MIT Graduate PhD Admissions

polarscribe
Tue, 28 Aug 2012 19:24:18 +0000

1,300 words is much too long, in my experience. You need to distill it down. You don’t want to be the application that a professor puts down because they get tired of reading it halfway through.

My SOP for masters’ study was 750 words on the dot.

A lot of the publications, etc. stuff should be in your c.v. and awards/leadership/extracurriculars don’t belong in your SOP at all because they’re meaningless for graduate admissions.