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[risoms]

Does anyone has an opinion about how much of a personal statement should talk about my faculty interests? Should I just include a sentence for each professor or should I go into greater detail? I'm including this as part of my paragraph talking about my research interests and why the university is a good fit.

Thanks!

[lohai0]

Does anyone has an opinion about how much of a personal statement should talk about my faculty interests? Should I just include a sentence for each professor or should I go into greater detail? I'm including this as part of my paragraph talking about my research interests and why the university is a good fit.

Thanks!

What field are you in and what are you applying for?

[polly_mer]

The question doesn't make sense to me.  In my fields, the personal statement ought to be something like:

My research interests lie in the area of salt-soaked reed weaving.  I am most interested in how the concentration of the soak as well as the length of time soaking affect the pliability of the reeds.  I have done previous work <describe at length>

I am particularly interested in this program because of the strengths in the overlapping areas of soaking fluids and weaving techniques.  My background in soaking fluids <describe> fits with work in soaking fluids.  My interests in weaving as an effect of pliability means that I would want to use <describe facility> and discuss my work with the folks working in that facility.


Don't put a sentence about each faculty member or try to tie your work to a particular faculty member's work unless you've already talked to that faculty member and that person is expecting you to show up to be that person's graduate student.

[seniorscholar]

In my humanities field, unless you are very familiar with one particular faculty member's work, trying to tie your personal statement to specific faculty interests would be very foolish. I well remember, during my term as director of graduate studies, the personal statements from people who had clearly read nothing except the brief faculty information on the department website: they mentioned particular interest in Professor A (who never taught graduate students and hadn't published anything since being tenured 25 years ago), in Professor B (who was now on sick leave and, alas, was unlikely to return to teaching), in Professor C (currently, as everyone in the department knew, on the job market trying to solve a two-body problem and therefore not taking graduate students), in Professor D (untenured, which means not yet eligible to direct dissertations), in Professor E (who has a great many current doctoral students and will not be taking more any time soon) in  . . . You get the picture.

We like best to get the first sentence in polly_mer's suggested statement, but without any "I am particularly interested in this program because" or the mention of any names. When the grad director makes the initial skim of an application, s/he names two readers: one is the faculty member most likely to become director of the dissertation if the grad student does not change plans by the time s/he has done two years of coursework, and the other is a random member of the doctoral admissions committee assigned in rotation. Each of them writes a report naming strengths and pointing out weaknesses in the total application package and paying particular attention to the included writing sample, and provides a "yes, no, maybe" ranking. The committee meets and (after discussion and some moving of names around) ranks the "yes" applications in order.

The only time a particular faculty member's name does any good is when the applicant and that faculty member have some true affinity -- I remember the time, for example, that an applicant had, through family sources, access to some unpublished material by a recently deceased author and one member of our graduate faculty was a well-known expert on that author's work. That kind of true -- and very unusual -- desire to study with a particular person should, of course, be mentioned.

[risoms]

lohai0 - I am applying to some PhD programs in Psychology.

polly_mer (and seniorscholar) - Actually you'd be surprised by how many applications I've seen that required personal statements to include faculty interests and why I chose their university. From what I've heard this is part of how they see if I'm a good fit. Do you think it would be better to just list the professors I'm interested in?

I feel like there's no way I can tell the universities that I'm interested in them without giving them details about why, a part of that is the professors. But I guess I feel like going TOO much into detail isn't possible because I haven't gone through the program yet. I'll show you what I have for the format of this section. Let me know what you think.

This section talks about what I'm interested in/Why I chose each university/and who within Cognitive Psychology matches my interests.

Within in the field of Cognitive Psychology, my interests are in field X.
Specifically I'm curious about subfield A, B, C, and D. I'm interested in understanding A and it's relationship with.. blah blah blah. (I go into deeper detail about this)
The university of Y has a strong focus in X, working with professors 1 2 3.
I want to work with Dr. 1 because of his focus studying A, looking at blah blah blah.
I want to work with Dr. 2 because of blah blah blah...
....you get the idea.

[risoms]

Oh yeah I did email the professors talking to them in short detail about: my experience, interests, and whether or not they're taking students. So for those who have replied they responded with whether or not I'm a good fit and if they're able to take students in.

[seniorscholar]

Oh yeah I did email the professors talking to them in short detail about: my experience, interests, and whether or not they're taking students. So for those who have replied they responded with whether or not I'm a good fit and if they're able to take students in.

