Professional essay for PhD Application

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Guidelines for Preparing the Doctoral Program Application Essay

The Admissions Committee will use your essay to help determine your readiness for doctoral education

and how well the program and concentration that you are applying for matches your interests and goals.

The essay consists of four sections, and these guidelines provide prompts for you to use in organizing

your thoughts. You do not need to answer all of the questions, and you may add additional information

than what is prompted by the questions.

The quality of the writing will be a factor in the admissions decision. Doctoral work, in particular the

dissertation, requires a high level of academic writing. You do not need to use citations, but if you do

reference the work of others, in-text citations and references should be in APA format.

Personal/Professional Motivation

The doctoral journey is a challenging one that few start and many do not complete. A key characteristic

of successful students is having clear goals that align with completing a dissertation and a doctoral

program. These goals are essential for remaining motivated throughout the process.

 What are your professional goals?

 What are your personal goals?

 How does this degree program and concentration relate to those goals?

 How do you plan to use this degree?

 Why are you interested in pursuing a doctoral degree?

Research Interests

From the beginning of the Doctoral Program you are preparing yourself to conduct research, in order to

ultimately make a contribution to the body of knowledge. When you have research interests in mind,

you will be able to view much of your coursework through the lens of your interests and, for example,

begin to find and review the literature in the area of your interests. While you can expect your topic to

evolve and change over the course of your studies, putting some careful thought into your research

interests before starting the program will help position you to fully take advantage of the courses in the

program, and finish the program within a reasonable timeframe.

 General topic – try filling in the blanks in this sentence:

 I’m interested in [doing what][why, how, if, to, what, where, who, ] [subject, problem or

opportunity] in the [specific industry, organization, group, population].

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 Here are some examples:

 I’m interested in understanding how virtual teams function after the departure of the

informal leader in the apparel marketing industry.

 I’m interested in studying the extent to which managers influence the professional

development of their employees in the IT industry.

 I’m interested in evaluating factors affecting the adoption of e-learning systems by

instructors in Jamaican educational institutions.

 I’m interested in measuring the results of implementing social media within nonprofit

organizations to Leverage Social Capital.

 I’m interested in testing the feasibility of a three step re-entry model for returning veterans

based on Lewin’s unfreeze move refreeze model.

 What about this topic, has not been explored so far – how would your research add to the

existing body of knowledge or fill a gap?

 Who else, beside you, should/does care about this topic?

 How does this topic relate to management (managerially related topic) or computer science?

 How does this topic connect to your work or industry, or what makes this topic important to

you?

 How will your workplace be involved in, or support, your research – if applicable?

Concentration Compatibility

Your concentration is a specific area that you will explore in depth in your coursework. It is important

that you have sufficient background professionally, academically, or both to be able to study this area at

an advanced, doctoral level.

 What professional background do you have that is related to your concentration?

 What academic experience do you have that is related to your concentration?

 What other experience and/or training do you have to prepare you for advanced study in this

area?

Overall Ability to be Successful

Doctoral course work along with the research and writing of a dissertation require significant

investments of time and energy. Before beginning this process, it is important to consider how you will

rearrange your life and routines to support your doctoral work.

 First and foremost, you should assess your ability to write at the doctoral level, which includes,

but is not limited to:

o Assuring that all assertions and contentions are cited with appropriate corroborative

evidence from the peer reviewed literature.

o All content is grammatically correct and does not contain spelling errors.

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o All content is compliant to APA guidelines.

 You should assess your writing ability and consider some additional coursework or other skill

building opportunities to mitigate any shortcomings to assure timely progress through each

phase of the doctoral journey.

 How will you balance personal and work requirements with doctoral education?

 How much time do you have available on a weekly basis for course work and research and

writing?

 What plans do you have to help you overcome challenges that could possibly impact your ability

to make timely progress?

 As a recommendation, you might want to consider developing a schedule by setting aside some

time each week (maybe two hours, 3 days a week) as well as deliverables (e.g. chapter 1

Introduction) that will assist you in meeting your objectives.