3.8. Academic and/or Professional Success

A final strategy which you might use is an identification of your Academic and/or Professional Successes.

In this strategy, writers share their success to explicitly demonstrate their competence and abilities. This could be done through identifying degrees, certificates, honors, awards, scholarships, grants, conference presentations, publications, GPA, tests scores, promotions, and successful outcomes in specific situations (like research). It is absolutely acceptable to identify and account for these successes in your SoP; however, be mindful of how frequently you use this strategy.

The CV and the SoP are self-promotional – the entire purpose of these genres is to promote yourself and make an argument for your ability to be successful in a graduate program. Self-promotion can be explicit or implicit, but overuse of explicit self-promotion could be perceived as self-aggrandizing and can be off-putting for readers. The line here is a bit unclear and differs between people. The bottom line? Share and account for your success, but make sure that you provide evidence to support the claims you make.

In the example below, the writer accounts for a success (a publication) from participating in a research experience; by embedding a discussion of his success through engagement a research opportunity, we can start to see the applicant’s commitment and ability to follow through, a key quality needed to be successful in a graduate program.

What you might start seeing at this point is how inextricable your experiences are from your motivation, particularly your research interests and career objectives. This is because our past experiences inform our decisions and future pursuits. Part of your “goal” in writing the statement of purpose is to make these connections between your past experiences and present interests explicit for the reader, and this really is value of the SoP within your application. To reiterate, the CV/resume will provide the breadth of your experience, but what it lacks is the depth of what you’ve done, how you’ve grown as a researcher/scientist/scholar, and what a given experience has done for you intellectually. That depth is what you are working to achieve with this goal.