SOP Tips #2

Some things that I learnt while writing my SOP and LOR

SOP:
0. Words like 'passion', 'hard work', 'love' should be avoided like plague.
1. The start and end of the SOP should be very good, please don't start the SOP with "In this era of Information Age..." almost 99.99% SOPs start the same way. Imagine if the admissions committee reads 40 SOPs a day, and yours is 40th. You can start with something like a narrative, or an incidence that got you start in the field of your choice and how you got hooked on it instantaneously.
2. When the universities read your SOP they expect some answers to questions, make sure you absolutely answer them
1. What are your research interests
2. What's the motivation behind the masters
3. A rough plan of what you aim to do while in graduate school. This doesn't have to be extremely precise and clear, mentioning the area of your choice would do; this would imply that you are coming to the graduate school with a plan and not just to vacation in the USA
4. Professors with whom your research interests match (This could possibly land you a TA/RA) Make sure you have some prior experience in the area that the professor is working in. For instance, don't just say that I like the professor for his work in computational complexity theory when you have absolutely no idea what it is.
5. What makes you an ideal candidate? Why should the university select you over the other guys? What's different about you?
3. Don't just brag about your achievements like 'I did an internship at Google', mention what problem you solved and how you overcame the difficulties and learned something noteworthy.
4. Discuss in brief about a research problem you have solved. For instance, if you did you BE project in Machine Learning, describe the reason behind choosing a model, and why not something else.
5. Make sure your SOP has a theme, and every paragraph should reflect the same. If you're unsure how to do, let me ask you if you were to summarise your SOP in a single statement, what would that be? Now that you have the main idea, for instance, mine was "I apply what I learn, that's what makes me different", now every paragraph should support this idea.



LORs:
1. Ideally, the LORs have to be written by the Professor and not by you. If you are the one who's writing it, be smart enough to hoodwink the admission committee. Make sure the format is different for the LORs for instance if every LOR starts with "I am pleased to recommend X" this implies that all of them are written by the same person.
2. Most of the LORs I've read suffer from flowery word syndrome. "In 20 years of my teaching career, X is the best person I have recommended", "His skills in algorithms are even higher than Donald Knuth", "This kid is the next John Von Neumann" Well, not literally this, but you get the point. A perspicacious professor will be as diplomatic as possible, and won't give in that easily. Make sure you don't call yourself the next John Von Neumann.
3. This is one of the most common problem: "X is diligent, hardworking", "I am impressed by his skills in X, I am sure he would do great at your university" Such words don't matter at all. If you say he is diligent, give a reason why he is diligent. If you say he's best in class, give a reason for the same. A good LOR would be: "I find him diligent based on the long hours he spends even after the class. I was particularly impressed when he improvised Dijkstra's algorithm using binomial heaps and argued over theoretical advantage."
4. Include comparison statistics. For instance "I would place X in the top 2% of the people I've recommended so far"