SOP for MA in Computational Social Science, University of Chicago

Hi everyone,

I'm applying for the MA in Computational Social Science at University of Chicago. Following is my Statement of Purpose for the application.

my best next stage

Political communication, digital media, public opinions, information censorship, politics in China ...there are some words that are always able to - like an electric shock - make me stunned and thrilled. Here and now, I have made up my mind to follow up this electric current, to embrace and further explore political communication through digital media within a computational social science scope, and I believe the MA program in Computational Social Science at University of Chicago will be my best next stage.

While studying Biological Sciences at Tsinghua University, I found myself enjoy learning knowledges related to people and society much more than those about the physical world. Hence, I started a double major at School of Journalism and Communication to dive deeper into how people interact with each other through the process of exchanging information. I show a strong passion for my dual major and was enchanted by those media and communication theories. I could write more than 15,000 words without stop in an essay with a demand of only 3,000 words only because of a pure interest about public opinions; and I even made it to read 11 books beyond requirement within a semester just for one course. With such a burning passion as well as my strong researching ability, I managed to finish all courses one year in advance, and ranked the 1st of the whole class and the top 40% at School of Life Sciences at the same time.

Beyond that, I also took active try on empirical studies in communication based on the knowledges I learnt. In a course essay that only required students to do some simple qualitative analysis on a communication event, I extended it to a large-scale quantitative research, in which I not only learned a lot about data processing, but also found big data analytics on digital era truly fascinating. In my extracurricular readings, I found that different scholars held different views on whether the public's dependence on opinion leaders become stronger or weaker on new media. The debates sparked my interest to explore more about the topic. Only within a week, I learnt a variety of tools and skills such as Gephi and data cleansing with Python, and processed on 140,000+ lines of data of reposts on a microblog related to science. Starting from scratch was hard, yet the outcome turned out to be exciting: the number of those opinion leaders without scientific background took up an overwhelming proportion of the reposting sources. Later I managed to prove that the reposts of these opinion leaders greatly lead to the public's irrational distortion of science. This research experience exposed me to large-scale analytics' incredible power to see the truth beyond surface. Also, I realized that there is still room for my improvement: my ability to conduct advanced analysis was still weak, that I could only use conventional manual coding methods to analyze the contents. It was at that time that I began my extracurricular self-learning about programming and data analysis.

Through countless independent biological sciences experiments, I have gained strong abilities in scientific researching methods, including complex experimental design with well-controlled variables, result analysis based on solid theoretical basis, and troubleshooting by process improvement. These abilities not only guaranteed me to receive an A grade in all lab reports, but also led me to achieve a set of positive findings in social science research. In my next research project after intensive learning about advanced programming, I studied China-Foreign relations within a media scope using NLP methods. It was hard to precisely figure out what texts can ultimately include a newspaper's sentiment towards a specific foreign country, especially without mistakenly involving other countries or other contents not related to international affairs while still guaranteeing enough sample size. To tackle this problem, I listed all factors that might influence the content retrieval (for example, the statistical unit, crossover calculation and appearance frequency of core words), tested the result of change in each factor respectively, examined the reliability and validity simultaneously with quantitative methods, and in the end chose the best combination. After experimentally coding more than 3,000 lines, I successfully designed an effective algorithm with this scientific approach to calculate the precise sentiment towards a country, with a total p-value less than 0.001. But I also found myself lacking knowledges about politics when doing in-depth analysis on the results during this project, which greatly influenced my research interest.

The research above took me to the concept of political communication, and after learning theories in this area, I was extremely fascinated by the political communication in China at an age of social media, as it's becoming much more interactive with the public's growing awareness of speaking out about their own thoughts, and the democratic politics that social media represent are contradictory to the stereotype of China's authoritarianism. I'm especially interested about how the authorities and public opinions interact with each other in this process, for example how the public reacts to the government's actions or voices, and how the government imposes censorship on the public opinions. I also want to learn more about the internal weak ties of the public and their political implication discourse as a response to the government censorship. After reading a large number of literatures, I find that related empirical studies in the United States are in full swing, while those about China are still at initial stage. It makes me determined to devote myself to this field and to bringing more insights to the academia.

