sample statement of purpose mfa creative writing

Free PDF: The 4 questions every SOP must answer → Master’s or PhD

How to Write Your MFA Statement of Purpose: A Success Story

• By Jordan Dotson
• Updated: March 1, 2023

Though they may not realize it, Fine Arts students are cursed. (Believe me, I know, I was one.) Not only are they more stubborn than engineers, but often they suffer the misfortune of being shackled to creative self-expression. Of course, unbounded creativity is a necessary and glorious aspect of their existence. But when it comes time to write an MFA statement of purpose, this same creativity can be a kiss of death.

It doesn’t matter that we’re applying for a somewhat non-academic degree. It doesn’t matter that we’re being judged on our ability to produce meaningful art. All that matters is that this one aspect of the application – the SOP – is NOT the same as a portfolio, in which we unleash our most potent creative juices. Instead, the SOP is a test for how clearly we can articulate our goals .

The funny thing is, these difficulties apply to ALL kinds of MFA applicants, from creative writing to visual arts to theater. (Creative writing students might be the worst.) Though the art differs, all seem to have trouble articulating their goals and inspirations without resorting to artful prose gimmicks. In fact, they face the exact same obstacles that ALL graduate applicants face.

That’s why I was so impressed by Yuxuan.

A color-blind graphic designer and painter, and non-native English speaker, Yuxuan wrote an SOP that puts many creative writing students to shame. And it earned admission to 5 fully funded MFA programs.

But before we read Yuxuan’s amazing essay, let’s examine how he started planning, so we can help you achieve the same wild success.

Getting Started

When he looked back on his applications, Yuxuan expressed his anxieties this way:

“I think the pandemic was a huge disadvantage. It increased the number of applicants and also reduced schools’ funds. This was a big challenge for me since I mainly applied for fully funded MFAs. At the same time, the pandemic reduced available studio time, and I had to complete a lot of my projects at home. The lack of space and equipment gave me a lot of concerns about my portfolio, so I knew I needed a statement of purpose that showed I could be better than other applicants.”

Luckily, Yuxuan was a willing student. When he read the Structure is Magic template , he understood immediately that the SOP isn’t a work of creativity, but a job application. His portfolio would reveal his artistic potential. But the essay had to reveal his potential as a clear thinker who knew exactly why he was applying to each program.

What did he want to convey?

• The over-arching theme of his work; the artistic problems that really motivate him.
• Why each individual school was a perfect place for him to develop those themes.
• How his past successes prove he’s ready to succeed as an artist (and maybe…teacher).

What’s Great About This SOP?

Yuxuan followed Structure is Magic as if it were a paint-by-numbers exercise, and the results were spectacular.

• Two paragraphs in the Introductory Frame Narrative
• One paragraph for Why This Program
• Two paragraphs for Why I’m (Overly) Qualified
• One resounding frame narrative conclusion paragraph

Amazingly, this paragraph-by-paragraph structure is almost exactly the same as that used by uber-successful Neuroscience PhDs . (When I tell you these narrative structures are universal and timeless, I ain’t lying!)

The frame narrative starts with the compelling story of how color-blindness makes Yuxuan a truly unique artist. It’s funny, humble, and it teaches us something. Quickly, this evolves into a description of the techniques he obsesses over in his pursuit of barrier-free art, and how this defines his goals.

Next, it goes into great detail to explain why two professors at his target school are the absolute perfect mentors for Yuxuan: they share the same artistic obsessions, and have much to teach him. Then, he gives a “highlight reel” of his artistic and academic achievements, proving that he’s ready to continue succeeding in graduate school.

Finally, the SOP ends with a clear rearticulation of Yuxuan’s goals, proving that his “genetic color weakness is actually an invaluable lens for viewing the world.”

This essay is beautiful. After reading, we walk away knowing we’ve encountered a true and talented artist, one with a uniquely powerful mind. Let’s read it and find inspiration for your own writing.

A Brilliant MFA Statement of Purpose

I have a red-green color weakness, one most people know as color-blindness. Most people think this means I see the world without green and red. Actually, in my world, reds and greens are grey shades with variegating shadows. I also have difficulty distinguishing pink from grey, and purple from blue. Curiously, this makes me think of animals. Dolphins are dichromats. They can see only two colors. Humans are trichromats. We see red, blue and yellow. Pigeons are tetrachromats. They see the world in a way people cannot even imagine. All creatures see the world through the heteronomy of their colors, and I exist somewhere between humans and dolphins. This fascinates me deeply.

In college, I have largely worked with chiaroscuro and high-contrast color. Chiaroscuro has always been provocative, as my insensitivity to color only increases my sensitivity to light and shadow. No shadow is a single shade of darkness, and I have found high-contrast color offers the same points of inquiry, especially blue, which is as bright as red in the eyes of people with color weakness. Color is thus an expression of self-identity. In most of my work, it is not an emotional expression, but a rational guide in a metaphysical dialogue that alters over time, and this issue of barrier-free visualization is exactly what I hope to explore in the MFA program at Gotham City School of Design.

I am particularly inspired by the work of Professor Karl Banksy. His work often deals with underserved public interest issues, echoing my own pursuit of barrier-free visual experiences. As I create designs for people with achromatopsia, color disorders, and others with visual impairment who are often overlooked in social services, I believe Professor Banksy will be a great mentor. I also feel inspired by Professor Wang Lu, whose research focuses on historical and cultural influence in graphic design. As a Chinese-diaspora artist, I often explore design themes idiosyncratic to Asian culture in my work. I experimented with this in my contribution to “Seeking Plural Narratives,” a recent anthology which sought to examine Eurocentric design and typographic cultures. My pieced discussed Cuban graphic design and its similarities to communist iconography from China. Therefore, I think Professor Lu will be a reliable mentor as I grow my international, multicultural vision for design.

As I consider working with these ideas at GCSD, my academic experiences give me confidence. At Metropolis University, I have excelled as a Graphic Design major, earning a 3.8 GPA even as I took graduate-level coursework in design and computational thinking. These latter courses allowed me to explore philosophy of art, particularly regarding deep fakes and artificial intelligence, as I combined critical reviews of important texts with coding experiments. By studying our emerging culture of disinformation selectively deployed as media manipulation, I learned how new modes of thinking are required to critically and artistically engage with computer culture in the public realm. This use of technology is also an area I hope to explore at GCSD. At the same time, I have interned for one year at the Metropolis Center for Arts and Technology, where among other tasks I serve as a teaching assistant for students from low-income families. Teaching these students, many of whom work part-time to fund their art tuition, has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. It has taught me new degrees of empathy, inspiring even more my desire to study barrier-free visual experience, and sparking my a desire to become an educator.

This is why I apply to GCSD: to study barrier-free visual experiences, to contemplate art in a multicultural and technological world, and to prepare to become a teacher myself. If given the chance to pursue these goals, I will work hard to be a credit to the university, and prove that my genetic color weakness is actually an invaluable lens for viewing the world.

Professional, Powerful, Persuasive

I admit that Yuxuan has a unique background that not everyone can match. A colorblind artist?! C’mon. But either way, it’s easy to see how everyone can model his essay and speak to program directors in a professional, powerful, and persuasive way.

1. Start with a compelling Frame Narrative

What is it about your art that makes you unique? What are you trying to accomplish? What stories are you trying to tell? Which aspects of humanity are you trying to draw out and explore? Most importantly, how are these inspired by your own life and experiences?

Don’t devolve into hackneyed proclamations about social issues. I assure you, every MFA program receives 500 essays a year about social inequalities and art-as-activism. Instead, focus on the things that make you and your art different from everyone else’s.

2. Explain “Why This School” is perfect for you

Once you’ve established the goals for your art, it’s time to explain how this school will help you achieve those goals. Look at the studios and resources available. Look at the faculty. Look at their work. See which courses and workshops you can take under them. Make sure they’re actually teaching next semester! Draw connections between your own themes, obsessions, and questions, and those in the work of your hopeful professors.

A warning, however: don’t claim that a school is perfect because they have a famous professor. Fame is not a good reason to want to work with someone. You need to find real connections between their work and yours. If the connection isn’t there, you’ll only look immature. Remember: if a school has a famous professor, everyone who applies will mention them in their MFA statement of purpose.

