The Statement of Purpose is probably one of the most difficult pieces of the application packet to complete. Many of us alumni who actually ended up at grad school in the US appear to agree that our old SOP's were horrible. In this section, some old bulletin board posts have been included here and then finally some links serve as sources of more information. These sources of information should serve as sufficient guidance as far as writing a statement of purpose goes. It still is a hard thing to write, but at least you now know what to put in there. The importance of a statement of purpose varies from institution to institution. See what Ananth has listed below in what he sees as priority items in his posts on the uor.org bulletin board. He provides a faculty member perspective on things.

Ananth:

I'm sorry I have been lax in responding, although I started what might have been the precursor to this thread. I can tell you from my experiences evaluating CS applications at what would be considered a top 20 school -- most people who apply have exceptional GREs. Even people who have trouble piecing together a single coherent sentence seem to have near perfect GREs. For this reason, this school considers GRE scores optional. If you asked me for an order of what we consider important, it would be:

- institution of undergraduate study.
- undergraduate record (GPA).
- research activities -- papers etc.
- other activities.

A good heuristic for applying is to find universities where your seniors have been admitted and where they have done well. Also, I have said this before, perhaps you should consider getting a Ph.D. (and I don't mean apply for a Ph.D. and quit after an MS.. do NOT do that.. that is cheap, unethical, and deceitful to the faculty who championed your cause in the first place).
Note that any information on research activities, papers and projects can easily be fitted into your SOP.

Prasenjeet Ghosh

Rosy SOPs should be stopped. When I was in Roorkee, I also made the mistake of writing a rosy SOP. Dont give the cliche' that "Right from the day you were born, you were intrigued by the electronic toys" if you are apping in Robotics, or "The wonders of science have always mystified you". Be realistic. No one expects you to be a genius, but they do expect you to be hardworking and sincere and reasonably intelligent. Talk about the projects or the classes that you have enjoyed while an undergrad and logically argue why you want to pursue a higher degree in that particular school. And most importantly, customize each SOP to the particular school you are applying. Don't send the same SOP everywhere. It requires extra work, but it definitely pays.

Sanjay V.

I'd like to elaborate about the non flowery SOP that PG mentioned. Put yourself in an admission committee's shoes. Keeping in mind that they read more than a few SOP's a year, do you think stuff like "my grandfather presented me with a tool set as a kid and since then I wanted to be a Mechanical Engineer" will impress them? Also, complicated flowery English is no good. If you really know to write well, good choice of words does embellish the SOP. (I could have simply said, "Improve the SOP", instead of embellish). On the other hand, if your prose resembles mine, stay simple and grammatically correct, use short sentences.

What should a SOP address? Here's my list, others please feel free to add to it.

1. What are your educational goals?
2. Why graduate school?
3. Why graduate school in the field you are applying in?
4. Why at the school you are applying to?
5. What are your interests? (In the area you are applying in)
6. Anything that makes you attractive that could not be fitted in the standard application materials that you are sending in.

This is all I can think of. Use your undergraduate/work/industrial training experiences and weave in a nice story here.

Ankit Seedher

Very right sanv....it is almost embarrassing when i look at my SOP that i had sent from Roorkee writing the right-from-the-day-i-was-born shit....i am about to finish my MS and have recently applied to the doctoral programs of some schools and have sent (thankfully) a much saner SoP this time..the SoP should be very focused and should be very technical. To people who want to see how apping must be ideally done i refer you to the following web-page:

http://www.async.caltech.edu/~kp/Grad/apps.html
This page has this Caltech guy's apping material and has a really good Sop. I have to admit i really copied his style of writing the SoP when i wrote my SoP the second time this year although his SoP is a Comp Sci SoP and my area of interest is not even remotely related to Comp SCi but reading this should give a fairly good idea on writing a SoP that can really create an impression......

Nishant Sameer

I found this article useful.
How to Write a Successful Statement of Intent for Graduate Schools, Professor Hower, Cornell University, Department of English. http://www.fulbright.co.uk/eas/postgrad/statement2.html

Sameer Anand

Check this link out asap, specifically potential applicants since you'll get multiple links for apping, rankings, recos, statement of purpose through this article. i think they should be bookmarked by those looking to app or apping. This article is not staying there for long.
http://www.rediff.com/search/2001/may/04know.htm

Links
Writing the Statement of Purpose
Dr. Carla Trujillo
UC Berkeley College of Engineering
http://coe.berkeley.edu/cues/grad.purpose.html

Another perspective from UTexas
http://www.ece.utexas.edu/~chase/ECE_Home/stmt_of_purpose.htm

RPI writing center
http://www.rpi.edu/dept/llc/writecenter/web/gradapp.html

A discussion board with some interesting samples
http://occs.cs.oberlin.edu/~csmc/gradschool/sops.html

Each of these webpages has its own brand of advice; some of it may actually be conflicting with each other. These things depend on personal perspective and departmental/University Policies. Ultimately, the best advice would be to write an essay and get it critiqued by somebody experienced.

Sanjay