That's entirely a different case, then, and it's then appropriate to mention how your interests fit with theirs, and to mention that you've contacted them, which is (in fact) customary in the sciences. It is not customary in humanities; and, in addition, you do have more information than the idiots who try to make this stuff up by looking at which courses professor x teaches. (Though for admission committees, it is of course useful to notice how stupid that move is, since even in humanities, faculty publication records can be found easily on databases that any college should have on their library website, so knowing that the earnest English major who wants to do great work on an "unexplored question" has not had sense enough to use ABELL or the MLA database, having asked a faculty member or the librarian about how to find what faculty have published, is a clue that said applicant is not ready for grad school.)

[betterslac]

lohai0 - I am applying to some PhD programs in Psychology.

polly_mer (and seniorscholar) - Actually you'd be surprised by how many applications I've seen that required personal statements to include faculty interests and why I chose their university. From what I've heard this is part of how they see if I'm a good fit. Do you think it would be better to just list the professors I'm interested in?

I feel like there's no way I can tell the universities that I'm interested in them without giving them details about why, a part of that is the professors. But I guess I feel like going TOO much into detail isn't possible because I haven't gone through the program yet. I'll show you what I have for the format of this section. Let me know what you think.

This section talks about what I'm interested in/Why I chose each university/and who within Cognitive Psychology matches my interests.

Within in the field of Cognitive Psychology, my interests are in field X.
Specifically I'm curious about subfield A, B, C, and D. I'm interested in understanding A and it's relationship with.. blah blah blah. (I go into deeper detail about this)
The university of Y has a strong focus in X, working with professors 1 2 3.
I want to work with Dr. 1 because of his focus studying A, looking at blah blah blah.
I want to work with Dr. 2 because of blah blah blah...
....you get the idea.

My neck of the social sciences is like this as well. Graduate programs want to know that you have checked out the strengths of the department and the course offerings so that you don't have people applying, say, to a program expressing an interest in doing neo-realist IR theory when there is no one in the department who does IR theory at all.

[sheepdog_working]

Within in the field of Cognitive Psychology, my interests are in field X.
Specifically I'm curious about subfield A, B, C, and D. I'm interested in understanding A and it's relationship with.. blah blah blah. (I go into deeper detail about this)
The university of Y has a strong focus in X, working with professors 1 2 3.
I want to work with Dr. 1 because of his focus studying A, looking at blah blah blah.
I want to work with Dr. 2 because of blah blah blah...
....you get the idea.

This is exactly appropriate in my humanities field.  What's good about the above sample is that you're saying things that are specific in terms of topics but you're not trying to take on particular arguments within the scholars' work (which is dangerous because you risk mischaracterizing something a professor wrote).

By the way, in my dep't, each professor reads every app that mentions her/him by name.  So if I were Dr. 1, for example, I'd read and assess your application even if I weren't on the admissions committee.  I think a lot of other dep'ts have similar policies.

[juillet]

I'm in psychology and at least in my experience, it's expected for you to list the professors with which you'd like to work and briefly discuss how your interests intersect with theirs.  But then again, it's also expected that you would have contacted those professors and asked if they were taking students, made a connection, etc.  Statements of purpose that did not mention any professors would be taken as showing evidence of a lack of research into the department.

[theblackbox]

My psychology colleagues all work with one specific mentor in grad school, not 5. (They collaborate occasionally with someone else, but there's clearly one primary mentor.) You might want to ask your current advisor how smart it is to list your reasons for wanting to work with all of the professors (might come off insincere since I'm sure they all do different things) versus how your research interests align in particular with 1 or 2 of them.

[totoro]

Make sure you get advice on this specific to psychology. In STEM it's usual that you won't get serious attention if you don't have a potential advisor lined up. In humanities from what we hear that could be a faux pas. In my social science (econ) it's an advantage to have a potential advisor lined up though not a must. In my program here in Australia though without a potential supervisor your application will be rejected (I was a DGS in the US too).

[dntw8up]

In STEM it's usual that you won't get serious attention if you don't have a potential advisor lined up.

In my STEM field (computer science) the majority of professors specifically state on their websites that they discourage personal contact until an offer of admission has been made.

[totoro]

OK, so computer science is different then. In many STEM fields PhD students are funded from grants which is why the grant-holder has to determine whether the student is suitable. In econ in the US we ranked all incoming students to decide on the acceptance cut off and though there wasn't much in grant funding, having a professor say they were interested in working with a student could bump them up the rankings. So I guess you really need to know how things work in your field.

[shrek]

In my dept we ask applicants to name at least two faculty who they see as potential mentors. They are asked to contact them and the faculty arrange to interview them. In my role as DGS I help applicants to find a couple of people who might be good matches for their interests. After interviews I follow up with faculty to see if they are willing to serve as mentor (and if they have funding) and with the applicant for their preference.