3. Prove that you’re ready to succeed

You’re applying to be a graduate student . Here, give them proof that you’ve been a good student in the past, and will continue to do so in the future. Remember, your portfolio proves how good an artist you are. This section shows that you take everything else seriously as well.

Good GPA. Awards you’ve won. Unique design internships you’ve held. Whatever constitutes your “Greatest Hits List,” include it here.

4. End your Frame Narrative

In the beginning, you showed how your life has been unique, and how this gave you unique artistic goals. Now, restate those goals. Remind us of them. Be circular. Take us back to the beginning. Give us a feeling of harmony as we finish your essay.

I’m grateful to Yuxuan for allowing me to republish his work and brag about his success. I originally met him through BosonEd in Philadelphia, a fantastic organization that helps internationals study in elite universities in America. Right from the start, I knew Yuxuan would be an artist of true consequence one day, and I hope his writing is an inspiration for you.

As you craft your MFA statement of purpose, do exactly what Yuxuan did: follow the Structure is Magic template or the SOP Starter Kit . Use the timeless, universal lessons of narrative structure to compose an essay that actively persuades programs to choose you.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking: “Oh, I’m an artist, I’m a creative writer, I know how to do this.” Chances are, you don’t. The SOP isn’t a short story. It’s not a film script nor a personal memoir. It is, however, the easiest part of the application to screw up. But if you treat it properly, as a clear, mature, professional statement of your plans for the future, then I’m sure you too can achieve wild success, and I wish you all the luck in the world!

Was this post helpful? Spread the love:

The sop starter kits.

These FREE (and highly insightful) guides will tell you exactly what to write, step-by-step, and leave you feeling super-confident and ready to hit “submit.”

© 2022 WriteIvy

[ninja_form id=3]

Writing a Winning MFA Statement of Purpose: Example & Advice

Are you applying to a master’s in fine arts program and looking for advice on how to make your statement of purpose stand out? Writing an effective statement of purpose can be challenging – but with some guidance, it doesn’t have to be. The Admit Lab is here to provide tips and insight into the statement-writing process, including an MFA statement of purpose example that demonstrates the components of a winning MFA application essay. Let us help take the stress out of making your writing shine!

Know thyself

Writing an MFA statement of purpose begins with a deep and introspective examination of one’s unique experiences, interests, and goals. The essence of the statement lies in the ability to convey your journey and the specific motivations that drive your desire to pursue a master of fine arts. The document should provide a detailed account of your artistic journey so far, punctuated by the experiences that sparked your interest in the arts. Whether it was an early childhood fascination with colors, your first drawing class at school, or the pivotal moment when you realized that art was your calling, these experiences are instrumental in detailing your artistic evolution. Reflect on the moments that challenged you, those situations that pushed you to evolve and grow as an artist. Perhaps it was a critique that made you rethink your work or a piece that didn’t turn out as expected, leading you to explore a new technique or medium. Finally, consider your future goals. Why are you pursuing an MFA? How do you envision it helping you achieve your artistic objectives? Remember, this statement is your opportunity to show the admissions committee not just who you are as an artist today, but who you aspire to become.

Speaking to Fit

When it comes to articulating your fit for a particular MFA program, it’s vital to conduct thorough research on each institution you’re applying to. Unlike an undergraduate program, an MFA is highly specialized and significantly influenced by the ethos, facilities, faculty, and community of the program. Begin by delving into the curriculum, understanding the course offerings, the teaching methodology, and the predominant artistic philosophies that the program adheres to. Understand the core values of the institution and how they resonate with your own artistic beliefs. Explore the faculty profiles, their work, and their accolades, and see if their style or approach to art aligns with yours. The community is another crucial aspect to consider. Does the program foster a collaborative environment, or is it more individualistic? What opportunities exist for exhibitions, internships, or collaborative projects? As you gather this information, identify the facets that make this program an ideal fit for you. Maybe it’s a particular course that perfectly aligns with the skill you wish to master, or perhaps it’s the opportunity to work under a faculty member whose work you’ve long admired. These specifics should be woven into your statement, crafting a narrative that not only showcases your understanding of the program but also highlights why you’re a great match.

Highlight Strengths and Skills

As demonstrated in the MFA statement of purpose example below, when writing your statement of purpose for an MFA program, it’s imperative to highlight your strengths and skills, particularly those that are transferable and align with the qualifications sought by the program. Start by analyzing the program’s requirements and identifying the skills and qualifications they value the most. Then, reflect on your artistic journey, your academic accomplishments, past projects, internships, or any relevant work experiences. Identify the skills and strengths you’ve developed throughout these experiences and articulate them in your statement. These could range from technical skills specific to your art form, like mastery in a particular medium or technique, to soft skills like creativity, perseverance, critical thinking, or collaboration. Emphasize how these skills have shaped your artistic practice, and supported your creative growth, and how they will contribute to your success in the MFA program. For instance, if you’ve honed your skills in digital art through a series of projects, discuss how this technical expertise will allow you to experiment and create innovative art in an MFA program that values digital mediums. Similarly, discuss transferable skills, such as your ability to work collaboratively on projects or your experience in organizing art exhibits, depicting how these skills make you a valuable addition to the program. By weaving these elements into your statement, you demonstrate not only your qualifications and preparedness for the program but also your potential to contribute to their community.

Choose Your Focus

When crafting the focus of your statement of purpose for an MFA program, it’s essential to illustrate a clear understanding of your artistic discipline and your specific creative intentions within it. This focus forms the crux of your statement, providing a lens through which the admissions committee can view your artistic aspirations. Start by elaborating on your chosen art or discipline – be it visual arts, creative writing, theatre, or any other art form. Discuss what drew you to this discipline, share your exploration and evolution within it, and the unique perspectives or techniques you’ve developed. Then, transition into your intended creative focus within this discipline. For this, discuss your future goals, the kind of projects or works you wish to create, the themes or issues you wish to explore, and how you intend to push the boundaries of your craft. It’s essential to be specific and articulate here; don’t just assert your passion for your art form, demonstrate it by discussing your ideas, inspirations, and creative vision in detail. Show how these align with the MFA program’s philosophy and how the program will provide the perfect platform to realize these ambitions. Remember, your focus is not just about what you wish to do, but also about who you wish to become as an artist and the impact you aim to make through your art. Thus, use this part of your statement to paint a vivid picture of your artistic journey ahead, making the reader invested in your creative future.

Craft a compelling narrative

In crafting a compelling narrative for your MFA statement of purpose, ensure that it’s a true reflection of your journey as an artist. Storytelling is a powerful tool that brings your artistic passion to life, connecting with the reader on a personal level. Share your story through a lens of authenticity and honesty, focusing on the experiences that have shaped you as an artist. Talk about the transformative moments, the challenges you’ve overcome, the triumphs you’ve celebrated, and the lessons you’ve learned along the way. Highlight pivotal artworks or projects that have influenced your work, the inspirations behind your creations, and how you’ve evolved artistically over time. As shown in any of our MFA statement of purpose example, this narrative should not be a mere recitation of events; instead, it should be a deeply personal and stirring exploration of your artistic journey. Remember, the purpose here is not to impress but to express, not to showcase your achievements

Show, don’t tell

It’s also crucial to detail specific instances where your creativity was ignited. Rather than merely stating that you’re passionate, demonstrate this passion through concrete examples. For instance, perhaps there was a time when you found inspiration in the mundane, like how the shadow-play of leaves on a sunny day led you to explore light and shadow in your art. Or maybe there was a moment of emotional turmoil that you transformed into a powerful painting, allowing you to process your feelings and create a piece that resonated with others. Don’t shy away from discussing the creative process either – how you felt while creating, the techniques you used, the risks you took, and how you pushed your boundaries. You might also describe how a particular artist, artwork, or art movement has influenced you, demonstrating this through specific projects or pieces you’ve developed in response. Providing these specific examples offers a deeper insight into your creative excitement, making your statement more compelling.

Capturing Your Audience

You should aim to draw in your reader with creative prompts or reflective vignettes that highlight your writing prowess. This could be realized through the portrayal of the artistic experiments and breakthroughs that excite you, the personal anecdotes that reveal your commitment to art, or the captivating descriptions of your pieces. Using these techniques allows you to paint a vivid picture of your artistic journey and the exploration of your creative voice. It’s important, however, to maintain a balance of creativity with transparency and clarity. You want your statement to be enthralling, but it should also effectively communicate your artistic narrative, your motivations, and your potential in the MFA program. Remember, your reader isn’t just looking for a good story, but also an understanding of who you are as an artist.

