Sample SOP for Engineers

A good SOP is well structured, well written but most importantly unique to you. Download a sample SOP and learn how to make your SOP stand out in a crowd

“I am not interested in what they did or how. I am keen to know why,” said a senior Admission Director in one of our campus visits in NYU.

SOP is where you tell that guy – why you did what you did and how it makes you the unique you.

Why do we need a SOP

GRE score can show whether you have the aptitude to understand the coursework or not. Your GPA and undergrad transcripts can show whether you have the necessary academic credentials for this program or not. Toefl shows if you will be able to communicate and hence, adjust well in an english speaking community or not.

But alas, you cannot capture the awesomeness of a human being in 3 scores. If that was the case, only the highest qualified will get admits to the Ivy Leagues. But what about that girl from small town in Africa who frickin’ fought against the societal bias and her closed minded aunts to dream of studying in USA! Or how about that IT guy from a tier 3 school in Indonesia who has mediocre grades but wants to be a data scientist!

Good schools want these super motivated candidates instead of uni-dimensional 10 pointers. And this is how, we came to the concept of SOP – its a Statement of Purpose. They want to know why you want to study this particular program in this particular school. It’s a story that tells them how you have come to this point in your life – what incidences have shaped your thinking, how you think, what will you do with your education and will you put it to a good use. And, what remains unsaid is – will you be a successful and good alum for the school?

Now that we have an understanding of what SOP is, let’s look at an example.

Sample SOP for CS

This is the real SOP of a candidate of ours who got into CMU MSIT, ASU MCS, NEU CS and TU Munich CS programs.

You can download the full PDF below.

Structure of a good SOP

There are a lot of samples available on Internet but what you will struggle with is finding out the right style for yourself. Of course, since these samples are available freely to everyone, you cannot copy them either.

So, let’s understand how to structure your SOP.

After 6 years of being in business and working with 500+ candidates, we have developed a deep understanding of what works. The problem is there is no one-size-fits-all solution here. But, to the extent that we can generalise, this is what we recommend.

Introduction

The opening paragraph should give a solid summary of your profile to the admission committee. It should answer why you are applying to this program, what makes you qualified for it and what is impressive about you.

Academic Background

Start with a brief summary of your college life. Try to cover your relevant academic details here such as grades in important subjects, accomplishments (scholarship, hackathon prizes, TAship etc). Start talking about how your interests started evolving in college. Follow up with 1-2 important academic project paragraphs.

Professional/Research Background

This is where you write about your internships, fulltime work experience and/or research experience. Talk about most relevant projects and what you learned from them.

Extracurriculars

Here, you can showcase your leadership and teamwork skills apart from anything meaningful you have done outside studies and work. People can talk about their serious hobbies, sports achievements, volunteering activities, experiences of leading a team in clubs etc.

Caveat – avoid cliches. If you were just a member of the IEEE club or volunteered for a simple event, that does not really count.

Why MS

As we discussed above, the admission committee wants to see how does MS fit in with your plan. So, this section has to convince them that you know what you want to get out of your MS. Talk about your career goals and what will you do after MS.

[pullquote]This is a good time to read our other post which shows good example statements you can use in SOP [/pullquote]

How to make your SOP unique?

As you can see, everybody can follow this structure but what is really hard is to personalize a SOP so that it stands out from the competition. It needs expert storytelling and multiple iterations to evolve a rough draft into a winning SOP. It has taken us years to perfect this process in our consulting.

Here are three pointers you need to keep in mind to make your SOP awesome-

  1. It should be genuine – Admission committee develops an eye for the fakers. If you keep telling how great you are and how you developed passion for microprocessors since childhood, no one is going to buy that. Don’t try to exaggerate unnecessarily. Keep it real.
  2. Address your salient strengths and weaknesses – Winning hackathons? Had low GPA because you went to participate in Formula SAE? Had to return to your hometown to take care of an ailing mother which caused a gap in your work? Only you can tell your story and you should.
  3. Your goals should make sense with your background – Everyone is applying for data Science these days even if they have never worked with ML or have any fundamental knowledge of statistics. If this is the case, you should ask yourself why are you applying to this program. If you cannot justify it yourself, how is the admission committee going to ever be convinced with it?

Never Use Templates

Please refrain from using templates given by counselors or websites. The whole point is to make your application stand out and by using a template (especially the ones where you just change your specific information), you are looking similar to thousand other applicants. In fact, try to write the first SOP yourself without seeing any sample SOPs. After writing the first draft, check out some good SOPs and tweak accordingly.

Don’t miss our 3 Exclusive SOP Tips

https://youtu.be/4IL-gzfHFTY

Download the Sample SOP in a PDF 

Click here to download [download id=”2941″]

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All about Statement of Purpose (SOP) for MS

sop for ms applications guide

How to write good SOP for MS applications? – It takes introspection, good writing and understanding. We know what AdCom is looking for in a SOP.

This is third article in this series. See the previous article on GRE here and School Selection here.

