My favorite research story

Two weeks ago, I gave a challenge for SOPs.

Last week I explained why your SOP will be better with stories.

This week I want to give you an example of the stories principle.

The Story

It’s 2017, and instead of writing, I’m browsing twitter. Somewhere in the infinite scroll, a tweet catches my eye. The author is Trevon Logan, a prominent economic historian, and he’s explaining the origin of his recent research.

The tweet catches my eye because I had seen his coauthor present the research a year or two earlier. The paper was about neighborhood segregation and the variation in racial integration. It was interesting, but I didn’t have much to say about it. For me, it wasn’t a paper that I felt compelled to tell others about.

But this tweet changed that.

Trevon explains that the paper came about because he had been talking to his grandmother. The discussion revealed that she, a Black woman in 1930, had a Black neighbor whose neighbor was white. Trevon was amazed that in this rural area in Mississippi, there was an “integrated” neighborhood. So he decided to measure neighborhood racial integration, and that investigation created multiple papers that became top publications.

In his tweets, Trevon pointed to this an example for the need of greater diversity in the economics profession. All of this important research came from talking to his grandmother about her life. My grandmother can’t provide that insight, and many other white economists would not get that insight from their grandmothers. This was a conversation unique to a Black economist talking with this Black grandmother.

Those few tweets in 2017 changed how I see the importance of diversity in economics.

And they also changed how I see research stories in SOPs.

The SOP Takeaway

Imagine you are on an admissions committee, and you read a story like Trevon’s in an SOP. It might go like this

In graduate school, I’m interested in researching the history of residential segregation in the United States. My grandmother was a Black woman in rural Mississippi in the 1930s. When I was looking through the 1930 census and found her name, I thought it was strange that a few entries later I found a white family. This seemed unbelievable to me because we have a lot of research showing the prevalence of residential segregation is in the U.S. South. But when I asked her about it, she confirmed the census was correct. She also told me that in her town there were white and Black families living in the same neighborhood. No one in the literature has discussed this kind of historical integration, so I’m interested in using the 1930 census to measure variation in segregation across the U.S. Then I can use that measure of racial segregation to look at labor market outcomes for Black men raised in neighborhoods with different levels of segregation.

This story communicates so much without ever using the word passion! It shows that normal conversations inspire research ideas. It shows the applicant knows that he’s expected to do research and already has an idea of what to do. It doesn’t have a super detailed research plan, but that’s ok because it has enough details to suggest that the work is possible.

And, most importantly, the story is easy to remember later on when you’re making your final decision. How do I know it’s memorable? Because that tweet was written 4 years ago and it still stands out to me!

You don’t need a crazy story. But a little bit of story can make your SOP so much more memorable.