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Sample Statement of Purpose, Page 1 of 4

Statement of Purpose:
Please describe your aptitude and motivation for graduate study in your area of specialization, including your preparation for this field of study, your academic plans or research interests in your chosen area of study, and your future career goals. Please be specific about why UC Berkeley would be a good intellectual fit for you.

The writer of the statement below was admitted into UC Berkeley's History Department. With her permission, I reprint her essay parsed with my commentary about why it works as a winning essay.

"Luscious fare is the jewel of inordinate desires,"¹ cautions² the author of The Gentlewoman's Companion (1673), one of many early modern conduct books I surveyed this past year for an honors thesis entitled "'Chaste, Silent, and Hungry': The Problem of Female Appetite in Early Modern England, 1550-1700."³ As indicated by the title, this project explores a provocative but as of yet scarcely studied facet of early modern gender constructions: female food desire.⁴ I use the word "desire" here rather deliberately, as early modern definitions of appetite extended well beyond the physiological drive to eat to encompass all those physical (and shameful) longings associated with the body. And, in a culture where women were by definition immoderate and sensual, female food appetite, I argue, constituted an unruly⁵ desire that demanded both social and moral discipline. In brief, my research concerns the patriarchal control of women's bodies in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England vis-à-vis a cultural idea about food desire and satiation as suggestive and immodest.⁶

In lieu of a formal introduction of my research interests and aspirations I offer a summary of my senior thesis, which earned me the 2003 Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research at the University of California, Davis.⁷ This first venture into serious historical scholarship has affirmed my passion for early modern culture and history; and it has given me the confidence to assert and contest my opinions regarding the status of women in early modern Europe and the current state of early modern historiography.⁸ Continuing along these avenues of research in graduate school, I would like to use my thesis as the basis for a future dissertation. Though I remain wary about committing myself prematurely to a specific topic of research, I am also eager to

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• ¹ The writer begins with a vivid quote that grabs the reader's attention right away.
• ² "Cautions" is an excellent verb choice. Careful word choice makes for lively writing.
• ³ Note how neatly in one well-packed sentence, the writer gets right to the point of her current research.
• ⁴ "Provocative" is an apt and colorful word choice. This sentence explains the nature of her study and situates her subject in historical and thematic context.
• ⁵ "Unruly" is another aptly chosen adjective. Adjectives can create "dead places" in writing if they add nothing significant to the noun that it is describing.
• ⁶ The summary sentence not only recaps the gist of the first paragraph, but also provides further nuance of the subject at hand.
• ⁷ This first sentence makes clear that research first and foremost will be central to her argument in the essay. Mentioning the "Chancellor's Award" in the context of her research is a clever way of boasting without seeming to.
• ⁸ It is a very good idea to explicitly state the chosen subfield within history: early modern Europe. You can't assume that your readers will make the inference from the research topic alone. To "assert and contest" opinions is, of course, the marksmanship of historians; making reference to "the current state of early modern historiography" conveys familiarity with the subject on the one hand, and confidence and intellectual poise on the other. Notice how much more powerful is such a statement as compared to one poorly written, such as "I am passionate and committed to my interest in early modern Europe."