Once you have shortlisted which schools and programs you will be applying to, you need to go ahead and actually fill out the applications for each of them. Most of the schools now accept online applications, all you need is good internet access, valid email account and a credit card to pay the application fee in dollars.

Each application will ask you to fill out personal details. Tip: This can get repetitive, so it is advised that you create a text file and store your basic information from which you can copy and paste it into each application.
You will be required to upload some specific documents as well. This includes-

  1. Statement of Purpose (SOP)
  2. Letters of Recommendation (LOR)
  3. Resume (in some cases)
  4. Transcripts

In this post, we will focus on writing a powerful SOP for MS applications.

What is a Statement of Purpose (SOP) for MS

An SOP is a reflection of ‘who you are’ in front of the admission committee. This is one of the most important components of your application because this is the only document that is totally under your control. This is the place where you can tell your story and differentiate yourself from other candidates.

Here are the guidelines by Cornell University on what are they looking for in a SOP.

Components of a SOP

Background and Aspirations

In a typical SOP for MS applications, you will begin with a brief background/description of yourself and what you hope to achieve through studying MS at this university. Caveat: Don’t quote cliches here as everyone is doing it! Also, avoid getting too poetic. Remember you are applying for MS.

Academic and Professional relevance

Every school wants great students who will carry its name and reputation higher. For that, you need to show your academic and professional brilliance. So, talk about the academic (or professional if you have work experience) projects that can tell them about your subject expertise. Tip: Give more space to what you contributed and learned from that project instead of just describing it. How many and what kind of projects you want to highlight is up to you. But we recommend expanding on at least one and show your involvement. MS is about a lot of course projects and some research. You have to demonstrate that you can not only handle it but excel at it. Similarly, talk about any papers you might have published. Research papers and project become more important for PhD and MS programs that require a thesis to be completed.

Personal Story

Admission Committee consists of people who are reading your applications. Since they handle a large volume of applications every day, it is important to make your SOP stand out or be memorable. You can stand out by being academically brilliant too but if your experience is not that distinguished, try to put forth a strong story that connects your background and aspirations and aligns it with your passion to do MS at that school.

For e.g. even if you have not published big papers or done great research projects, you could have still started a startup with couple of friends and done some relevant work through it. The startup could be as simple as a website that offers building surveys for companies who want to do some marketing research. You could be highlighting some personal angle here such as how you came up with the concept and what were some of your lessons.

Here, you can also talk about extra-curriculars esp if you excel at something such as playing in a band, professional photography (something that is more than just a hobby), blogging (may be how you applied your php programming lessons to customize wordpress) etc.

Tip: Remember, anything that helps the admission committee personnel see a face behind your application is good as it will help him in remembering you. Caveat: But, dont spend too much space talking personal story that is not directly relevant to the course as that alone can’t get you admitted. Personal stories are good to supplement your acad/professional experience section.

Talk about how you have applied your learnings

Be it professional or personal section, remember to talk how you have applied your education or lessons into real world. This is a GREAT way to show that you’ll be able to translate your classroom lessons to your professional life. A naive example but you’ll get the point-

“Having learned how xyz and abc help improving the signal strength of the wireless networks in my CCNA certification course, I was excited to help the system admin at my current company do so and so.“

One more-

“My brother’s company wanted to get customer feedback on one of their new products and I offered to get the surveys designed, filled and collected for them. Initially, I was doing it manually with my friends but then I realized that we can automate and package the service in a very easy-to-use way and put it online. To our surprise, we got contacted by lot of local companies in first month itself. Slowly, we iterated and developed pro packages that charged a premium for nicer result analysis. By integrating our services with right social media platforms and offline distribution channels, we had built a fully functional survey building service in six months. This gave me an inspiration to test new ideas online.“

The above concludes the topics that should feature in all your SOPs (irrespective of the school). Next, you should be talking specific points about each school-

Why are you applying to this school?

This will typically discuss specific coursework, professors and research that you are interested in. This should tie up with your experience and background sections as well as your aspirations. You should have selected universities based on these anyways, so you should just be tying it all together at this point. If you are not finding good stuff to write here, you should rethink why you are applying to this school in the first place?

Caveats: Whenever you are mentioning specific professors, avoid talking about very famous ones as everyone will be talking about them. If the schools feels that your education will be hampered unless you are able to work for that professor only and if that professor is over subscribed, it might actually get you rejected even if your profile was great otherwise. So, exercise some caution when selecting professors with whom you want to work. A good strategy is to mention a couple of them and dont make your plans look too contingent on the availability of one professor.

Why should this school admit you?

As I said, it’s all about the ‘fit’. Talk about why you will excel at their program and afterwards professionally. The more you can convince them on this, better your chances are.

Alright, now that you are ready to crack your SOP, check out our Sample SOP for Engineers (yes you can use the inspiration to write for any program).

Don’t use Templates

Please refrain from using templates given by counselors or websites. The whole point is to make your application stand out and by using a template (especially the ones where you just change your specific information), you are looking similar to thousand other applicants. In fact, try to write the first SOP yourself without seeing any sample SOPs. After writing the first draft, check out some good SOPs and tweak accordingly.

