statement of purpose for phd
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#1 Rule to Follow When Writing Your Statement of Purpose for Ph.D

One of the more difficult writing skills to learn is how to show rather than tell.

When trying to signal to the Admissions Committee that you belong in a Ph.D. program, it’s much easier to tell them about your research competence, how hard working you are; how intellectually curious you are; how much research you’ve done and call it a day. It’s straightforward and self-explanatory.

In writing your Ph.D. Statement of Purpose, you’re applying the ‘show, not tell’ rule to describing your research interests. This is a skill and like all skills, it requires practice. What makes for a compelling description about research?

Here are some considerations:

  1. Be specific, not broad
  2. Aim for research questions, not just research topics
  3. How you came to be interested in this research question
  4. Explain why this question is important
  5. Contribution to knowledge

For example, perhaps you’re interested in emotional intelligence. It’s too broad to say,

“My research interest is about emotional intelligence in education.”

A more specific, and compelling, description might be:

“I’m interested in seeing how emotional intelligence can be developed in middle school children using experiential learning”.

Clearly, the second description has more details. Nevertheless, it’s more than just adding details. When possible, you want to also phrase your interests into a research question.

You might say:

‘Can emotional intelligence be developed in middle school children using a specific experiential learning protocol?’

When posing a question, you can follow-up with a story about how you came to be interested in this question.

Perhaps you noticed that more students were spending time on their phones and you wondered whether the new generation would have difficulty developing emotional intelligence.

Perhaps this led you to take a seminar on emotional intelligence where you learned about emotional intelligence development in schools.

Perhaps you worked with a professor who created various techniques for developing emotional intelligence in high-school students and you wonder whether these techniques could be applied to a different student population.

You might ask:

‘Will a certain protocol for developing emotional intelligence in one student population (high-school students) work with a different student population (middle-school students)?’

These details of how you came to be interested in a specific research question are worth describing. After, you can explain why the question is important (i.e., policy implications, practical implications, validating an existing theory, etc.).

Finally, explaining why the question is important leads to the next natural step in scientific research, inferring how your research interests might contribute to a larger body of knowledge.

Because [highlight]research is about contributing to the existing knowledge base[/highlight], you’ll want to discuss how your research interest has potential to contribute to a ‘gap’ in the existing knowledge base.

A complete paragraph about research interests in a Ph.D. statement of purpose might look like this:

“I’m interested in how emotional intelligence can be developed in middle school children using a specific experiential learning protocol. Given the greater rate of mobile phone immersion among young children, there is growing concern about the development of interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence among educators and policy makers.

While completing my masters, I worked with professor X who studied the development of emotional intelligence in high-school children. Working on a project using an experiential learning role-play protocol with high-school students, I wondered if the method could be extended to middle school students.

As we reviewed the existing research during a year long Emotional Intelligence seminar on Emotional Intelligence in Education, I noticed that ‘role play protocol’ had not been extended to middle-school students. This has implications for policy makers because…”

Notice how this paragraph goes beyond telling to showing the Admission Committee your research interests.

More importantly, it begins to provide insight into your thought process, which answers a question that all Ph.D. admissions committee are wondering:

Does this candidate have the potential to be an outstanding researcher?

P.S.

This post is fictional and for demonstration purposes only. Any semblance to actual persons or research questions are purely incidental.

Prospective doctoral students in different fields will need to observe conventions of research description specific to that field (i.e., computer science researchers will obvious frame their questions differently than those in educational psychology).

Written By Paul Apivat Hanvongse, Ph.D. in Social-Organizational Psychology  from  Columbia University Teachers College. Follow Paul at phdpurpose.tumblr.com

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