Customize for each school

When crafting your statement of purpose for an MFA program, consider the unique strengths and characteristics of each school you’re applying to and tailor your SOP accordingly. Showcase in your SOP how your artistic aspirations align with the school’s offerings and ethos. For instance, if you’re applying to a program known for its strong focus on experimental forms, highlight your interest and past work in this area. If a school boasts a renowned faculty member whose work resonates with your own, mention how you look forward to learning from their expertise. Additionally, if a school offers unique resources such as specialized workshops, state-of-the-art studios, or community engagement projects that will enhance your artistic journey, include these elements in your SOP. By customizing your SOP for each school, you not only demonstrate your thorough understanding and appreciation of the program but also articulate how your artistic journey can be enriched by, and contribute to, the unique fabric of each institution.

Convey enthusiasm clearly

In the process of authoring your statement of purpose for an MFA program, a crucial element to incorporate is a clear display of your enthusiasm. It’s essential to remember that while the SOP is an academic document, it doesn’t necessarily have to be devoid of emotion. Rather, it is your opportunity to convey your passion for your art, your commitment to honing your craft, and your excitement at the prospect of joining the MFA program. An engaging, enthusiastic tone can truly make your application stand out, prompting the reviewers to envision you as an energetic, dedicated participant in their program. As demonstrate in any of our MFA statement of purpose example below, use vivid, evocative language to describe your past projects, your artistic inspirations, and your future aspirations. Highlight instances where you’ve gone beyond the call of duty in your pursuit of art—be it late-night sessions at the studio, extensive research for a project, or even a piece of art you created that deeply moved your audience. Underscore your eagerness to immerse yourself in the MFA program, the skills you wish to acquire, the faculty you’re keen on working with, and how this journey would contribute to your growth as an artist. Remember, an engaging, passionate SOP can serve as a compelling testament to your dedication, thereby making the admission committee not just consider, but want to admit you!

MFA statement of purpose example

Mfa statement of purpose example 1:.

As an artist, I have always thrived on expressing the inexplicable—translating the deepest emotions and profound experiences into captivating visual narratives that resonate with the viewer on a profound level. My unwavering passion for art was ignited during my transformative undergraduate years, where I delved into the mesmerizing power of visual storytelling and discovered the immense potential it holds. Now, with an ardent desire to further harness and nurture this power, I am excited to embark on a remarkable journey by joining the esteemed MFA program at your institution.

The allure of your program lies not only in its prestigious reputation but also in the vibrant artistic community it fosters such as X and Y. It is with great admiration that I have come across the works of Professor X, whose exploration of abstract expressionism aligns seamlessly with my personal artistic inclinations. I believe that under her expert guidance, in addition to the X and Y courses, I will have the invaluable opportunity to push the boundaries of my artistic expression, unravel new depths of creativity, and make meaningful contributions to the ever-evolving art community. Both of these courses will provide me with *** and will help me reach my artistic goals.

By immersing myself in the rich artistic discourse, collaborating with fellow passionate artists, and embracing the diverse perspectives offered by the program, I am confident that I will not only grow as an artist but also develop a profound understanding of the profound impact art can have on society. I am looking forward to joining the X, Y and Z activities, because…With an unwavering dedication to my craft and an insatiable hunger for artistic growth, I am eager to embark on this transformative journey and make a lasting mark in the world of art.

MFA statement of purpose example 2:

“Bridging the gap between digital and traditional art forms has been the relentless driving force of my artistic journey. As an enthusiastic undergraduate art student, I have consistently sought to experiment with a multitude of mediums and techniques, pushing the boundaries of creativity to create art that not only challenges the status quo but also sparks conversations.

The MFA program at XYZ University, renowned for its innovative approach and unwavering commitment to artistic excellence, presents the perfect platform for me to further deepen my understanding and expand my artistic skillset. I believe X, Y and Z will allow me to….

The potential to engage in fruitful collaborations with like-minded peers by joining X, Y and Z, as well as the invaluable opportunity to learn from distinguished faculty members such as the esteemed Professor Y, fills me with immense excitement and anticipation. I believe their expertise will help me…

Through this transformative program, I aim to create art that not only blurs the lines between the digital and the real but also captivates the audience with its unparalleled uniqueness, leaving a lasting impression and provoking thought-provoking discussions within the art community and beyond.”

MFA statement of purpose example 3:

“Art, for me, is not only a medium to engage in dialogue with society, but also a powerful tool to challenge and question existing norms, and ultimately, to invoke meaningful change. With each piece in my body of work, I strive to shed light on pressing social and environmental issues, aiming to inspire reflection, empathy, and action.

The MFA program at XYZ University represents a significant milestone in my artistic journey, as it provides the perfect platform to further refine and amplify my creative voice. The program’s interdisciplinary curriculum, coupled with its emphasis on critical thought and conceptual exploration, promises to equip me with the necessary skills and knowledge to create art that has a lasting impact. I am looking to enroll in courses Z and X because…

One aspect of the program that particularly excites me is the opportunity to work closely with Professor Z, a renowned artist known for his socially engaged art. His mentorship will not only provide invaluable guidance but also inspire me to push the boundaries of my own artistic practice. I cherish this chance to learn from a visionary in the field and am eager to absorb his wisdom and insights. I believe his expertise in **** will help me achieve X, Y, and Z.

As I embark on this immersive journey, I am filled with anticipation and enthusiasm. I am confident that through this program, I will not only create art that matters but also contribute to the ongoing societal discourse, sparking conversations and provoking thought. I am excited to make a meaningful impact through my artistic endeavors and play my part in shaping a better future for our society.”

Navigating the Complexities of Crafting an Impactful Statement of Purpose

Despite the clear and articulate vision presented in your statement of purpose, it is essential to consider the potential uncertainties that may arise. Are you confident that your artistic intent and future goals align well with the program’s objectives? Does the statement effectively capture your unique artistic approach and how it will evolve throughout your academic journey? Have you convincingly conveyed how this program is the ideal fit for your creative aspirations? Remember, the admissions committee will be reviewing countless applications, many of which will be from individuals with comparable talents and ambitions. Therefore, to stand out from the crowd, every sentence of your statement must reflect your passion, dedication, and potential for exceptional contributions to the art world. A mere oversight or misjudgment can be the difference between acceptance and rejection, with significant implications for your career and life trajectory. Therefore, it may be prudent to seek expert feedback on your statement, to ensure it represents the best version of your aspirations and abilities before submission. You wouldn’t want to leave something this important to chance, would you?

Solicit feedback from trusted individuals who can evaluate your SOP objectively. Ask them to focus on assessing the clarity of your message, the flow of your thoughts, and the overall potential of your SOP to impress the admissions committee. Encourage them to be honest in their feedback and to highlight areas where you can improve. Remember, constructive criticism can provide invaluable insights that may not be obvious to you. This step, while sometimes daunting, can essentially help refine your SOP, ensuring it truly reflects your passion, showcases your abilities, and resonates with the admissions committee.

We hope that, with the advice we’ve given, you now have a greater understanding of how to write an effective MFA statement of purpose. Remember: when you write for your master’s degree program in fine arts, be focused yet concise; demonstrate why you’re uniquely qualified but humbly aware; and use powerful language to make your point stick. If you feel that you need more help perfecting your statement for success, The Admit Lab can assist with everything from essay review to crafting original content tailored just for you. Don’t struggle alone – we are here to lighten the load and help make sure that your application packs a punch! So don’t delay – check out our graduate school application essay services and stand out among the rest of the applicants. All the best!

With a Master’s from McGill University and a Ph.D. from New York University, Dr. Philippe Barr is the founder of The Admit Lab . As a tenure-track professor, Dr. Barr spent a decade teaching and serving on several graduate admission committees at UNC-Chapel Hill before turning to full-time consulting. With more than seven years of experience as a graduate school admissions consultant, Dr. Barr has stewarded the candidate journey across multiple master’s programs and helped hundreds of students get admitted to top-tier graduate programs all over the world .

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel for weekly tutorials on navigating the graduate application process and live Q&A sessions!

Share this:

Join the conversation.