You may also want to read some basic mistakes that you must avoid in writing your SOP.

For specific SOP tactics and samples, check out our bestselling MS Book: Smart Engineer’s Complete Guide to MS in USA.

For our paid professional counseling, check out our counseling packages.

How to write a powerful SOP

how to write SOP

How to write that powerful SOP that will get you admitted to your dream schools? Many applicants shudder at the thought of staring at a blank sheet. In this post, we will make the process easy for you.

An SOP is a mandatory component for applying to Master’s programs in US and other countries. Hence, it is important that you write a perfect SOP that contains everything that Adcom is looking for.

What is a good SOP?

Let me show what I mean. Look at the following examples, which one do you think is a better approach?

A: “I have CCNA and CCNP certifications in most of the fields to serve as a proof for my knowledge in these fields”

OR

B: “For instance, in my math class, I found myself getting frustrated with my calculator because it could not handle matrices with complex numbers. I took the matter into my hands and wrote a java program to find the determinant of a matrix involving complex numbers, which would run on my mobile phone. It worked well, and this was just the beginning of bigger things for the next three years.”

Approach A tells what you have done, something that is easily mentioned in the resume itself. B tells me why you did something and gives me an insight into your thought process.

A is wasting precious space by repeating stuff on your resume. Clearly the Admission Committee will prefer to know your potential better as a candidate and B shows them exactly that.

A: “As it is evident, my academic qualifications in the field of networking are exceptional.”

OR

B: “During the internship, I faced a crunch situation while designing a Cost-effective Power Generation Unit. Since factors such as time to procure and implement the solution were not considered by me before designing the circuit, the entire complexion of the solution got changed – which taught me my first lesson in engineering management.”

Approach A is to state your opinion (which in this case makes you sound arrogant anyway even if you are not). In B, you are giving facts and letting the Admission Committee form its opinion. This is known as TELL vs SHOW. Don’t tell me what you think you are, show me examples and let me form my own opinion. Obviously approach B will give better results.

How to write a compelling SOP?

We covered the essential paragraphs of a SOP in our Statement of Purpose (SOP) guide

Now you know that SOP is not your verbose resume and it is not simply a collection of what you did. It is your story and unless you understand what is the Admission Committee looking for in your story, you will struggle to write the winning SOP.

Trying to cover the following pointers has worked well for applicants working with us-

  1. Background and Aspirations
    • Clear goals help
  2. Academic and Professional relevance
    • Show you are good in your field
  3. Personal Story
    • Show a face behind the application
    • Talk about how you have overcome challenges, what motivates you?
    • Talk about how you have applied your learning
    • Show that you can execute your lessons in practice
  4. Why are you applying to this school?
  5. Why should this school admit you?

How to write the perfect Introduction for your SOP

Next, let’s look at a real introduction used by a candidate who is now studying MEng at Cornell-

“From programming cells of an excel sheet with math formulas in my fourth grade to building a security plugin for Mozilla Firefox considering the current threats to privacy and security on Internet, I have realized that problem solving is what excites me. After a year and a half as an Application Developer in Risk Technology at JP Morgan Chase, I have found my passion in improving the way Information is used in businesses. Therefore, I wish to return to school to pursue a Master’s degree in Computer Science that will allow me to explore the subject in greater depth, particularly the fields of Data Mining, Database and Software Engineering, and use it effectively to address real-world challenges.”

  • First line shows that the candidate knows about his field
  • Second line shows that he has solid background and proficiency
  • The last line clearly identifies his goals

In the MS Book, we use something called SOP Canvas to help build your story. If you fill it out sincerely, I’m pretty sure your SOP will end up better than majority of applicants out there!

Don’t use templates

One major mistake that I have seen in students’ SOPs is that they all look same. It is tempting to pick out 5-6 SOPs from Internet and hash them up to create your own SOP. That is where you will dig your own grave because using templates or copying will only get you to come up with things that others already have. The key to a successful application is to stand out from the crowd, not copying them.

Read how to Avoid other common mistakes that 80% applicants make in their SOPs

In summary: understand what AdCom is looking for

So, those were some insights into the tricky world of SOPs. It’s a rookie mistake to think that SOP is a description of your resume or that there is a set template that you can use as a shortcut. Use SOP to highlight your strengths and tell your unique story.

This is why we do a detailed call to craft a student’s story and then formulate strategy for SOP and LORs in our MS Admissions Consulting. Do not use shortcuts for your SOP, give it time and let it evolve into a solid personal statement.

Common mistakes that applicants make in writing SOP and application essays

How to avoid most common mistakes while writing SOP or other application essays for your MS, MIS and MBA applications? And, what does this Computer Science Professor at UCSB has to say about SOPs? We have already talked about the technical aspects of a SOP in our previous post. Today, we will look into how to avoid some common pitfalls.

Here are some common problems we have observed.

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