My research interest, my academic pursuit, as well as my personal affection for University of Chicago, have led me to apply for the M.A. program in Computational Social Science. Conducting empirical studies on the vast digital media needs strong abilities in large-scale computing, from crawling, data processing to data visualization, and from network analysis to text-as-data. I have accumulated a lot on programming through my academic experiences but I am still lacking skills on mathematics especially statistics. I believe that the Computation program's various courses on data analytics will equip me well with these necessary abilities. Though I've been familiar with those communication theories, I still need a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of political science and sociology, as political communication is a highly interdisciplinary subject. And UChicago's various selective courses and workshops covering all kinds of social science subjects will fill the gap for me to build a strong interdisciplinary theoretical foundation and help me develop deeper insights from existing data. Moreover, with the well-known Chicago School's great impact on communication studies, the world's greatest university in social science, University of Chicago, has always been a hallowed hall for me since the very first time I knew it. I'm eager to follow the steps of the great scholars such as John Dewey, George H. Mead and Robert E. Park, and continue the old Chicago story with the newest quantitative utterances.

If I have the chance to be admitted to this program, I will firstly spare no efforts to pass the two placement exams to gain more opportunities to select the courses that better fit my needs, including computation courses such as Machine Learning and Large Scale Data Analysis and Causal Inference, and social science courses ranging from sociology, psychology to political science. In addition to the Computation Workshop, I will also actively participate in the East Asia: Politics, Economy, and Society as well as Theory and Models Workshop to keep up with the latest trend of research and discover topics to make improvements. As for research projects, I'd mostly like to work with Professor Justin Grimmer and am more than willing to explore the political communication on social media under his guidance with sophisticated experience in quantitative political research and text analysis. After graduation, I will continue to pursue a Ph.D. degree and work as a tenure-track professor in the United States to carry on my research.

In summary, my past research and project experience have helped me find my true academic passion and have provided me with the basic knowledge and skills required for future exploration on political communication. The opportunity to receive further education and to carry on more research in Computation program at University of Chicago will best assist me in realizing my resolution, and I am sincerely aspiring for this chance at such a marvelous institution.

Yun, you do not present a solid purpose for your line of study aside from an excitement and eagerness to continue learning. That is not the information that should be contained in the statement of purpose. The statement of purpose is written under the assumption that there is a specific trend in the business that you wish to learn about or, you have specific work related handicap in terms of performing your duty that requires you to undertake advanced studies in this field. I do not get any information regarding either of those possibilities at the moment. Your essay is severely focused on academic accomplishments, undertakings, and possibilities that the most important aspect of the purpose is not fulfilled in your responses. Let's just say that the statement of purpose is composed of the following W's:

What - What is the reason that you feel the need to study this course? (Purpose)
Why - Why do you believe that your career will benefit from achieving this masters degree? (Professional experiences)
Where - Why do you think that this university choice is the best for you based upon your professional requirements and beyond the generic references in your essay to courses and classes. (Academic accomplishments in relation to your chosen masters course

Focus only on your Journalism major in college for this essay. The Science references are irrelevant. Convince the reviewer that you have 2 years worth of remarkable journalistic experience that ties in directly with a minor or foundational exposure to Computational Social Science. Based on the 3 guide questions I have provided you, the next version of the essay that you will write should have a more pronounced focus on the purpose of your studies, the reason you wish to study this course, how it relates to your future career opportunities (a 5 year plan), the reason that this university choice suits your academic and professional objectives, and what specific research paper in relation to your interests in China and Chinese journalism and/or research you will be completing during this time which will help you enhance your professional field upon your return to China.