• Pingback: What's the Difference Between a Personal Statement and a Statement of Purpose? -
• Pingback: Struggling to Write Your Personal Statement? -

Leave a comment

Leave a reply cancel reply, discover more from admit lab.

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Type your email…

Continue reading

• Extended University
• UTEP Connect

You love writing fiction or poetry and want to earn an advanced degree, but how do you put together a successful application to a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program? We chatted with Sylvia Aguilar-Zéleny, MH, MFA, Director for UTEP’s Online MFA, and she helped us answer six (6) of the most frequently asked questions about getting successfully accepted into a competitive master’s in creative writing. Read on to learn more about creating a strong statement of purpose and a writing sample that demonstrates literary quality.

What is a statement of purpose for an mfa in creative writing.

The statement of purpose introduces you to the admissions committee. This is your opportunity to let them know who you are, your interests and background, and why you are pursuing an MFA.

Specifically, be sure to address why you want to be considered for that particular MFA program. Highlight what you will contribute.

The statement of purpose is not a resume or bio, but rather the qualifications you bring to the program as well as the reasons why you want to earn your degree from this program.

Sylvia Aguilar-Zéleny, MH, MFA, Associate Professor of Instruction and Director of The University of Texas at El Paso’s fully online Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing recommends doing your homework and learning about the faculty. If there is a specific faculty member that you are looking forward to working with, highlight why you are interested in working with them.                                                  

What determines literary quality in the writing sample?

A piece with literary quality inspires the reader to keep reading. That may be through captivating storytelling. Or words that paint intriguing images. Or perhaps an engaging plot where the reader must find out how the story ends.

In short, the words are chosen carefully, capturing attention from the very first sentence.

Since you’re applying to a master’s program in creative writing, you already know that you can benefit from additional education, mentoring, and practice. Your writing sample should demonstrate knowledge of the craft and will provide clues to your potential as a poet or fiction or nonfiction writer.

Resist the temptation to submit a writing sample that crosses several genres. Instead, focus on the one genre in which you feel most comfortable writing and create a strong piece that stands on its own merits. A strong MFA program will give you the opportunity to explore a variety of genres and writing styles under the guidance of experienced writers.

What genre is best for the MFA application writing sample?

Research the application requirements for each MFA in Creative Writing program before submitting your writing sample. Make sure that you are delivering a piece that aligns with that specific program’s stated goals.

For example, UTEP’s online MFA in Creative Writing is looking for fiction, nonfiction, or poetry that brings attention to social issues and the human condition. They do not work with genre-literature such as fantasy, vampires, and sci-fi unless it’s used to address social, political, or cultural issues.

If you cannot find detailed guidelines on the program website, reach out to the program contact. The more information you have as you put your application together, the better you can position yourself for consideration.

What considerations affect the committee’s decision?

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing programs accept a limited number of applicants. With multiple applicants for each spot, selection committees can afford to be choosy.

Formatting doesn’t necessarily matter, but whatever you submit should be well-edited and proofread. Don’t submit something that is clearly still undergoing revisions.

Make sure that your statement of purpose and writing sample speak to something that aligns with what the program offers. If you are applying to more than one program, it may be tempting to use the same writing sample and statement of purpose. This can severely impact your chance for being selected. In fact, your application will be more competitive if it is tailored to specific program requirements.

For letters of recommendation, ask people who know your writing, capabilities, and sense of responsibility. This may include your colleagues, former professors, and supervisors. Recommendation letters and other credentials may be used to determine whether the candidate will be able to find a balance between work, life, and the online program.

How can you increase the likelihood your application will be accepted?

UTEP’s Director for the Online MFA, Professor Aguilar-Zéleny, offers these top suggestions for MFA in Creative Writing candidates:

• Start your application early.
• Ask questions.
• Read the curriculum.
• Read the faculty bios and look for a mentor.
• If your application is not accepted, reach out and ask for feedback.

“A student who is willing to improve–that is the type of student I want in our program,” says Professor Aguilar-Zéleny. She goes on to recommend her favorite revising tool: “Share and read the statement of purpose and the writing sample out loud.”

What should you consider when choosing an MFA in Creative Writing program?

UTEP’s fully online Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing lets you earn your graduate degree from anywhere in the world. The curriculum has a strong emphasis on workshops, but there’s no residency requirement, so you can earn your master’s in creative writing from Texas without ever leaving home. And UTEP’s program is the only bilingual MFA in Creative Writing in the U.S. Classes and discussions are held in English, but creative assignments may be submitted in Spanish, allowing you to write in your native language or expand your ability.

Students come from a variety of fields, but they all share a common passion – an interest in improving their writing ability. Whether you are interested in establishing yourself as a writer or advancing your teaching career, UTEP’s online creative writing program lets you gain essential credentials without uprooting your life.

What’s Next

We invite you to explore our online program and see what it will take to make that next step into your profession. If you are interested in learning more, reach out and an enrollment counselor will contact you directly.

GET STARTED

Connect With Us

The University of Texas at El Paso Extended University UTEP Connect Online Programs 500 W University Ave. El Paso, Texas 79968

E: [email protected] P: 1-800-684-UTEP

MFA Program in Creative Writing

The Creative Writing Program offers the MFA degree, with a concentration in either poetry or fiction. MFA students pursue intensive study with distinguished faculty committed to creative and intellectual achievement.

Each year the department enrolls only eight MFA students, four in each concentration. Our small size allows us to offer a generous financial support package that fully funds every student. We also offer a large and diverse graduate faculty with competence in a wide range of literary, theoretical and cultural fields. Every student chooses a special committee of two faculty members who work closely alongside the student to design a course of study within the broad framework established by the department.

Students participate in a graduate writing workshop each semester and take six additional one-semester courses for credit, at least four of them in English or American literature, comparative literature, literature in the modern or Classical languages or cultural studies (two per semester during the first year and one per semester during the second year). First-year students receive practical training as editorial assistants for  Epoch, a periodical of prose and poetry published by the creative writing program. Second-year students participate as teaching assistants for the university-wide first-year writing program. The most significant requirement of the MFA degree is the completion of a book-length manuscript: a collection of poems or short stories, or a novel, to be closely edited and refined with the assistance of the student’s special committee.

MFA program specifics can be viewed here: MFA Timeline Procedural Guide

Special Committee

Every graduate student selects a special committee of faculty advisors who works intensively with the student in selecting courses and preparing and revising the thesis. The committee is comprised of two Cornell creative writing faculty members: a chair and one minor member. An additional member may be added to represent an interdisciplinary field. The university system of special committees allows students to design their own courses of study within a broad framework established by the department, and it encourages a close working relationship between professors and students, promoting freedom and flexibility in the pursuit of the graduate degree. The special committee for each student guides and supervises all academic work and assesses progress in a series of meetings with the students.

At Cornell, teaching is considered an integral part of training for a career in writing. The field requires a carefully supervised teaching experience of at least one year for every MFA candidate as part of the program requirements. The Department of English, in conjunction with the First-Year Writing Program, offers excellent training for beginning teachers and varied and interesting teaching in this university-wide program. These are not conventional freshman composition courses, but full-fledged academic seminars, often designed by graduate students themselves. The courses are writing-intensive and may fall under such general rubrics as “Portraits of the Self,” “American Literature and Culture,” “Shakespeare” and “Cultural Studies,” among others. A graduate student may also serve as a teaching assistant for an undergraduate lecture course taught by a member of the Department of Literatures in English faculty.

All MFA degree candidates are guaranteed two years of funding (including a stipend , a full tuition fellowship and student health insurance).

• Graduate Assistantship with EPOCH . Students read submissions, plan special issues and assume other editorial and administrative responsibilities.
• Summer Teaching Assistantship, linked to a teachers' training program. Summer residency in Ithaca is required.
• Teaching Assistantship
• Summer Fellowship (made possible by the David L. Picket ’84 Fund and The James McConkey Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing Award for Summer Support, established by his enduringly grateful student, Len Edelstein ’59)

Optional MFA Lecturer Appointments Degree recipients who are actively seeking outside funding/employment are eligible to apply to teach for one or two years as a lecturer. These positions are made possible by an endowment established by the late Philip H. Freund ’29 and a bequest from the Truman Capote Literary Trust.

