How to Write a Brilliant Course-Based Master’s SOP (MSAI)

Not all grad students want to do research! Some of us just want to take awesome classes. Others want to learn new skills and boost their career (and salary). But how do we explain this in a master’s statement of purpose? Can we stay career-focused and still seem like brilliant grad students? Absolutely! Below you’ll read what I consider a perfect SOP. It’s an MSAI sample essay focused on Machine Learning and Business, and it’ll teach you my surefire strategy for applying to a course-based or career-track master’s — in any field.

If you’re a hopeful software engineer, marketing executive, or someone who just wants to learn cool things, this SOP writing strategy is for you.

Table of Contents

1. The 3-Step Strategy
2. Sample MSAI Essay: A Perfect SOP
3. What Makes This SOP Perfect?
4. Who Should Use This Writing Strategy?
5. Conclusion

The Strategy

Step 1: Structure Your Essay

If you want to be maximally competitive, you need to realize that your statement of purpose isn’t just a navel-gazing personal narrative about what you’ve done in the past. Instead, it should describe your plans for the future. My Master’s SOP Starter Kit teaches you how to do this. You’ll structure the essay in four parts:

1. What I want to achieve
2. How this school will help me achieve it
3. Why I’m qualified to study this stuff
4. Affirmation that I’m ready to get started!

Number 2 is most important. It’s where you tell Target University how you plan to use their resources. Whether you want to build better robots or gain expertise in a specific kind of accounting, you need to prove you actually know how to go about achieving this! You have to have a plan.

Thus, we first dedicate about 1/3 of our essay to explaining our “Study Plan” for Target University.

Step 2: Determine What You Need to Learn

Today, you’re at Point A. You want to get to Point B — a bright future where you’ve learned a lot, and probably have a cool new job. To get to that Point B, you’ll have to acquire some new skills and knowledge. You need expertise.

Good applicants know exactly which skills and knowledge they need to obtain. They can’t exactly learn it all themselves — they need a good teacher — but they at least know where their knowledge gaps are.

Bad applicants don’t know these things. They haven’t figured out what they need to learn. They just assume that if they get accepted, some expert professor somewhere will tell them everything they need to know. (They’re quite naïve.)

One way to become a good applicant is to find your Dream Job on recruiting websites like Monster.com, and see which kinds of skills and expertise they require:

This is excellent! Grad school will give you these skills, right? Whether you need to get better with finite element analysis or explore new techniques in mental health counseling, these are things you’re going to learn at Target University. Awesome.

But…how are you going to learn them?

Step 3: Study Plan

In the second section of your statement of purpose, you need to explain (i) exactly which classes you’ll take and (ii) which extracurricular resources you’ll use to (iii) obtain the skills and knowledge you need to achieve your career goal. Thus, you can visualize the entire essay according to the following argument structure:

1. My goal is to work in X;
2. In order to achieve X, I need to obtain skills A, B, and C;
3. Target University will teach me these skills in courses like 1, 2, and 3;
4. I’m qualified to study at Target University because, in the past, I’ve accomplished Q, R, and S;
5. Thus, with Target University’s help, I’m certain I can achieve my goal of X.

Already, that sounds pretty convincing, doesn’t it? But let’s not dwell in abstraction here. Let’s see what a really good master’s essay looks like in practice. As you read the sample essay below, ask yourself:

1. What is this student’s goal?
2. What does she need to learn before she can achieve that goal?
3. What will she do at Gotham University to learn that stuff?

A Perfect Course-Based Master’s SOP

During my time at Johannesburg’s Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital, I witnessed how Lunit INSIGHT MMG, a deep learning-based medical imaging software, both helped in the detection of breast cancer and lessened physicians’ workloads. Even as an IT extern in the radiology department, I realized the extent to which such products, when they are truly accessible, can help the whole hospital system. In South Africa and countries like it, many public rural hospitals can’t afford such technology, yet have triple to quadruple the number of patients as their urban private counterparts. Obviously, with more patients, doctors are more prone to human error. This is a dilemma of certain consequence. Yet, this problem describes precisely my reasons for applying to Gotham University: I hope to study artificial intelligence so that I can contribute to machine-learning models and applications that help physicians with early-cancer detection, especially in underfunded rural hospitals like those in my home country.

The Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence program will provide both the technical and business-management skills I need to achieve my goal. Through courses like Intro to Computer Vision (MSAI 329) and Deep Learning (MSAI 407), I hope to gain a comprehensive understanding of computer vision, its current limitations, and how it can be advanced. This will provide the foundation I need to contribute to the development of accurate and robust machine-learning models for image classification in medical diagnosis. Furthermore, Innovate: Medical (MBUS 450) will guide me toward creating business plans that turn medical innovations into achievable ventures, while Financial Foundations for Entrepreneurs (MBUS 382) will provide hands-on experience with the financial accounting necessary for startup businesses — a crucial aspect of my long-term goals. I am also interested in Professor Lucius Fox’s work on self-supervised fine-tuning algorithms, as correcting super-resolution convolutional neural networks could greatly enhance medical-imaging processes. If possible, I would like to explore this or similar topics in my capstone, with Professor Fox as my advisor, and thus gain vital experience applying these technical skills that will be directly relevant for my future career.

