Why Universities Ask for Statement of Purpose

Statement of Purpose (SOP) is mandatory requirement when applying for Graduate Schools. Some schools call them as Personal Statement or College Admission Essay. For Undergraduate admission, students will be asked to write college admission essay on a specific topic, but for Graduate School admission, it will be more general. Universities use SOP to lean more about you. When you are applying for a program located half way around the world, SOP makes it easy to decide if they want to admit you to their program.

Sample Statement of Purpose

Here is a very nice video from University of California that explain in detail and in depth about the importance of College admission personal statement with an example. Video is 50 minutes in length, if you are  looking to craft a SOP that will explain what kind of person you are and what you should include in a SOP that will get you an admission.

Don’t Copy from Sample Statement of Purpose

You can find lots of sample SOPs and students usually tend to copy the content from Sample Statement of Purpose and use it as it is. But, its very important to explain what kind of person you are and how you will contribute to college. So, try be as Original as possible in your Statement of Purpose. Same applies to sample LORs.

If you read the comments to some of the article here in HSB, students specifically ask

1. I need sample SOP for Biotechnology
2. I’m applying for MS in Pharmacy, can you send me few sample statement of purpose and LOR’s
3. I’m applying for Masters in Electrical engineering with Embedded system as major, I need some statement of purpose

It very easy to say, if they are asking for a specific SOP, they are going to copy it. Because, if they are planning to write college admission essay with their personal experience, all they need is few sample sop and it really doesn’t matter which department the SOP is used for.  Essentially you are going to write a story about you, but you can find format of SOP, page layout, structure, language style used, but same story and personal experience cannot be yours. So, don’t copy college essay when applying for colleges.

It will be funny, if someone after reading this article, writes a comment to this article requesting a sample SOP.