It usually begins with a quote randomly taken from Google. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know who the hell the author was, but preferably someone exotically phoren! While the evaluator has already formed an impression about you in their mind, your ability to sound intellectual by Googling little-known utterances of Ralph Waldo Emerson would have surely made up for that low college GPA, or just-above-sea-level GRE score. Then somehow this quote you lifted five minutes earlier, becomes your “life’s motto”, which you’ve always lived, slept and breathed every moment since you first bawled as a baby.
The tale then moves on to how you were inspired by the “world around me as a child”, with an insatiable curiosity that could have killed the entire cat population of the world. While it is normal for classmates in your 9th or 10th grade to be discussing updates on India’s cricket scores, or what happened in John Cena v Undertaker on WWE last night, you instead would be engaged in profound discussions with your teacher, on life and the universe around us, that “helped shape my perspectives”. (Hell, if Lord Buddha had a teacher like that, he’d have reached Enlightenment faster!). Almost everyone of you, also wants to “make a difference” to the world around them, by which time the evaluator is wondering if you’ve at least made any difference with the previous applicant’s essay!
Then comes the charade of four years of learning in a “highly stimulating and motivated setup”. The term projects handed down from buttered-up seniors/taken from Google are proof of your “demonstrable ability to inculcate intricate technical concepts into everyday life”. Those participation certificates you received for being the odd-hand at a college play, and the first prize in the paper presentation competition at God-Only-Knows Institute of Technology, are also “testimony to your well-rounded personality”. Those time-pass electives you chose just to help your grades, are also “in line with your interests”, and serve as demonstration of intent.
That final year project which you started one week before the deadline is “a culmination of months of planning and execution of a highly complex amalgamation of the latest concepts in the field.” (Just to set the record straight, everyone else did do their projects on out-dated concepts!). This is followed up by gobbledygook about what the project was, throwing in every last Greek/Latin word known to you. If not adding anything worthwhile, this at least helps to keep up to the required word count! By this time, the evaluator starts to wonder, why, if every single Indian is really as scientifically gifted as they claim to be, they need to come to his country, or there are no home-grown Nobel Laureates.
And that, is when you start to feel every single inadequacy in personality. One suddenly finds the need for a “broader outlook”, “reworking of perspectives”, and a need for “filling of gaps in technical knowledge”. By default, the country of the university applied to, is always a beacon of scientific advancement and material prosperity, an akshayapatra where milk and honey flow freely, and a land of opportunity, which is the panacea for all the ills plaguing the world. Likewise, the university is always a hub of “research oriented learning that provides cutting edge facilities in a cosmopolitan setup”. (Well, you can’t really admit on paper that you’re applying because of peer pressure from your mom’s aunt’s cousin’s maid’s son who got through there, can you?!). Again, the course you’re applying to is always the “buzzword in tech circles”, the “path to future innovations that will reshape our world” and so on. Then at the end if it all, when you’ve run out of butter, you can wind down with how that university will have a “symbiotic” relationship with you, serving to benefit both, because of your “aptitude for learning” and their “state of the art facilities”.
It’s not for nothing that the whole thing is acronymed “SOP”. While the university intended it as a “Statement of Purpose”, this has been developed into a “Standard Operating Procedure”! While this is more an account of SOPs for MS applications, derived from experiences of being asked to edit them, it’s quite clear the SOP for MBAs or pretty much anything else uses the same basic skeleton. It really is a wonder, how the University is able to differentiate between the numerous applications, all of which revolve around pretty much the same stories. Both sides probably know it is a waste of time, and see through it, but yet have to go through each year, for reasons best known to them! Wonder why the CAG in those countries hasn’t launched an audit of the man-hours wasted in evaluating these “Standard Observations of Purpose”!
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