I also appreciate the many extracurricular resources through which Gotham will support my goals. I am keenly interested in the WeLaunch Program, which supports hopeful female entrepreneurs with incomparable mentorship and networking opportunities. Joining this program will be uniquely important to me, as in the future I hope to coordinate nonprofit efforts that will help integrate AI-powered medical-imaging platforms in rural hospitals in South Africa. Projects like this would require external funding and collaboration with my country’s Department of Health; thus, the WeLaunch Program will greatly benefit me as I seek to develop software prototypes and public messaging that will resonate with collaborators in government and beyond.

Fortunately, my academic and professional experiences have fully prepared me to face these challenges. As a Computer Science student at Metropolis University (with a concentration in Security), I acquired a strong background in system programming and software testing — an education that continues to drive my professional growth in backend engineering roles. Today, I work as a software engineer at Wayne Technologies, a consulting and IT services company, where I have acquired rich experience delivering robust products for high-impact clients. My integration work with frontend, DevOps, quality assurance, and business goals has allowed me to study the product lifecycle from start to finish. Furthermore, having contributed to both large-scale projects with millions of users at WayneTech and small-scale projects from my previous job at the startup, Katara, I have mastered different tech stacks and system designs which I believe will greatly benefit me in the Industry Capstone Project at Gotham. I write code in Python, Golang, and Kotlin, practice data structure and algorithms, and utilize DevOps skills in deploying microservices in the cloud. All these skills, I believe, will be the foundation for my success at Gotham.

After graduation, my short-term goal is to contribute to projects that help close the gap in AI technology between rural and urban hospitals, hopefully in companies like Arterys and Enlitic, both of which design image-classification tools for medical diagnosis. Long-term, I hope to contribute towards creating an AI-powered medical-imaging platform that can integrate rural communities (like those of South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province) into our modern healthcare infrastructure, via collaborative non-profit work. I believe Gotham’s Master of Artificial Intelligence program will provide me with the knowledge and experience I need to achieve these goals, and work toward innovating the future of healthcare systems in developing nations who could most benefit from these efforts.

What Makes This SOP Perfect?

This applicant, Sherry, was super successful — she was admitted to multiple highly competitive programs in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, and other fields that merge business and technology. To understand why, we only need to ask those three questions:

1. What is her goal?

To “contribute to machine-learning models and applications that help physicians with early-cancer detection, especially in underfunded rural hospitals”.

2. What does she need to learn before she can achieve that goal?

A handful of (i) technical and (ii) business management skills.

3. What is her plan to learn these things at Gotham?

She’s going to take courses like Intro to Computer Vision (MSAI 329), Deep Learning (MSAI 407), Innovate: Medical (MBUS 450), and Financial Foundations for Entrepreneurs (MBUS 382). She’s also going to use their WeLaunch program to get female mentorship in starting a business.

This is really what it all boils down to. What’s your goal? What do you need to learn to get there? How will you learn this at Target University? The answers to these questions must be 100% deadly clear in your statement of purpose. If they are, you too will have a perfect SOP and a strong chance of admission. But, if the reader has to scratch their chin and wonder what your goals are…well, you’re going to have a hard time.

Who Should Use This Writing Strategy?

Obviously, as the essay above indicates, this strategy is perfect for anyone applying to MSCS and MSAI, or MBAn-type programs, but the principles apply to every field. It would be ideal for Counseling, Accounting, Finance, Engineering, or anything that doesn’t involve research. In fact, you can see the similarities in other WriteIvy sample essays:

• Data Science (MSDS)
• Psychology/Education (Ed.M.)
• Health Administration (MHA)
• Human Computer Interaction (MHCI)

Conclusion for the Course-Based Master’s SOP

I’m grateful to Sherry for allowing me to share her essay because, truly, I think it’s perfect. There’s not a single a thing I’d change. It’s less than 800 words. It’s marvelously clear and intelligent. The language is tight. Structurally, it’s balanced from beginning to end. Nothing feels wasted. Nothing feels like fluff. It’s just perfect! It’s the epitome of an SOP.

More importantly, all this is true because Sherry stayed laser focused on our above writing strategy for the course-based master’s SOP:

1. What is your career goal?
2. What do you need to learn before you can achieve that goal?
3. What will you do at Target University to learn those things?

Make that argument and I’m certain you too can have similar success. Computer Science, MSAI, counseling, nursing, accounting, humanities, whatever…as long as you’re not focused on research, this SOP strategy will work for you. I promise.

Want to know exactly how Sherry wrote her SOP?