Application essays and the SOP.....Passports to your Admission.

Application essays can do two things for you:
(1) They can kill your chance of getting an admission or financial aid, even though you have a "strong" application (such as high GRE scores, high GPA's, research papers, and/or solid working experience).
(2) Or, they can get you into a US school, with financial aid, despite an otherwise a "weak" application package!

This is how powerful application essays are. Pay attention to them!No matter how much information schools or professors ask from their applicants, they are trying to picture a person based on the information provided. After all, they are taking in a real person, not a bunch of test scores or research papers.

So how do schools figure out what kind of person you are? They carefully exam your scores, your awards or lack of them, your working experiences, your references, and your extracurricular activities. After reading all this information, admissions officers will have a general idea of who you are and what you have gone through in your life. They will also have questions and worries about you. For instance: Why are your GPAs so low but your GRE incredibly high? Why did you switch jobs after only a half-year with your first job? Can you do academic research after you have been in international trade business for three years?Why is there a seven-month period in your life that is unaccounted for?

For some of the questions and concerns, admissions officers can guess the answers on their own. For others, they turn their attention to your essays.Good essays should answer all the important questions in an admissions officer's mind, eliminate his or her concerns about you, and reinforce your qualifications evident in other application materials.Badly written essays, on the other hand, not only are unable to answer the critical questions, but even create more worries on the part of the school. If an admissions officer is already questioning your research ability after your three years in international trade, your enthusiastic description of your trade experiences will only magnify his or her worry. (One of the right things to do in such a case would be to write how you can transfer the skills learned in trading business into your academic research capability.)


To be competitive, your essays should at least outline your general plans for what you want to do in school and afterwards. These plans should be specific and make sense given your background and abilities. Remember, every admissions officer want to know your future plans because your future will be part of the school's future if you are accepted. Good essays showcase the good side of your personality. You are driven but not overly aggressive, you are enthusiastic but not lightheaded, or you persevere but you are not extremely stubborn.Poorly-conceived essays may give readers the impression that you are overly passive, negative, uninteresting, overly private, overly pessimistic, mean-spirited, arrogant, or egotistic. If you would have to spend the next 2-5 years with such a person, would you admit him or her? Some essays written by some Indian students are depicting such a bad personal image that they fail in their application even with very high test scores.

One of the biggest worries that US schools have for their Asian applicants is their communication skills. There are two kinds of communication skills: One is related to your language skills, especially writing and speaking. The other has nothing to do with language skills. Rather it is knowing how to communicate. Many Indian essays show that the writer lacks both kinds of communication skills.