Lesson 1: Introduction
Applying to graduate school is very different from applying to medical, law, or business school and nothing like applying to college. How do I know? I did it, many years ago, and almost made the worst possible mistake. Back then, the statement of purpose was misleadingly named the personal statement. I took that title literally, so spent weeks crafting an essay that extolled my love for my subject and commitment to my field in eloquent, often metaphoric terms. When I had a polished draft, I read it aloud over the phone to my father, a college professor. He fell silent, which was odd because I was an award-winning writer by that time and he had always been my biggest fan. Finally, he said, “No. Not at all. You cannot embarrass yourself by sending that.”
He explained that faculty members don’t want to read your poetic ruminations about your field. They don’t care about your passion, if only because they know that passion won’t get you through graduate school. Skills and discipline will see you through the trials of a master’s or doctoral program. No matter how sure you are that graduate school is right for you, and you are right for it, no matter how much you love to learn, no matter how driven you are to succeed and move on to the next step in your career--you will, at some point, most likely hate graduate school and doubt your decision to enroll. What gets students through that dark night of the soul are skills, discipline, and recognition that graduate school is a job. So write your statement like a job application, with a sense of clear-eyed, unsentimental purpose.
After that disheartening conversation with my dad, I rewrote my personal statement as a statement of purpose and was admitted to every top graduate school in my discipline with full funding, including tuition and a stipend. I chose Yale, graduating with distinction six years later, then began a new position as an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. There I sat on graduate admissions committees in more than one field in the humanities (MA and PhD) plus observed graduate admissions in a variety of applied doctoral programs. After a few years, I took a new job at Princeton University where again I read graduate admissions in two humanities programs.
I’ve read hundreds of statements at this point and helped countless candidates apply to graduate programs, even in fields far from my own. So much advice out there floating around the web is, frankly, either too general to be of much use or just plain wrong. It’s clear faculty members aren’t writing those sites. So why am I writing this? Because I genuinely want to share my privilege as the child of a professor who attended elite private schools, enjoyed incredible research opportunities as an undergraduate at Columbia, and benefitted from expert mentorship by top scholars in my field throughout my undergraduate and graduate studies. My experience in graduate admissions was acquired as a faculty member at a Research I institution and at an Ivy League university. All the expertise I offer to you here in the hope it helps.
My advice will sometimes sound blunt, certainly frank, because if my path early on was smoothed by privilege, nevertheless my expertise has been hard-earned. Graduate school can be daunting, especially for students who might not have family ties to the academe or clearly see themselves reflected in the professoriate. The job market for those aspiring to academe has never been worse and shows little signs of improving; there are jobs out there, of course, but it is now common to spend years in visiting or post-doctoral positions before being competitive for tenure-track jobs.
Being aware of these realities before crafting a statement of purpose is important because you do not want faculty members to find you naive or idealistic. Part of demonstrating the maturity and independence that will appeal to professors reading your application means being clear-eyed about what you’re getting into and what you hope to get out of it.
