The Statement of Purpose (SOP) is usually a 1-2 page essay/introduction about who you are, why you want to pursue a marketing PhD, why you’re applying to a particular school, and why the admissions committee should select you.
The SOP is your opportunity to tell the adcom exactly what you want them to know about you and make a compelling case for your school fit. The best thing you can do is have one of your recommenders who has been on an admissions committee give you feedback on your SOP before you mail it out to schools.
What Should You Include In Your SOP?
Many schools have specific instructions about what they want you to write about. I’ll include here the recommendation from one marketing professor that I find gets to the heart of it.
“You need to get to the meat of your statement…so that someone who reads only one paragraph knows what you want to research and gets the impression that you’re qualified to start the program. Someone who reads only two paragraphs is further convinced of your abilities. Someone who reads only three paragraphs gets even more convinced . . . see where I’m going?”
Some people try to get unnecessarily creative as part of the SOP. I won’t say that this doesn’t ever work, but remember that this isn’t an undergraduate admissions committee. These are rough, hardened, wizened professors who are considering a multi-year investment of a lot of time and money. Some schools won’t even interview or make offers if none of the applicants make their cut. With this in mind, the smart approach is to be on-point.
Write what the admissions committees want to hear, provided it’s true and you believe it. In a perfect world, writing the SOP would be merely a formality because you had already developed an incredible track record as a researcher, all of the professors at the school know you and love you, etc. Alright, back to reality.
I recommend you include the following (and the challenge is really how to fit it into two pages):
- Desire to become a researcher in marketing (i.e. don’t go off on how you love to teach)
- Tentative area of research interest
- Tentative methodological focus (behavioral, modeling, strategy, qualitative)
- Reason for interest in school X (There should definitely be a sizeable section of your SOP that should be catered to each school you apply to. It’s expected. And don’t forget to change school names that may lie throughout your paper. It’s an embarrassment waiting to happen.)
- Particular researchers at school X who fit your research interests (And mention here if you’ve had conversations with them about the school/their research, read their papers, etc.)
- Any additional supporting evidence of your preparation and fit that the admissions committee won’t be able to quickly surmise by glancing at your transcripts, scores, etc. (Here I would include relevant research experience, publications, expertise in the research domain of interest, teaching experience, etc.)
Above all, make sure you have someone with a marketing PhD give you feedback on your SOP. Taking it to your “writer friend” may fix grammatical issues, but will not get your paper to “adcom-ready status.” You should go through several revisions. The statement of purpose really is the hallmark piece of your application and it needs to be crisp and compelling. Spare no mental anguish. :)
*A word about methodological focus. You should understand the great divide that exists between experimentalists/consumer behavior and modelers/quantitative. Last I heard, around 70% of the job market consists of CB people, 20% are modeling, and the rest are a combination of qualitative, and other niche research forms. Most marketing departments have faculty that are firmly entrenched in a particular discipline. This impacts PhD admissions in interesting ways. In my example, I was encouraged to position myself as a multi-methods researcher who wanted to do some CB, but lean quant for the purposes of job placement (because in social network research, there is research opportunity on both ends). I interviewed with one school that told me that they weren’t able to take any quantitative-minded students because they had already bargained to take 2 CB students, after having taken 2 quant students the previous year. So you may not have a strong preference for methodologies and research orientation at this point, but it’s good to be aware of the implications of your choice. Knowing what I know now, I should never have positioned myself as a mixed methods person.