Statement of Purpose Checklist: 5 Tests
The reader has your CV and has read hundreds of essays on the same prompt. They cannot verify what you claim about yourself; they can verify what you did, decided, noticed, and got wrong. This page shows what to cut, what to check, and five tests to run before you submit.
This page covers PhD statements of purpose, MBA essays, law school personal statements, and other documents written for someone deciding whether to admit you. Use the lines that apply to your document.
The reader has your curriculum vitae or résumé before they open the essay, so they already know what you did and when. They have also read hundreds of essays on the same prompt.
01
Before you write
Hardship, effort, success, future plan. Most applicants use it, often with the same topics: a parent's influence, a team conflict, a volunteer trip, a refusal to give up. A reader who has seen it hundreds of times can predict your ending.
Applicants from unrelated industries write the same plan: ESG, climate, AI, data. If you name one of these, state something about it that you know from your own work and an outsider would not.
Your essay can describe a difficulty you have not yet overcome and how you intend to keep working on it.
02
Two things the reader needs to see, which you cannot simply claim
03
Three assumptions that weaken a draft
04
Cut
It is on your CV.
Passionately, deeply, vividly, tirelessly.
Any applicant can write these about any program.
Paradigm shift, breakthrough, multidisciplinary, advancing the field, novel insights. Replace each with a product, a compound, a number, or a failure mode.
MATLAB for an engineer, Excel for an analyst.
Choose one trait, and keep only the activities that show it.
Any applicant can write this about any school.
05
Check
For each change in your direction, write what caused it. "I did A, and B happened" leaves out the reason, and the reason is what the reader is evaluating.
Most accomplishment paragraphs report the result. Include what you noticed that others had accepted, and what you did to check it.
Many admissions readers are not experts in your industry. "Identified limitations of the previous model" cannot be evaluated by someone who does not know the model. Say what the limitation was.
Writing only “I” makes it unclear which parts you contributed. Use “we” for team work, then specify which part was yours.
"The equipment proved unreliable" names no decision. Name the decision or hypothesis that failed and what you changed after it.
A PhD fit paragraph needs a number, a mechanism, or a prediction the professor could dispute. An MBA or law school goal needs a specific market, client group, area of law, or problem the reader could question.
A problem your field has already settled shows competence. A problem the current consensus cannot explain shows where you might be useful in ten years.
06
Weak and strong
PhD, research experience
These experiences reinforced my ability to identify root causes and draw novel conclusions from data.
The layer would not stack. Two fixes from the literature failed, and both assumed the problem was bond strength. I measured surface energy instead, found the mismatch there, and added an amphiphilic interlayer.
PhD, fit
I am interested in Professor X's work on perovskite stability and would like to contribute to this area.
Professor X's tunneling-barrier model predicts minimum vacancy barriers at 0.4 nm junctions. My anchor defects perform best at those points, and her model explains my flex-cycle data better than my own did.
MBA and law school, goals
HBS (or Yale) will give me the leadership (or advocacy) skills and network to drive innovation (or policy) in sustainable energy.
Law: Most independent designers whose prints are copied by fast-fashion retailers never file a claim. Under U.S. copyright law, a designer who did not register the work before the infringement cannot recover statutory damages or attorney's fees, and actual damages on a $40 print are too small for a lawyer to take the case. I want to use the IP clinic to test whether registering a designer's collection before release changes how often these claims get filed.
Résumé, activities
Violinist, university orchestra; member, choir, baseball club, cooking club, investment club, tutoring society.
Read unstated needs. Tutored younger students who could not explain what confused them; organized and promoted concerts for musicians who had no interest in promotion.
Interview, "Tell me about yourself"
I am a supply chain manager at XXX, I have held this role for eight years, and I studied industrial engineering at ZZZ.
As a supply chain manager, I've learned to predict who will miss a deadline and who can speed up a project.
07