by Franziska Boenisch and Adam Dziedzic

You decided to do a Ph.D. and know where you want to apply, you know whom you want to work with. The big question is: What’s next? Where should I start? What documents do I need? How to best prepare? We’ll share some general thoughts–the nitty gritty details vary largely over different universities and countries. But often, there are four main steps that you have to take to complete your applications: (1) write a statement of purpose, (2) ask for recommendation letters, (3) take TOEFL and GRE exams, (4) feel the forms, submit your transcripts of records, diplomas, and pay the application fees. We’ll go through them one by one over the next few days. In this post, we’ll start from the statement of purpose.

The statement of purpose requires you to reflect on your academic life and to truthfully answer the questions: Why do I want to do a Ph.D.? Where would it lead me to? How would it change me? How is it the next natural step after finishing my bachelor or master’s program? It can start like something along the lines of: “When I was ten, one of my teachers showed me the ELI application (http://bit.ly/1sHw8qg) wherein I started building algorithms out of a set of boxes resembling Lego bricks, ran my micro yet powerful programs and eventually created a few fractals. I spent some of my best days playing with ELI. Having learnt how to program, I successfully took part in a computer science competition. Since then, I have always wanted to become a computer scientist. My motivation to pursue a Ph.D. came a bit later, it grew from the beginning of my studies to the last day of my internship at … I was searching for a professional purpose to my life, which would offer the best way to invest my time. I studied hard and achieved top scores at my home university. However, my greatest need is not merely knowledge acquisition, but also the creation of new things, which can be achieved as part of the research community by pursuing a PhD”.

After such an intro—tailored to you, of course—describe your past research experience. Were you a member of any research lab before? Did you do any internship and had to work on something new that has not been done before? Write about such things, mention the challenges that you had to tackle. You can mention your bachelor’s or master’s thesis, too. How did you select the topic of your thesis? What inspired you to pursue this path? At the end, you can finish with something like: “Every day, I would like to wake up in the morning and fly to my lab to work on my project and delve deeper into the fascinating world of …. Now that I can see the end of the application process approaching, as well as my future prospects, I am glad that I decided to take this challenging step and look forward to a productive and wonderful experience at the research lab at …”. We’re sure that you can further embellish these snippets and treat them as a first draft to write your individual and inspiring statement of purpose.