Don't Make This Mistake on Your Grad School Application

Let me tell you a secret: I am passionate about dogs. Ever since I first encountered dogs I knew I wanted my career to involve them. I can remember one dog who helped me see the world differently. And now I’m ready to learn more about dogs and fulfill my passion.

This paragraph is a great example of what’s wrong with many graduate school applications.

The One Part Still In Your Control

When it comes time to apply for graduate school, almost everything that goes into your application is fixed. You took your courses, you earned your grades, you have your test scores, and you have relationships with letter writers. But there is one thing left that is in your control. And that one thing has a huge impact on whether you get accepted.

Your statement of purpose.

Most students are unprepared to write a SOP. I was. My fear over what to write seized me and I got a book on how to write SOPs. I didn’t know it, but that book had awful advice. At least, it was awful for applying to economics programs.

I still remember one example SOP that felt so good at the time but in retrospect was awful. The essay detailed a student’s journey driving a van on the Pan-American Highway, a series of roads that stretches from the tip of Southern America to the crown of North America. It was a trip of self-discovery and passion. Of course a law school would want to accept him! I didn’t have anything so grand.

It would have been a terrible idea to follow his strategy. The biggest mistake students make on their applications is writing about their “passion”.

Cheap Talk

To economists, it is easy to see why you should avoid this strategy. Talking about passion is cheap talk. Anyone can say it. I did it in this essay.

The first paragraph was a lie.

Not only am I emphatically not passionate about dogs, I don’t really like them at all. But it’s easy to lie because people think that when writing they just have to say they love something and that’s enough to convince someone they love something.

Here, let’s rewrite that first paragraph as if it were a SOP:

I am passionate about economics. Ever since my first economics class I knew I wanted my career to involve it. I can remember one economics professor who helped me see the world differently. And now I’m ready to learn more about economics and fulfill my passion.

Even though most of this paragraph is true for me (and likely you), it’s no better than when it was a lie about dogs. It contains no evidence of passion. It is written on an assumption that if I just tell people I’m passionate then they’ll believe me.

So what should you do instead?

My Challenge

First and foremost, take my challenge: write your SOP without using the word “passion”.

The second step is recognizing what passion means. Passionate people do not talk about being passionate. They do things that show they are passionate.

I read some admissions essay for a program at my university. The essay prompt was “Tell us a time you got excited about something you learned in school.” Basically, it was “tell us about your passion.” Only one essay stuck with me. The student had a class where a guest came to demonstrate sewing. She loved that class so much that she saved her money, bought a sewing machine, and started teaching herself. Her first big accomplishment was a skirt, which she proudly wore to school. A few years later, after much practice, she took a huge risk and made her own prom dress.

That student convinced me she was passionate. Because she had a good story.

When applying to graduate school, you need to look at what you have done that shows you are the kind of person who loves economics. Do you run econometric analyses in your free time? Have you run a podcast interviewing economists about their research? Do you read research in your spare time?

Having a good story will go much further than banal statements about passion.

But there’s a specific type of story that will work better than anything else. After all, above I said that the guy who wrote about his Pan-American Highway trip had a bad SOP. Isn’t that a story?

Yes, he had a story, and that’s why I still remember it 10 years later. But that story doesn’t demonstrate anything related to what he wanted to do for graduate school. It signaled that he was adventurous, sure. And maybe an MBA program or a law school is interested in that. But competition for economics programs is fierce, and that story is unlikely to open doors for you.

So what story should you tell?

I’ll write about that next week.