Ok, so after looking around on the web for some advice and samples of SOP’s, I realized my initial attempt was a bit too “big-picture” idealistic, which is exactly what I usually have a problem with. So this is my attempt at a more concrete Statement of Purpose that will attempt to convince the committee why I would be an ideal graduate student.
During the fall semester of my senior year at the University of Maryland, I made the decision to forgo graduate school for a year or two and apply to Teach-For-America, where I would (in my own mind) help lift young school children out of poverty by my sheer enthusiasm for physics and math. Unfortunately for me, and perhaps fortunately for those children, Teach-For-America did not believe I would be able to accomplish such an ideological feat. And so it was that I found myself at the end of my senior year without a plan for the coming year.
What began as a year or two hiatus from physics turned into three, then four, five…now almost ten years later I have moved around the country several times, studied stratospheric and tropospheric ozone, spent a month hiking in Alaska, gotten married, bought a house, passed the patent bar exam and written over a hundred patents. And all the while I have felt this nagging feeling that I’m not done with physics and it isn’t done with me. I have spent some of my free time trying to teach myself some physics and mathematics. But the results have been mixed. It’s taken me several years to realize that desire is not enough. I am lacking many crucial ingredients to learning and doing research in physics: a strong community of other people who love and are devoted to physics, the structured progression of courses and the direction of professors, advisors and colleagues.
I would like the opportunity now to continue that desire to do research in physics that began when I was an undergraduate. During my time at Maryland, I sought out opportunities to do research and study under faculty members. I spent my junior and senior years working with Dr. [ ] Chang in the experimental Nuclear Physics Group. There I picked up some FORTRAN and helped Dr. Chang run various numerical simulations for [ ] experiment. I also spent a summer doing some independent study under the supervision of Dr. Xianijong Ji, in the Theoretical Quarks Hadrons and Nuclei Group at Maryland. On one occasion that summer, Dr. Ji asked me to factor out an expansion of an S-Matrix element he had given me in to a particular form. I sat with the problem for several days, all the while Dr. Ji kept asking me if I had finished the problem. When I showed him my result, he explained that the answer was much simpler than the form I had come up with. So I continued working on the problem, trying to understand my mistake. Finally, after several days, I went to his office and stated emphatically that the answer I’d worked out was the correct one. He argued with me about if for several minutes, until I explicitly showed him why the solution was correct. ”Well, then, congratulations on solving your first non-trivial problem,” he said, which I have never forgotten. That problem wasn’t a particularly complicated one, but I believe that situation illustrates well my commitment to a problem and my willingness to challenge [?].
After finishing my degree at Maryland, I took the first job that came along. The position was as a Faculty Research Assistant at the University of Maryland, where I worked under the supervision of Dr. ___ in Maryland’s ____ and Dr. Anne Thompson at Goddard. During my time as a Research Assistant, I worked on modifying a radiative transfer code to quantify atmospheric ozone concentrations from satellite measurements. As a Research Assistant I learned IDL, unix scripts, and how to work with very large datasets. I also gained a lot of experience relevant to the logistics of doing research. I helped Dr. Anne Thompson in submitting research summaries and grant proposals. I also co-edited a special edition journal [?], which required me to edit manuscripts, as well as set up and maintain author and reviewer correspondences.
Three years after graduating, Dr. Anne Thompson took a position as a full professor at Penn State, and invited me to come do a masters thesis there under her supervision. As my soon to be wife had just started her graduate work at Penn State the year before, this opportunity was a no-brainer. So I spent two years at Penn State studying tropospheric ozone under Dr. Thompson and also married my wife during that time. For the two years that I spent as a graduate research assistant, I made every effort to come up with new and interesting solutions to the research problems being explored by our group. A big problem in atmospheric science is the ovewhelming amount of data that is provided by satellite measurements as well as surface instruments. Sorting through all the data to find patterns can be difficult. In studying troposheric ozone, we had access to a large collection of ozonesondes, which are profiles of ozone content (as well as other parameters such as water content, temperature, etc.) that are collected during the ascension of a balloon from the surface into the stratosphere. To help us with identifying possibly interesting patterns and relationships among these various ozonesondes, I developed a clustering approach using MatLab that was adapted from a paper published by another ozonesonde researcher in the field. I spent several months trying to fine tune the clustering technique so that it would sort the ozonesondes into stable groups in order to find possible underlying relationships between them. Although the end result was not as robust as I had hoped, I felt I learned a great deal about research during that period and ultimately helped to provide support for several ideas about tropospheric ozone being considered by my advisor.
It was also during this time that my first (and only) research paper was published. The paper, entitled “Intercontinental Chemical Transport Experiment Ozonesonde Network Study (IONS) 2004: 1. Summertime upper troposphere/lower stratosphere ozone over northeastern North America”, which was based on my masters thesis work, was published in the Journal of Geophysical Review in 2007.
Although I found atmospheric chemistry interesting, I was not nearly as passionate about the subject and research as I had been about physics during my undergraduate years. I made the decision that upon graduation I would look for other opportunities for employment. Immediately after graduating with my masters I was presented with the opportunity to do work with a small law firm in Bethesda, Maryland. Because my wife was still finishing her PhD at Penn State, this job was ideal since it allowed me the flexibility of working from anywhere in the country.
For the last 3 1/2 years I have worked as a patent writer. In ___, I passed the patent bar exam and officially became a patent agent. My primary responsibilities have been to write patents for our clients as well as to provide general counseling regarding issues of intellectual property. It would be difficult to argue that my job as a patent agent is directly related to research in physics. However, there are several ways in which I believe that my work as a patent agent has connections to teaching, which I feel is also an important part of academic life and which I would like to do as a professor one day. As a patent writer for the last several years, my primary responsibility has been to explain (using words and figures) complex technical inventions in a way that can be comprehended by someone without expertise in the technological field of invention. Furthermore, I have a responsibility to boil down the invention to its essence – some generalized features that can be modified in a myriad of ways without changing the original intentions of the inventor. I believe that these are two qualities that a good teacher should possess: to break down a complicated subject into more easily understandable pieces and to highlight those essential features, the motifs, that provide a backbone for more sophisticated topics down the road. I am excited about the prospect of teaching other students not just the formulas and laws, but the way of thinking about problems that is common to much of physics.
I am primarily interested in doing theoretical work in physics. I have great admiration for experimentalists, but I have always felt the most fulfillment in solving a problem using mathematics. While my current interests lean towards more esoteric fields like quantum field theory, I am really most interested in finding a research area with interesting problems and interesting techniques. In the little bit of self study in physics and math that I’ve done of the last few years, I’ve learned that seemingly different branches of physics (and math) are much more interconnected than I would have ever thought as an undergraduate. The details of the problems may be different, but the tools and techniques developed in one field often seem to find good use in a seemingly unrelated field at a later time. So in addition to exploring opportunities in particle theory, I would also spend my first year as a graduate student learning more about research in other theoretical fields being researched by faculty at Iowa.
In closing, I would like to point out that I have already begun the process of taking physics classes to warm up in preparation for the possibility of joining the physics department here at Iowa. I sat in on Professor Rodgers graduate level General Relativity course last semester. Though I was auditing the class (no grade or credit), I made sure to do most of the homework exercises because I knew that it would be difficult to truly grasp the material otherwise. I also completed the midterm exam and did very well on the exam. In addition, I am taking (for credit) the mathematical methods course taught by Professor Scudder this spring.
