Stating My Purpose: Georgia Tech

This is a long time coming, and finally the pressures of the final final week, have inspired me to write about a topic that I have been wanting to talk about since the last two years.

In less than two weeks, I will be graduating from Georgia Institute of Technology, or if you are my relatives: Georgia Tech University. Despite this accomplishment, and my blood, sweat, tears and fracture at GT know that it’s an accomplishment, I continue to rely on the notion that admission to a master’s program is a black box. As much as articles, including my personal favourite (How to Write a Statement of Purpose for Grad School), try to demystify the process, I don’t plan to, or rather am not qualified enough, do so. What I can do though is share how I wrote, what I wrote so that anyone who is at the same stage as I was on that night of 19th September 2020 with an empty document, hopefully, would know how and when to start. I write it in a way I know best, as a story, hopefully, this helps. 

I started writing my SOP somewhere in mid-September after getting off a call with a trusted senior (shoutout to Mudra). Her advice is something that I tell everyone, take a piece of paper, list down everything that you think is relevant to your degree, everything that you have done in the last 4 years and everything that you are proud of and would like to scream out to the world. You then take another piece of paper and divide it into three parts, your resume, your SOP and your LORs. Now add each list item into each of these columns.

So that is what I did. I went into memory overdrive. Brought out all my old daily diaries, my internship records, went through my old pen drives and wrote down everything I did in the last 4 years at my small state college. The list was comprehensive. It included everything from the first 12 hr hackathon where we barely presented a frontend, to the one where we came second, to the winter working on algorithms with Prof Gandhi to the summer school that introduced me to ML(and boy have we been hooked), to working on the editorial team at ACM to leading Unicode, a group that I owe much of my undergraduate CS career to. As per the stated procedure, I began dividing this into three categories. I’d put an ‘achievement’ into one category, then realise that it was probably better in the other, and then be unsatisfied with the placement, and then come back to where I started. By the end of this long, arduous and iterative process, I had an organised list of items that I would want to cover, and I would have easily been able to write my SOP. Right? 

Wrong, instead, I kept this piece of paper away, and began penning down a 6-7 page mish-mash of the story of my life. It contained all the above achievements, my failures, my feelings and my fears. There was no format to this, but I realised that naturally, I gravitated towards a temporal format as I jotted down my experiences. I emailed this document to my mom at 4 am that night and was woken up by her intensive critique the next morning of how the admission staff wouldn’t care that blue was my favourite colour. Just kidding, I didn’t write that but came very close to mentioning that. While this may have seemed like a night wasted (the first applications were due in less than 2 months !!), it gave way to a realisation of how I’d like to format my essay. 

I was also advised not to read any other SOPs, and that’s one piece of advice I duly followed. At the time of writing my SOP, which was way back in 2020, I wasn’t sure why this was the case. Isn’t it always nice to get inspired by those who achieved the mark, and learn from the mistakes of those who didn’t? They walked so we could run, is what I thought. But it’s only now, as I review applications of practically strangers, that I realise, the freedom that we have to write this essay is very limited. In this constricted environment, it is bound that people will sound similar. By reading other SOPs, we condition our minds to follow the noise of an anonymous achiever, while suppressing that one voice that could narrate our story, as unique as it deserves to be told.  

But, I was still in search of inspiration, so instead, I decided to read books, with the hope that their writing style would rub on me. In the pursuit of finding this unique voice, I came across Max Tegmark’s ‘Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence’, who striated the evolution of AI into three stages, and the uplevel of each stage represented technological evolution. That’s when it hit me, surely the aim of stating your purpose would mean showing your growth, your journey and how you could continue this journey ahead. This along with the initial realisation, of my love for a temporal format, led me to, against the advice of many counsellors, draft my Statement of Purpose in this fashion. My journey was to take the shape in three such stages. The first would talk about my novitiate nature as a first/second year as I scrambled to find my footing. The second would go into detail about how I did end up discovering what I liked, and what I did and learnt in this field. Finally, the third stage would be continued at the intended university and how using the resources I would be able to attain absolute nirvana, pursue groundbreaking research and become an expert in the given field, which at the time was pursuing explainability in vision. Spoiler Alert: it didn’t quite pan out that way, we’ll get to that part later. 

In my mind, my essay essenced the format, and I quote one of the MVPs Taylor Swift herself, ‘pages turned and lessons learnt’. My counsellors, including my parents, and some very trusted seniors from college, were not in favour of the chronological order I followed. Whether they were right/wrong, I don’t know, but as I mention, it was my story, so I decided to stick to the format that suited me naturally. But the one place we all agreed, was lessons learnt. And this is a place, where most writers make their first mistake. 

I was advised to write about the lessons I learnt, but what were those lessons? Was it how I learned to deploy an NLP model to the cloud or was it how when in a hackathon, we were abandoned by a member and had to scramble to present something half decent? In hindsight, and this is somewhere my counsel of advisers agreed for the very first time. I decided, and recommend this to everyone, to maintain an equal proportion of both your technical lessons and life lessons. The people who review your applications are humans, those who will teach you are humans, and they also want the people to join their cohort to be humans, with stories. This is the one part of your essay where you can express what makes you different, and that’s not just the medium article that helped you deploy your model, but also how you handled the good days and the bad. Sure they want to know the impact that your project had on the world, but they also want to know what impact it had on you, and your journey. “This taught me the constant need to evolve, adapt and alter plans in research.”, is what I said when a passion project didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to. 

Somehow, this isn’t the toughest part of the SOP. The toughest part of the SOP and generally in life is to know what to do next. As someone who came here directly after my undergrad, you best believe that I had (and in many ways still don’t have) any clue what I want to do. The primary reason is that I couldn’t justify picking one thing because I didn’t even know all my options. So I promise, they aren’t looking for your exact problem research statement. What they are looking for is a direction that you’d like to follow, and whether your previous work, justifies this choice of direction. I am living proof, that this direction can change after grad school as well. So be honest, choose one direction that interests you amongst the abundance of work that you have done. Research, and research heavily about the work that is done in that university and about the professors who work on that problem area every day. Use this part of your SOP, to write to them, as if you were writing them a love letter. Display that passion in your words, and I know it will make a lot of difference. 

And just like that, with 40 odd iterations circulated amongst 4-5 people, with varied advice on what is good, bad and in my case ‘cheesy’, on 18th January, 4 months after I first started writing my SOP, I had a draft that got me into GeorgiaTech.  And that was just the beginning.