Admission & Application Procedures

The application for Fall 2025 admission will open on September 15, 2024 and will close on December 1, 2024 at 11:59pm EST. Please note that staff support is available M-F 9am-4pm.

Eligibility : Applicants must currently have, or expect to have, at least a BA or BS (or the equivalent) in any field before matriculation. International students, please verify degree equivalency here . Applicants are not required to take the GRE test or meet a specified GPA minimum.

To Apply:  All applications and supplemental materials must be submitted on-line through the Graduate School application system . While completing your application, you may save and edit your data. Once you click “submit,” your application will be closed for changes. Please proofread your materials carefully. Once you pay and click submit, you will not be able to make any changes or revisions.

DEADLINE: Dec. 1, 11:59 p.m. EST . This deadline is firm. No applications, additional materials or revisions will be accepted after the deadline.

MFA Program Application Requirements Checklist

• Academic Statement of Purpose Please use the Academic Statement of Purpose to describe, within 1000 words: (1) your academic interests, (2) your academic background, preparation, and training, including any relevant professional experiences, (3) your reasons for pursuing graduate studies in this specific program, and (4) your professional goals.
• Personal Statement Your Personal Statement should provide the admissions committee with a sense of you as a whole person, and you should use it to describe how your background and experiences influenced your decision to pursue a graduate degree. Additionally, it should provide insight into your potential to contribute to a community of inclusion, belonging, and respect where scholars representing diverse backgrounds, perspectives, abilities, and experiences can learn and work productively and positively together. Writing your Personal Statement provides you with an opportunity to share experiences that provide insights into how your personal, academic, and/or professional experiences demonstrate your ability to be both persistent and resilient, especially when navigating challenging circumstances. The statement also allows you to provide examples of how you engage with others and have facilitated and/or participated in productive collaborative endeavors. Additionally, it provides you with an opportunity to provide context around any perceived gaps or weaknesses in your academic record. Content in the Personal Statement should complement rather than duplicate the content contained within the Academic Statement of Purpose, which should focus explicitly on your academic interests, previous research experience, and intended area of research during your graduate studies. A complete writing prompt is available in the application portal.
• Three Letters of Recommendation Please select three people who best know you and your work. Submitting additional letters will not enhance your application. In the recommendation section of the application, you must include the email address of each recommender. After you save the information (and before you pay/submit), the application system will automatically generate a recommendation request email to your recommender with instructions for submitting the letter electronically. If your letters are stored with a credential service such as Interfolio, please use their “online application delivery” feature and input the email address assigned to your stored document, rather than that of your recommender’s. The electronic files will be attached to your application when they are received and will not require the letter of recommendation cover page. Please do not postpone submitting your application while waiting for us to receive all three of your letters.  For more information please visit the Graduate School's page on preparing letters of recommendations .
• Transcripts Scan transcripts from each institution you have attended, or are currently attending, and upload into the academic information section of the application. Be sure to remove your social security number from all documents prior to scanning. Please do not send paper copies of your transcripts. If you are subsequently admitted and accept, the graduate school will require an official paper transcript from your degree-awarding institution prior to matriculation.
• English Language Proficiency Requirement All applicants must provide proof of English language proficiency. For more information, please view the  Graduate School’s English Language Requirement .
• Fiction applicants:  Your sample must be between 6,000 and 10,000 words, typed, double-spaced, in a conventional 12- or 14-point font. It may be an excerpt from a larger work or a combination of several works.
• Poetry applicants:  Your sample must be 10 pages in length and include a combination of several poems, where possible.

General Information for All Applicants

Application Fee: Visit the  Graduate School for information regarding application fees , payment options, and fee waivers . Please do not send inquires regarding fee waivers.

Document Identification: Please do not put your social security number on any documents.

Status Inquiries:  Once you submit your application, you will receive a confirmation email. You will also be able to check the completion status of your application in your account. If vital sections of your application are missing, we will notify you via email after the Dec. 1 deadline and allow you ample time to provide the missing materials. Please do not inquire about the status of your application.

Credential/Application Assessments:  The admission review committee members are unable to review application materials or applicant credentials prior to official application submission. Once the committee has reviewed the applications and made admissions decisions, they will not discuss the results or make any recommendations for improving the strength of an applicant’s credentials. Applicants looking for feedback are advised to consult with their undergraduate advisor or someone else who knows them and their work.

Review Process:  Application review begins after the submission deadline. Notification of admissions decisions will be made by email or by telephone by the end of February.

Connecting with Faculty and/or Students: Unfortunately, due to the volume of inquiries we receive, faculty and current students are not available to correspond with potential applicants prior to an offer of admission. Applicants who are offered admission will have the opportunity to meet faculty and students to have their questions answered prior to accepting. Staff and faculty are also not able to pre-assess potential applicant’s work outside of the formal application process. Please email [email protected] instead, if you have questions.

Visiting: The department does not offer pre-admission visits or interviews. Admitted applicants will be invited to visit the department, attend graduate seminars and meet with faculty and students before making the decision to enroll.

Transfer Credits: Transfer credits are not available toward the MFA program.

Admissions FAQ

For Further Information

Contact [email protected]

MFA in Creative Writing Graduation Readings

Columns > Published on April 17th, 2012

Honey, I Shrunk the MFA Application Pile: Crafting Your Statement of Purpose

Every place you submit, you can usually sample what they publish. Just to get a feel for what works there, what doesn’t—whether the current editorial tastes veer toward the gory and in your face or seem to be more in keeping with first-person first-kiss kind of stories. And this goes beyond publishing: before you apply for a job you can cruise the aisles of the store, see if people are slicking their hair back and covering their tattoos. And, if you want the job, you take their lead, you fall in. You need that check. It even works with whoever you’re looking to shack up with: stalk their ex, use them as both a model and a cautionary tale.

MFA applications, though. As far as I know, there’s no way for an applicant to page through fifty or a hundred of those, see what your competition’s doing. See what they’re over doing, so you can do something different. You can track people you know who are applying, sure, and chances are you may have even helped them with their writing samples somewhere along the way, and they’ll tell you their GPA and GRE if you want, because who cares, none of that means you can or can’t write. But, just keeping up with two or three people’s acceptances, and trying to associate that with your estimation of the actual quality of their writing sample, of their talent as compared to yours—it’s not going to help you that much, finally.

Where you need to look, it’s their Statement of Purpose, their Statement of Intent—the cover letter to their whole application. However, the way you need to look at those Statements, at least if you hope to adjust yours accordingly, it’s not just one or two or three at a time. You need to look at them the way the writing professors who are reading them are going to be looking at them. Which is to say en serious masse. In a slushpile. And, chances are you’ve worked one or two of those, yes? Then you know. You don’t dive in looking for gold. You dive in looking for reasons to reject, the idea being that, once the obvious losers have been removed, only the gold will remain.

Reading through two or three hundred MFA application Statements, however, the only way I know to (get to) do that’s to have no choice. To have to do it. Even though all this new genre awareness you’re gleaning—and it is a genre—it’s pretty useless to you now, as you’re obviously not ever going to be in that slushpile again. Well, it’s useless unless of course you can pass it on, so as to maybe, possibly make next year’s application reading better.

So, in hopes of that better tomorrow, here’s ten things to keep in mind, next time:

1. "It All Started Here" is Not the Place to Start

There seem to be an endless series of variations on the “When I was a kid” openings: I always knew I was writer ; I found my fifth-grade journal the other day ; I fell in love with stories at a young age ; Writing is the only thing that’s ever felt right to me ; I come from a family of liars . At one time, these all had to have been new and effective, or new-ish and effective- ish , anyway. Now, however, there’s nothing left but fatigue. This is what everybody’s saying, so just assume that we’re going to be assuming that when you were a kid you always knew you were a writer because you fell in love with stories because your family’s always telling them. Cool? And, what tends to work better is to talk about writing, then plug yourself into that discussion at some opportune, quiet moment.

2. People Don't Care About Your Life Story as Much as You Think

Your condensed autobiography isn’t nearly as vital as you might think it is. Granted, it’s probably interesting to people at the bar or at the gym that you were kicked out of monastery, that you once fought an alligator to a standstill, that you can count to five hundred in your head, in Aramaic, that you started a trivia-group for Friends . Good: you’re interesting. Also: we don’t care. What we’re looking for is the content of your mind , articulated well, not the content of your life. Or, the idea, I guess it’s that the content of your life, it colors everything you put on the page. Let us get it through your writing sample, then, yes? Another way to look at this is if you build yourself up as too interesting in your Statement, then you better have some just very interesting stories in your sample. And that’s a gamble you might not want to take.

