<p>Hi there, I am in the process of crafting my SOP and I would like some pointers or suggestions from you all on what I can address if I don’t have any research experience during my undergrad years. </p>
<p>Talk about experiences that gave you transferable skills, and that make you ready to plunge directly into research in grad school. For example:</p>
<p>-Discuss class projects with particularly heavy methodological/research-based components that you enjoyed, and how they are connected to the work you intend to do in the future. For example, you may have done a simple experimental design in a research methods class that you plan to scale up and learn about later. You may want to spend a sentence or two briefly discussing how you DO plan to scale up that knowledge, if you know.</p>
<p>-Discuss papers that you’ve read recently - bonus points if they are by professors in the program - and projects you’ve envisioned based upon the prompts from those papers.</p>
<p>-Have you worked on any research-related things - like maybe in an administrative aspect on a research project, or done hands-on work that’s related to your field? You have to tread carefully with this, but it could be relevant. For example, you might be interested in doing research on adolescent psychopathology, and you worked at an inpatient psychiatric ward that specializes in children and adolescents. Although you may not have focused on research, perhaps your experience there gave you ideas, or maybe you did some very applied research projects like experimented with room placements for certain illnesses or some pilot method of educating patients on self-care or something.</p>
<p>Also:</p>
<p>-You want to be really sure about your research interests, more sure than would be normally expected. The first assumption that a person evaluating you is going to make is that you have no idea what you are getting yourself into, and that there’s little way that you can know that you really want to go into research. The second, closely related assumption is that without substantial experience, you don’t know what field you really want to enter. You need to do some work to dispel those, and one way is by sounding really solid about your interests. There’s a fine line - you want to leave room for growth and a suggestion of flexibility in your application, while still sounding mature enough professionally to be ready to take on grad school. So make sure you have that together.</p>
<p>And I probably don’t need to tell you that if you are in a STEM field (except maybe pure math) or a social science field that the chances of getting into a PhD program without research experience are small. Nonzero, but still small.</p>
<p>Thank you so much for your suggestions. I will use them in my writing. For the record, I am applying for a professional masters program actually. :)</p>