Lesson 3: Why Grad School?
Before writing anything, you must first figure out and articulate to yourself exactly why you want to go to graduate school. Loving a particular subject isn’t enough, nor is simply wanting to learn more. Those reasons are too general. You also want to avoid sentimentality: Love and passion won’t be enough to sustain you through the trials of a master’s or doctoral program. Likewise, professional advancement is not itself a compelling enough reason; your statement of purpose cannot present going to graduate school as merely the means to an end. That kind of single-minded careerism will turn off your professors. They want to find students who will be actively involved in their seminars and prove engaging interlocutors as invested in the process as the product.
So that said, what’s your answer? Why are you applying? What questions do you want to explore? What issues compel your attention? What are you excited to research? Why? What expertise are you committed to acquiring?
Professor Timothy Burke at Swarthmore College gives some seemingly harsh but exceptionally valuable advice on his blog:
“Let’s say you want to be a historian. Sit down and write out two or three sentences describing what kind of historian you want to be. If what you get out of that exercise is, ‘I really enjoy the study of history, particularly reading old documents’ or even, ‘I’m fascinated by American history, particularly the Civil War,’ do yourself a favor and give up any ambitions to do a doctorate in history. Not because there is anything wrong with either of those statements, but because you don’t have a sufficiently specific sense of what it is presently like to be a professional academic historian.”
The same advice applies to any field: education, social work, psychology, engineering, chemistry. Without a clear and specific sense of what you want to do in graduate school, you won’t be able to craft a compelling statement of purpose.
What Will I Do in Graduate School?
Simply asking “why” risks focusing on your feelings (I love learning or love being in the lab) or your goals after school (I want to advance in my career). So now think about what you want to do in graduate school. It’s not just more undergrad; you won’t simply be taking seminars, completing work that professors assign. What do you want to do? What do you want to research? How can you contribute? Consider the intellectual problems, issues, and questions in your field that have emerged from your research and coursework. Consider how to connect your past or current studies to your future research plans. What training do you need to prepare you to tackle those problems or issues
There’s some room for uncertainty in your research plans, especially at the master’s level, and you are not committing yourself at this point to any particular topic. You want to demonstrate to faculty members that you understand your field, the methods and approaches most common as well as emerging in the discipline, and know that graduate study is more than just additional coursework. If it’s available online, read through the graduate handbook in the program to which you are applying. Focus on what is available to you within the department: Don’t extol the visiting lecturers series, for example, and for academic programs extracurricular activities do not matter one bit. Some degree programs (in education, for example, or clinical psychology) might include internship opportunities as part of the coursework; if so, then definitely think about what you would like to do that is specific to your scholarly goals and professional plans.