3. Proofread Like Your Career Depends on it

The easiest rejections, they’re those Statements where there’s a typo or mechanical error or grammar issue or formatting jack-up. Because that’s our first impression of you: that you’re sloppy, that you don’t re-read—that you don’t care, that the details don’t matter, you’re moving too fast for that. Well, so are we. And the rest of your application, it’s looking a lot like details . . .

4. Sycophancy is Your Friend

Just like when submitting a magazine, mentioning our names, yes, it’s the cheapest, most obvious and wheedling tactic there is. But it works. Seeing our name and a title or two of ours in your Statement, even if it’s nothing incisive or particular, still, at the very least it shows that this isn’t one Statement, printed twenty times. It suggests you cared enough to individualize. To target. And we tend to repay that kind of chicanery—better, we even identify with that kind of chicanery, and sympathize with you, having to use it. And, man, right there, we're already starting to be on your side.

5. PDFs Read Differently than Paper 

Used to, all the applications were in some sort of crazy pile of folders, and the folders were in boxes or some central location, and there were papers and paper clips and bad copies and worse sorting and endless headaches. Now, it’s all PDF. Which is a lot easier to tote around, yes. But be aware of how a PDF changes the game, too. Used to, when we got to your writing sample, we could page ahead while keeping our place, see where this portion of the sample ended. Now that’s much more difficult. So, those applicants who thought to thumbnail a little barebones Table of Contents top-center on the cover page of their writing sample? Thank you. This helps tremendously . Makes me feel like I owe you, even.

6. Novel Chapters are Not  Your Friend

Talking writing samples, sure, John Barth was right: some people sprint, some have a longer stride, a slower pace. Some write complete stories on cocktail napkins, some think in epic trilogies. And, not to privilege the sprinters overmuch, but if your writing sample’s chunked up, if you’re giving us two or three pieces instead of an out-of-context excerpt from a novel, then we can see both how you open and how you close, not just the high quality of your prose. And being able to open and close, that matters a lot. Anybody can write a solid novel chapter. Not everybody can tell a whole story in fifteen-hundred words. Short pieces work better in writing samples than long pieces. It’s not fair, but I hope nobody told you it was going to be.

7. The "Sans" in "Sans-serif' Means "Without You " 

This should go without saying, but, the files you upload to the school’s server, either as PDF or to get converted along the way—is it possible you could please please please use a serif font? Peeling through twenty-five pages of fiction in Arial is an exercise in pain, for us. And, we reward accordingly. It seems shallow to let something like font guide our decisions, yes. But, when everybody in the applicant pool’s good, then you select by what you can. You get the luxury of being picky.

8.  Pretend   not to be Ambidextrous?

Understand that if you’re applying to two genres, if you’re trying to sell yourself as a fiction-writer/poet, a memoirist/fiction-writer—and all the rest of the possible combinations—then you’re already hurting your chances. Not because we don’t trust that people can do both, but because you’re gambling on having risen to the top of two different sets of professors’ stacks. When even rising to the top of one set of professors’ stacks of applications is rare and difficult. Rising to two , though? Not even remotely likely. What you’ve done by cross-genre’ing yourself is make it easy for us to sacrifice your app, to ‘trade’ it for somebody we know will be all ours. So, fake it: ‘commit’ to the genre you think you represent the best in, then lay the two-genre thing on us when you get here, when there’s nothing we can do about it.

9. This Page is Made for Turning

Your Statement is really a cover letter. Meaning you want to summarize the rest of your application. You want to plant hooks there (“3.98 GPA? Seriously?”; “Is in Best American -what?”; “Has a letter from which  big-time so-and-so?”) that get us to turn the page, actually read your transcript or CV or letters of reference. Instead of just skim, yes. We should be better people and start early, peel through, pore over, reread, think it over, come back later. But come on. MFA apps are a flood every year, like somebody’s dynamited the dam. There’s no time to be a good person. We just have to hope that the good people—you—will float to the surface long enough for us to see you. So, rig your statement so we’ll see you as you want to be seen. Never trust us to look deeper on our own.

10. Short and Direct, Like You're Robbing a Convenience Store

Two pages, tops. And that’s double-spaced. Those Statements that sprawl on for four or five single-spaced treatises on The Life and Times of Applicant X, and Associated Childhood Pets? They’re often well-written, and show exuberance. But they’re such a chore, and usually wind up just trying to be clever, and clever, it’s the bane of these Statements. How to actually be clever? Don’t try. Just be yourself. Hopefully you’ve got a natural wit, a pleasant disposition, a facility with words, and can, in five- or six-hundred words, intimate to us that you understand how fiction works. Intimate—show, don’t tell—that you’ve got the stories inside you, and always have. You just need us to help you be a better writer than you already amazingly are. That, we can sometimes do that. Especially if we feel that all you need is one good nudge to go superstar.

All pretty grim, yes? All the same, every year, in spite of typos, of lost transcripts, of letters of reference a month late, still, every April another Rocky runs up those stairs, hands in the air, eyes closed in joy, the whole future laid out for the taking. It happens again and again and again. And, whatever our selection process has been, however arbitrary or fraught with hope, however difficult and random and laden with guilt, when you show up in the fall, when we’ve almost definitely forgot your writing sample, to say nothing of your GRE or GPA, every fall, seeing you in the seminar room, your lips bitten in like you’re about to not believe even one word we’re going to be laying on you, we know that something must be working. That we got the writers we wanted. We got the best. Hopefully you feel some of that as well.

About the author

Stephen Graham Jones has ten novels and more than a hundred and thirty short stories published, and has been teaching fiction for twelve years. 2012 will see at least two more novels from him, then at least one in 2013 and one in 2014, he says, "should the world not have ended by then."

Stephen Graham Jones' recent few books are Zombie Bake-Off ,  Seven Spanish Angels , It Came from Del Rio , and the Stoker finalist The Ones That Got Away . Next are Growing up Dead in Texas (MP Publishing), Flushboy  (Dzanc), and Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth (Lazy Fascist) . The last few anthologies he's in are The Weird , Amazing Stories of the Flying Spaghetti Monster , Creatures , and West of 98 . Jones teaches in the MFA program at CU Boulder . More at http://demontheory.net .

Similar Columns

Explore other columns from across the blog.

Book Brawl: Geek Love vs. Water for Elephants

In Book Brawl, two books that are somehow related will get in the ring and fight it out for the coveted honor of being declared literary champion. Two books enter. One book leaves. This month,...

The 10 Best Sci-Fi Books That Should Be Box Office Blockbusters

It seems as if Hollywood is entirely bereft of fresh material. Next year, three different live-action Snow White films will be released in the States. Disney is still terrorizing audiences with t...

Books Without Borders: Life after Liquidation

Though many true book enthusiasts, particularly in the Northwest where locally owned retailers are more common than paperback novels with Fabio on the cover, would never have set foot in a mega-c...

From Silk Purses to Sows’ Ears

Photo via Freeimages.com Moviegoers whose taste in cinema consists entirely of keeping up with the Joneses, or if they’re confident in their ignorance, being the Joneses - the middlebrow, the ...

Cliche, the Literary Default

Original Photo by Gerhard Lipold As writers, we’re constantly told to avoid the cliché. MFA programs in particular indoctrinate an almost Pavlovian shock response against it; workshops in...

A Recap Of... The Wicked Universe

Out of Oz marks Gregory Maguire’s fourth and final book in the series beginning with his brilliant, beloved Wicked. Maguire’s Wicked universe is richly complex, politically contentious, and fille...

Submitting your manuscript?

Professional editors help your manuscript stand out for the right reasons.

1 million authors trust the professionals on Reedsy. Come meet them.

Statement of Purpose Examples

Successful statements of purpose to help you write your own.

A Statement of Purpose for a Masters of Fine Arts program is perhaps the most difficult Statement of Purpose to write.  Like your writing sample, your Statement will be scrutinized.  But an MFA Statement of Purpose is also the type of Statement that allows for the most risk-taking.  Successful MFA Statement of Purpose essays often read like artist statements and are very creative.  Do not fall into the trap of only worrying about the creative aspects, though.  Your MFA Statement of Purpose still needs to demonstrate an element of thoughtfulness and groundedness that indicate an understanding of the endeavor being taken on.

