While there are many, many guidelines out there which you will be asked to follow while writing your SOP - its not very hard to come up with some basic guiding principles on which to base your SOP. In this post, we have tried to drill down to a few basic principles you should keep in mind at all times, while writing your SOP. Since these are pretty basic and kind of like notes-to-self - they are described crisply so that you can take the maximum out of them and …

SOP - or statement of purpose is one of the most important documents in your application. You have only about 3-5 minutes of time before a reviewer comes to a decision about whether to give your SOP for further consideration (spend more time) or to just reject it (i.e. - give you a low score). You need to get it right the first time. Here are 5 DON’Ts you should keep in mind while writing your SOP.
1. Typos: I have seen many SOPs while i was part of the …

So many people tend to forget that apart from GRE and college grads, one thing that can make or break your application - is the Statement of Purpose. We spoke to Atul Kulkarni - who is currently pursuing a Masters in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. Atul talks about how honest recos and honest statement of purpose play such an important part in the applications. Here is Atul himself:
1. Which univ are you at and what course are you currently enrolled in?
Atul: I am enrolled at University …

Mrunal Gawade is a masters student in Jack Baskin School of Engineering, in Computer Science department, at University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. He is from Pune, India. He received his undergraduate BE Computer Engineering degree from Vishwakarma Institute of Technology (VIT), Pune, India. Here is a post from Mrunal about the entire process of applying to US universities for MS - covering almost the entire spectrum from thinking about applying for MS/Phd to visa interview. Here is Mrunal (mrunalg.com) himself:
Applying for higher studies could be made easier if you …

I generally prefer to have interest provocating titles to my articles in order to encourage people to read through them. But let me warn you at the outset that if you are looking for a procedural way of putting together a good application packet, this article is NOT going to help you at all. The hard fact is that an application is only as good as the person who is evaluating the application thinks it is good. The only chance of a grad school aspirant is to prepare an application …