My aim is to become a professional researcher with focus on Development Economics and inequalities

SOP Economics Ph.D. admittance

Hi everybody, I am applying for Economics Ph.D. programs and I am having a hard time in writing my SOP because I am finding a lot of different (and sometimes contradictory) guidelines. This is the first draft so these are actually the content I'd like to put in the SOP but I am not even sure about the structure. Please give me some feedback so that I will be able to improve it. Thanks!

Dear Admission Committee,

I am applying to [university_name] because I wish to pursue a Ph.D. in Economics. My aim is to become a professional researcher either in academia or in international organizations, whose focus is on Development Economics and inequalities. Since high school, I knew that what I wanted to do in my life was about Economics because I have always been interested in understanding what causes countries to be poor. It has been the story of the city of Nogales, whose Mexican half is poorer than its American half that first thrilled me. I wanted to study how to answer questions like this, studying the economic reasons and the role of institutions. My high school track was focused on Mathematics and Computer Science and I always wanted to put this knowledge into practice. That's why I applied and I was selected by the top school in my country and one of the top world schools of Economics, [my_university]. There I earned both my Bachelor and Master of Science in Economics and Social Sciences.

However, it has been my experience as an Exchange student at [exchange_university] that made me fully convinced that Economics would have been not only my field of study but also my field of work. At [exchange_university], I attended my first course in Development Economics that totally changed my perspective about what Economics is and how powerful it could be. During that course, I had the occasion of reading inspiring books as "The end of poverty" by Jeffrey Sachs and being involved in the use of Economics not only as a mental exercise but also practically. I started thinking that this was what I wanted to do as an economist. Back from [exch_uni_country], I had my first experience of independent research, writing my Bachelor thesis under the tutoring of [prof1] about Taiwanese marriage market and the influence that dowries have on wives' bargaining power within the newly-formed household. Thanks to this experience, reading the literature and doing the analysis I reinforced my will that I wanted that to become my job.

I had a confirmation during the period I have been a Visiting Student at [research_center], the Economics research center of my university. This experience got me fully exposed to academic life: I attended conferences, paper presentations, workshops and I had the occasion to work as Research Assistant for [prof 1]. During our collaboration, I had the opportunity of working on the editing of two incoming papers, one concerning the effect of gold price fluctuation on dowries in India and its effect on marriage market outcomes and the other concerning the production function of small-medium enterprises in Uganda. In both cases, I have been fully involved in the work: I have been asked to actively collaborate not only cleaning data and running econometric analysis to produce the results but also in the elaboration of the research strategy. This experience has been so positive that I decided to choose [prof 2] as my Master thesis advisor and it has been a successful choice. In my thesis, I explored the causal effect of education on the experience of domestic violence, exploiting the Free Primary School reform of 1994 in Malawi. The results were really satisfying because I had to face many challenges starting from getting an original research idea to data collection and cleaning to running a completely new research design, Regression Discontinuity, all of that under a tight deadline while I was contemporaneously working as RA.

That said, Micro-Development Economics is my main research interest. In particular, I would like to explore questions such as how social networks may prevent women from experiencing domestic violence or using spatial analysis to explore the causes of poverty of a particular geographic area. Nonetheless, currently, I am having the opportunity to explore other research fields that are related to my main interest. Indeed, I am involved in another couple of RA collaborations, which are focused on migration and on drawing the distribution of life expectancy in the US.

In addition, my university career at [my_university] has been formative, both from an academic and from a personal perspective. The tough coursework I attended in Mathematics, Statistics and Econometrics, both at undergraduate and graduate levels gave me a strong quantitative background. This strong theoretical basis has helped me in facing graduate economics courses, in which I have been able to sharpen and deepen my competencies. Moreover, thanks to my experiences as RA, I learned advanced skills in using econometric software for economics analysis and about the most up-to-date experimental designs and models used in economic research. Furthermore, [my_university] has a very international environment, which in addition to my experience as an exchange student abroad, allowed me to meet scholars and students with the most different backgrounds so that I learned how to exploit this differences in growing my cultural background.

The research and life experiences I have had, combined with my training, in theory, provide me with a good start towards becoming a successful researcher. Applying at [university_name] is my ideal choice because, beyond its overall extremely strong faculty, there are many scholars in Development Economics whose interests have a good fit with mine; without to forget, the universal acknowledgment of the program as one of the world's best, as its impressive job placements. I am looking forward to joining your community to grow as a scholar and a person and to share my experiences with you and the academic world.

Sincerely,

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Alessandro, this is not an SOP. It appears to me that you combined the influences of a personal statement, a motivational letter, and a SOP in this essay. This is perhaps because you were confused by the various formats that you read about online. In actuality, the SOP for a PhD is the same as the SOP for a masters course application. Therefore, the same format applies to your essay only at a higher level of presentation.

Par. 1: Relate how your career has improved or changed since you completed your masters course. What is your status now in the workplace? Are your current skills, after taking the masters course still adequate for your job? If not, what parts of the job are troubling you at the moment? Are / is this / these problem/s the reason you feel you now need a PhD? What is the driving force that pushes you towards the need to fulfill a PhD requirement?

Par. 2: Talk a little bit about your masters course and how it affected your job performance. How do you hope to enhance your skills with the PhD? As an international researcher, what additional skills do you feel you require that will help you to surpass your masters degree training?

Par. 3: Think about your masters thesis. Would this successfully translate and transform into a dissertation proposal? A PhD dissertation is usually a continuation of the masters thesis so you may need to think about what you want to say in the summary presentation that will connect the two research projects. Indicate a summary of the new research you hope to complete during your PhD studies.

Par. 4: What are your career goals after you complete your PhD studies?

Par. 5: How does the choice of a specific university come full circle to bring all of these concerns into one course curriculum that you feel will be the perfect course for you to study, based upon the given information?

Respond to these questions and you will have a more appropriate PhD SOP to present with your application.

Thank you! But I am still a bit confused.

There is one university to which I am applying that asks for that. It calls it a personal statement but the things they ask seems similar to what is needed in a SOP.

Please upload a copy of your Personal Statement. Please give your reasons for deciding to do graduate work in the field you have chosen. Include a statement concerning your past work (study and research) in your chosen field, your plans for study at [university], including issues and problems you want to address, and your professional goals.

Do you think I should follow your outline or should I look for what each university is asking for?