Because the MFA is a terminal degree, you will especially want to include what you plan to do with your degree.  Do you plan to teach? Write? Every program has its own strengths.  Some programs are well know for their MFA in writing, while others for their MFA in installation art.  Be sure you know the strengths of the department to which you are applying, and include that information in your MFA Statement of Purpose.

MFA Statement of Purpose Examples:

1. I Write. (Poetry)

{Need more help with your MFA Statement of Purpose? Check out our ebook Hacking Your Statement of Purpose for a concise guide to writing and revising your Statement of Purpose.}

You are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser or activate Google Chrome Frame to improve your experience.

Begin typing your search above and press return to search. Press Esc to cancel.

The Graduate Blog, Columbia College Chicago

A Comprehensive Breakdown of My Statement of Purpose

As deadlines for applying to an MFA program approach, I want to share tips that will save you time when writing your Statement of Purpose, using my own SOP as an example. This is the time to show off your dynamic creative range outside of your specialized craft. My SOP was geared towards a creative writing MFA, but a lot of the concepts can be applied to any program you apply to. Check out my breakdown below:

Most SOPs are 700 words or less, so brevity is very important. In two sentences, I gave a general understanding of my life before applying to the MFA program. In the next three sentences, I tied that story to writing and how writing has transformed my life to what it is now, which, in turn, explains why I am investing time and energy into getting an MFA. Poet and Creative Writing professor at Mississippi University for Women, Kendall Dunkelburg says: “Keep it brief and to the point but do give some information about where you’re coming from. Remember that your focus should always be to convince the program that you are ready to take on graduate work in creative writing.”

One technique I personally chose to include was selecting a theme that would permeate throughout the whole SOP. The theme I centered around was community .

Tips for writing your opening paragraph

• Keep the description of your past brief. Only include the parts that inspired you to write.
• Remember to tie in your purpose for applying for an MFA.
• Don’t talking about how, as a child, you loved to write (Cathy Day, Author and Creative Writing professor at Ball State University).

In the second paragraph, I delved deeper into the theme that I chose. In the first sentence, I spoke authentically about what community is to me and why I value it. I then transitioned into the kind of writing I want to pursue in the program by introducing a novel idea I had. If you do not have a novel idea, short story idea, poetry collection idea, etc., you do not have to come up with one on the fly. You could use this section to talk about the writing you are interested in doing. I only added my novel idea because (1) it was pre-thought out before applying to grad school and (2) because I wanted to give the admissions committee some insight into my writing, the genre I was interested in, and my creative depth as a writer.

In the third paragraph, I introduced a fallacy that I identified within myself as it pertains to writing: thoughts of inadequacy. My intent was to show humility as well as reaffirm my reasons for continuing to pursue writing as a career. Although I introduced a flaw unveiled from my own insecurities, I have a practice that aids with censoring those thoughts, unlocking my potential onto the page. My purpose for adding this was to show the admissions committee that I know I am not perfect, in fact, I have doubts about how my writing is perceived by others, but I am still willing to persevere, even when faced with these thoughts of inadequacy.

The fourth paragraph was probably the most important paragraph for me because it delved into the writers that inspired me as well as a faculty member I’ve acknowledged I wanted to study under. Kyle G. Dargan, director of the MFA program in creative writing at American University, states: “Writers are readers first and foremost. One comes to an MFA program seeking a literary community, and one of the clearest ways of assessing what kind of literary community member an applicant will be is to get a sense of how and why she or he reads.”

In conjunction with the writers who’ve inspired me, I added a TENURED professor whose work I’ve read and intrigued me enough to want to apply to the program. I emphasized “tenured” because those are the professors that are most likely on admissions committee. Ideally, the professor you’ve reached out to and spoke one-on-one with is the professor you want to choose to write about in your SOP. Reading the work of the professor is important because it will allow you to speak articulately about it in your SOP.

Tips for writing your fourth paragraph

• Have a reason for the authors you chose as inspiration. Try not to choose a generic reason why. Be as specific as possible.
• Use that same philosophy when writing about the professor you would like to work with at the university. If I could go back, I would have chosen two professors and written about them both.
• Bring it back to what you want to gain from the program. Having that clear vision will translate well to the admissions committee.
• Try not to choose authors that are widely known. It shows you are more widely read when choosing authors that were not born a century before you were.

This is it: the conclusion paragraph. The crescendo. The au revoir. This section should tie together everything you’ve talked about in the previous paragraphs. For me, I brought back the idea of community and how certain characters/authors growing up played a major part in my love for literature and writing. Personally, I like to make my conclusion paragraph very metaphorical like. I also leaned on my unique identity as it pertains to an MFA program (as you should as well). Most people in a creative writing program are usually white, heterosexual, men, which makes sense because that demographic of people dominate the writing industry. If you have even the slightest deviation from this, you should include it in the introduction paragraph and then reinforce it in the conclusion paragraph.

Tips for writing your conclusion paragraph (from DLA Editors & Proofers)

• Avoid stating that it is your conclusion.
• Avoid introducing an entirely new concept.
• Be specific in details.

The Writer's Pocket Guide

The Writer's Pocket Guide | The Pocket MFA

In-depth craft guides for serious writers

MFA Applications III: The Writing Sample

The writing sample matters. Know what to send, what not to send, when to send it, and for whom to ask for help. Read this guide—the competition is stiff.

Also known as The Only Thing That Really Matters in an MFA application, the writing sample is where you should be putting all your creative energy. It should represent your best work. But can it actually be made better in the few months leading up to application deadlines?

With MFA admissions folks, it’s more about seeking out and recognizing potential, rather than about expecting perfectly polished work. There’s got to be something at the heart of the work that’s purely you and speaks to the latent powers of the Future You after two or three years of intensive schooling.

But make no mistake, it’s got to be good. Competition will be stiff.

This guide in the MFA Applications series is a particularly tough one, because the writing sample is the most important piece of your package—yet it’s also the most personal. So what advice can I give you? Gleaned from personal experience, instructors, professors, articles, and program directors, here’s a shortlist of things to keep in mind.

Quality, not Quantity

Don’t push the 40-page limit if you have an absolutely clean 20 pager that you love. Or a 15-pager, for that matter. The risk is that a more mediocre second writing sample might let the air out of your transcendent shorter piece.

Receiving Rejection

You may only get into a few schools, or you may get into none, but don’t take it personally, and don’t give up on your writing. After you reach a certain level of competence, the admissions process is more a question of taste rather than a lack or abundance of technical skill. In other words, a work may be great, but not up the reader’s alley. All things being equal, admissions readers (like all first-line-of-defense readers) are going to recommend a piece they love, rather than a technically-proficient piece that doesn’t make a personal imprint.

The Importance of Feedback Pay for it if you can afford it, as long as the reader is someone you trust, or try to get it for free from friends, but good God, man, don’t submit without at least a second pair of eyes giving it a once-over. And not just for typos, but for content, flow, thematic power, characterization. Misplaced commas or misspelled words can be a huge irritant, but it may not be a deal killer if you’re the second coming of Michael Chabon. Stories that don’t make sense, or lack well-rendered characters, are a different case all together. In addition to yours truly , there are a number of people and consultancies that provide reading services—just ask Google. If you can...

Solicit feedback from someone whose sensibilities are similar to yours—someone whose suggestions consistently hit the mark without interfering with your story's intent.

This is very important. You don’t want the edits to change the core of your story, its meaning, the thing that makes it important to you. You’ll feel bad about submitting it, and if you don’t get in, you’ll always wonder if it’s because you sold out on the advice of someone you didn’t trust, whose instincts were different from your own.

Following Rules

This one was easy for me, being the anal retentive, OCD, rule-follower that I am. 40 pages means 40 pages. Times New Roman means – guess what - Times New Roman, not Courier. Paperclips don’t mean staples.

Pretty Words—Meh

Some, maybe many, maybe all, admissions readers aren’t content with beautiful passages and evocative descriptions. You need to strike an emotional chord. Magazine readers, agents, and editors say the same; in order to grab your reader, the work has to speak from deep inside your heart. Evocative and emotional resonance is important to demonstrate—because it’s harder to teach than the purely technical stuff. If you can come in with a unique voice and gutsy, emotional chops, someone's going to like you.

