SOP Questions

A statement of purpose should be able to answer the following questions in a general flow within 1.5 pages (letter size).

Introduction (short paragraph)

1. Why are you writing the SOP?
2. What is your primary interest?
3. What is your specific interest?

Education background
1. What did you study and where?
2. How did you prepare yourself academically for graduate school? (specific to courses)
3. Specifically, how did you get interested in your field of research and academically what helped? (courses, labwork, term projects, class projects, etc)

Research experience
1. How did you apply the knowledge learned from your classes?
2. Describe your research and projects in brief?
3. In the projects, how did you particularly contribute?
4. What was the new thing that you did in your project?
5. What were the new things that you learned during research?

Future plans
1. What are your future plans?
2. What role does the university play in your future plans?
3. Why did you choose this university for grad school?
4. Which professor would be the most suitable to be your mentor?
5. Specifically why and how?
6. What do you hope to gain out of your university grad school experience?

Some general points to remember:
- Always use spell check.
- Be grammatically and temporally (do not mix past, present and future tense) correct. Use correct punctuations.
- Make sure the answers to the questions above flow smoothly among each other.
- Use the ideas from the end of a paragraph to construct and continue the new paragraph.
- Remember, it is all about marketing yourself.