Can an exceptional personal statement make up for an otherwise mediocre application?

[InquisitiveOne]

<p>Just wondering. Has it ever happened?</p>

[fatsheep10]

<p>I am certainly not an expert on this but my impression from corresponding with graduate schools (these are mechanical engineering graduate schools) is that they would look for other credentials to back up your personal statement (grades, research, experience, recommendations, gre scores, etc…). They probably will want more than just a superlatively written personal statement.</p>

<p>On the other hand, I have heard of people getting admitted that might not have unless they pointed out special circumstances in their application (for example, if their parent died and this sent them into a depression which hurt their grades immensely for several semesters). I’d bet someone here has much more personal experience with this issue than I and could provide you better information. Best of luck.</p>

[GShine_1989]

<p>In the natural sciences and engineering, an exceptional SoP would be one that talks about exceptional research. Avoid the life story nonsense if that’s what you had in mind. You can list legitimate extenuating circumstances during college as noted above.</p>

[InquisitiveOne]

<p>Okay good points. What would be the best option for me, then, if most of my research is non-exceptional? Most of what I do is just coding what the professor wants me to code (especially making plots). I did get a publication in the Astrophysical Journal, but I’m in the middle of 30 authors, and I honestly didn’t do that much.</p>

[GShine_1989]

<p>

How should I write my statement of purpose?</p>

<p>Show, don’t tell. Reinforce every claim you make with supporting evidence from your own experiences. Professors can easily sniff out fluff and bull****.</p>

<p>Motivation is great. Don’t just list out your research projects as successive bullet points. What motivated you to undertake those projects? What did you learn from those projects that motivated you to further pursue research? Why do you want to pursue a Ph.D.?</p>

<p>Transitions are important. Don’t just have sentences mash up against one another without any connective tissue. This is mostly a stylistic tidbit, so don’t worry about it when you’re doing your initial drafts, but an essay that flows well shows that you are better-organized and simply makes a more appealing impression.</p>

<p>Try to put a ‘researchy’ spin on your work, even if the research work that you did was mostly grunt work, which is understandable because most undergrads have to do a lot of grunt work (programming, entering data, making graphs, running simulations, wet lab work, etc.) as part of a research team. After all, you’re at the absolute bottom of the academic food chain. What I mean by that is to not just say that you did the grunt work for a project, but try to step back and mention the ‘bigger picture’ of what impact your grunt work had on the rest of the project. However, don’t be too facetious or you’ll end up sounding like a pathological exaggerator (don’t say that you co-developed a novel algorithm when all you did was code it up and test it on some simple inputs, under the guidance of the grad student who actually developed the algorithm).

</p>

<p>Read the rest of it too: [Philip</a> Guo - Advice for preparing to apply and actually applying to science Ph.D. programs](<a href=“http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/grad-school-app-tips.htm]Philip”>http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/grad-school-app-tips.htm)</p>

[InquisitiveOne]

<p>Okay nice - thanks very much! :)</p>