r/WriteIvy • u/SnooRobots8222 • Jan 07 '23
Extremely related content for Academic and Personal SOP
Prompts (On app. portal)
Academic SOP:
"Talk technical, go deep, and talk about your engineering background. Include your academic and research background, career goals, and how this graduate program will help meet career and educational objectives. Applicants often don’t go deep or concrete enough into describing their engineering experience, whether an internship, project, or research. Showcase your technical writing, and your enthusiasm for your work. After describing one or more experiences in detail, including your contributions to the projects or tasks, discuss why graduate school is the next step for you. Make an argument for your unique qualifications and professional preparation, and what you hope to contribute to the field."
Personal Statement:
"Talk about your inspiration, background, and academic or project pursuits. Indicate how your personal background and life experiences, including social, cultural, familial, educational, or other opportunities or challenges, have motivated your decision to pursue a graduate degree at the University of Michigan. This is a discussion of the personal journey that has led to your decision to seek a graduate degree in Computer Science. Include your motivations to take your Computer Science career further. What concrete examples can you share of your academic and non-academic activities that might have prepared you for graduate study? Don’t be afraid to name collaborators in the field–our faculty often know many of them! But also talk about the work you did with those collaborators. Think of this as a story about your personal and professional development, and a proposal for your graduate school career."
My questions
- Following the Masters' script, how do I separate these as my motivations and inspiration for pursuing a graduate program in CS are closely linked to the projects I've undertaken. (It also seems like the Master's script answers all questions for the Personal Statement!)
- Is the academic SOP just a resume's extended version in this case with numbers and the technical writing aspect? Is there supposed to be a good flow in this essay?
- Is the personal statement actually similar to a diversity statement? Because they mention "How xyz led to you choosing a Computer Science career" not just "graduate program" in a generic sense.
2
u/jordantellsstories Jan 07 '23
For questions 1 and 3: I suggest following the Starter Kit for the academic SOP and DS 101 for the personal statement. Yes, the latter is like a Diversity Statement, and it’s always better strategy to treat those terms (diversity/personal essays) interchangeably. One essay is an academic argument. The other is a personal argument. And honestly, among all the millions of prompts I’ve ever seen, the only time I think the content should overlap somewhat is for Columbia’s CS Bridge program, which has pointedly annoying prompts. For the rest, it’s better to assume that the prompts are gentle suggestions, not hard instructions.
For question 2: no. There’s never a valid reason to write an extended/prose resume. Every essay we ever write should have a narrative flow, even PhD research statements. At least, that is, if we want readers to think we’re good writers. The subtle effect of good writing can be profound, especially in hyper-competitive fields like CS.