I didn’t really know “How to Learn”, even though I was scoring immensely well. I didn’t have a clear purpose, I was studying because I was told to. I didn’t want to study more, I enjoyed programming.
2020 (Second year, Pandemic)
6. Utilized Covid Time to watch a lot of Andrew Ng Deep Learning videos. Astonished when I realized he was actually a co-founder of Coursera.
2021 (Third year, Pandemic)
4. SWE Internship @ Azure Networking Microsoft to simplify configurations on routers. First Big Tech exposure, I was hungry to prove my worth. I used to overwork like crazy, ended up being one of the only people who got a full time offer without any interview rounds. My director and I ended up chatting about Distributed Systems and whether AI could take up Systems jobs. Came out to be quite prophetic with OpenAI, as I decided on pursuing the very same area.
7. Covid Part 2 → Newfound interest in Distributed Systems. I played around with ML last year, but I felt like it wasn’t “real programming”. I instead wanted to write code to difficult problems. However, as my project and Work Ex ended up revealing the two often go hand-in-hand.
Step 3: Write your first draft
Once I had enumerated my experiences, I started to notice a clear story bloom. If you have formatted your list of experiences well, you might as well drop it into ChatGPT and have it write a draft for you.While this can be a good start, I don’t recommend excessive usage of generative AI. Based on my experience, ChatGPT tends to use excessively ornamental verbiage, which can be quite easy to spot as a reviewer.
Use the list of resources to gain an idea of what a good Statement of Purpose should contain. These pointers will help you construct a good draft out of your ideas. There are a lot more helpful resources available online, Reddit and GradCafe are some that you could look into.
I do not recommend reading other people’s statement’s at this step because it could bias you towards writing like them and steal away from your authenticity. You can do that after you have made a solid attempt at a first draft.
Do not take any longer than 2 weeks at this step, because your first draft is likely going to be incomplete. Let’s fix this in the next step.
Step 4: Get Peer Reviewed
Ideally, this is the step that you want to iterate fastest to, while still having made your best effort towards writing a draft. Your reviewers should be people who have applied to graduate school, and preferably reviewed multiple statements. Your best bet are people who you know personally, such as your college peers, or your seniors.Cold approaches on LinkedIn might are also a good approach. I reached out to multiple people who were studying at the colleges I was applying to, asking them for advice and a request to review my statement. Not all of them responded, and not all of the ones that did reviewed my Statement. However, I did get a few really helpful connections who I am still in touch with today. So reach out early with a polite request, and respect their time because we are all busy :')
Reviewing statements takes time, and leaving critical comments takes even more time. So if someone leaves a lot of scathing comments on your draft, try not to feel sad. Thank your reviewer, because it’s a strong indicator that they spent a lot of time reading your draft. Your draft is about to get a lot better.
Step 5: Go back to the drawing board
Now, I want you to read other people’s Statements. You can read mine here. Here is another really helpful site that contains CS PhD Statements.Some of the PhD statements might seem a lot more impressive than yours, but that is okay since these people are going to have a lot more experience than you.
Try to find people who are applying to similar colleges or CS areas as you. As you read through their statements, I want you to analyze how they structure their sentences, how they format their document, and how they present their ideas. In a good statement of purpose, every line should have a purpose and should communicate something of substance to the reviewer. Take notes and steal good lines if you have to.
If you have time, I recommend repeating steps 4 and 5 a few times until you are satisfied with your statement.