MFAs as Readers

It's true. Most—but not all —schools employ their currently enrolled students for a first pass at the appallingly-named "slush pile." I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Maybe some good stuff slips through. Or, one positive aspect of this process may be that the reader on the other side may not be too different than you. You’re relatively new to writing, and you’ve recently discovered you want to do it for a living. Your first-round audience may be, in fact, very much like you, therefore making your work more "relatable." But you and I know relatability is itself a fiction. No two MFAs are the same. Oh well. Either way, it is what it is.

Don’t Write Only for an Admissions Audience

That said, it’s not wise to write purposely for your audience, unless it’s true to your personal style. Don’t pretend to be dark because the director has a reputation for loving literary horror. Don’t keep it short only because a faculty member is a pioneer of flash fiction. And certainly don’t riff on styles of notable alumni only because you think it’ll catch their eye.

Write stuff that means something to you.

You can’t fake a love for your work, nor can you imitate someone else’s style with the same panache with which you deliver your own. And every reader is on the hunt for a sample that’s fun to read, beautifully and meaningfully rendered, and unique to you as a candidate.

Above all, I recommend getting on it ASAP. You need time to draft, edit, rewrite, get feedback, and repeat as necessary. You’ll want to plan ahead out of consideration for your readers, too. Don't ask your supporters to move mountains only because you’re procrastinating, you’ve lost track of time, or because you planned poorly. This is especially true if you’re asking the help of your busy friends on a pro bono basis.

Story coaches can get expensive, so if you’re going down the professional route, you’ll want to give the coach a clean draft, give her time to respond, and work out a revision schedule so she can comment on a second draft. Then when application deadlines start coming round, you can complete a final draft based on a couple rounds of feedback, at least. If you want to do more than a couple of major rewrites, you’ll need to pull the entire schedule in by a few weeks or months, depending on how quickly you can produce. Personally, I'm a slow writer, so I'd err on the side of more, rather than less, time. Once you lay out the schedule, it may appear to you that time is running out. And you would be correct.

It’s time to get serious!

Need help? We've been through it too!

Recent Posts

MFA Applications IV: The Personal Statement

MFA Applications II: Planning

MFA Applications I: Researching Schools

5 Uncommon Tips on Your MFA Creative Writing Application

A couple of years ago, I made the decision to apply to MFA programs in creative writing. Compared to medical school or law school, the application process for an MFA can sometimes feel like a crapshoot, with the odds of getting into a fully-funded program hovering somewhere below four or five percent (and some programs like Iowa, Michigan, Michener—gulp—even less!). Still, it seems that every year, a few applicants manage to get admitted to a handful of programs, which brings up the question of whether the process is as random as one might initially think.

As a caveat, I’ve never served as a reader for any programs’ admissions committee (for a genuine insider look, follow Elizabeth McCracken’s twitter and listen to everything she says!), but I happen to have been lucky enough to get accepted to several fully funded schools on my first try. Whenever someone asks me for advice, I get a little queasy, because I barely knew what I was doing back then. However, I’d like to think that I’ve had some time to reflect on the process and have spoken to many people, including students who’ve been accepted and faculty members. I’ve since graduated from my MFA and hold (at the time of writing) a Zell postgraduate fellowship in fiction at the University of Michigan.

I’ll skip the general consensus—polish the writing sample, apply to more than one school, get feedback on your materials, etc. Instead, I’ll offer some less common ones that I thought worked for me. I hope they help with your application, and I’m certainly indebted to many writers who came before me and similarly shed light on their own experiences.

• Presenting yourself . Most of us writers tend to dislike being pigeonholed, or to accept the idea that there are certain themes or styles we keep reverting to again and again.  I definitely struggled with this (and continue to) but for the application process, presenting ourselves in a way that is unified and meaningful can sometimes spell the difference between sticking out in the pile or not. I write a lot about the Philippines, where I grew up, and this location not only influences the setting of my stories, but also informs my thematic sensibility as well as my identity. My personal statement talked about my background growing up in a predominantly Christian and Chinese-Filipino family, the conflicts at the dinner table as a result of our ethnic and religious upbringing, and how these issues are explored in my work. My fiction samples were chosen with this in mind (of course, they also happened to be my best work at the time), and I imagine my recommendation letters further attested to my experience as an immigrant. As a result, I believe I demonstrated myself as someone who deeply cares about what I write and has something important to say about the world around me. A place or region might not be the element that binds your application materials together. It might be a style, philosophy, or occupation—but whatever it is, it should resonate meaningfully in all aspects of your work (you can even ask your recommenders to talk about it). If readers can come away with the feeling that they know you and what motivates you to write, then you only need to show that you also can write.
• Range and length of sample . This might sound like a contradiction to the above, but it really isn’t. Rather, this is the part where you get a chance to display your skill and flexibility as a writer. For my sample, I chose three stories with varying styles: fabulist, comedic, and straight realist. They also differed in their lengths: short, medium, and long. What kept them all together was the setting of the Philippines, which again referred back to my personal statement and kept them from feeling haphazardly chosen. You might wonder if this is a good idea, since schools often just ask for 25 to 30 pages of creative sample, and might even say something to the effect that they’re looking for “a demonstration of sustained, quality work.” I debated with myself on the correct approach, and you might not agree with my conclusions: If programs clearly ask for just a single story, and if they feel more traditional in their aesthetics, then perhaps sending a longer story is better. However, the risk of sending one story is the risk of increasing subjectivity, and has to do more with the practical reality of the selection process than anything else. We all know that readers have different tastes, and if for some reason they don’t connect with the first few pages of your work, they most likely won’t read on. If you present them with a shorter work first, they might be willing to read the beginning of the second story, and if they still don’t like that, then the third. If each story is different stylistically, you’re increasing the chances that one of these would be appealing to the readers, and they might reconsider the stories that they passed on the first read.
• Potential . I’ve heard anecdotes of applicants being turned down because the admission committee thought they were “overqualified” to be studying in an MFA program. This probably doesn’t apply to most of us, but the principle remains: administrators are looking for people they believe can get something out of the two-to-three-year experience. In other words, they’re looking for writers’ potential as much as writers’ ability. I can certainly speak to this. When I applied, I’d barely taken any creative writing workshops. I’d just started writing literary fiction and I was unpublished. I took screenwriting as an undergrad (a related field, I know) but I still emphasized the things I anticipated learning from an MFA, including the benefit of being in a community. I did not downplay my background in screenwriting (and as it happened, also journalism), but I was able to articulate how each tradition influenced me as a writer. You might be someone who’s majored in creative writing as an undergrad and knew for a long time that you want to write literary fiction. That’s okay (in fact I think that’s great!). But you still have to find a way to communicate your limitations while playing to your strengths. To a large extent, it seems to me more of an attitude check: nobody wants to be with the writer who feels privileged and entitled to a seat at the MFA table.
• Preparedness . Sometimes, perhaps because I got in on my first try, I wonder if my acceptance was a fluke, and if I was really ready for the MFA experience. Of course, I’ve heard many people who felt similarly, some who even have a lot of creative writing background under their belt. The impostor syndrome aside, I do think that it’s good to gain as much exposure to the literary world as possible before applying to an MFA program. This not only gives you a better sense of why you write and what you write (going back to my first point), but moreover it increases the likelihood that once you are accepted, you’ll know how to make the most out of your time and the resources being offered. I had a wonderful experience at the University of Michigan—indeed, I’ve never read or written more in my life than I did at that point, and I could not have asked for a better set of cohort or mentors. I have grown exponentially as a writer. Rightly or wrongly, though, I did consciously set myself apart as someone who was a beginner, who had the most to learn about writing literary fiction. This attitude has enabled me to develop in leaps and bounds. At the same time, I could see how—had I been further along in my progress—I could’ve used the MFA in a different way: writing that novel I’ve always wanted, giving more thought to the direction of my career, the business side of the industry, finding an agent, etc. I think there’s something valiant and admirable about finding yourself as a result of experimenting during the MFA years, but it might also be worth considering and being aware of the different trajectories in entering a program. As a suggestion for preparing yourself pre-MFA-application, I highly suggest going to a conference (the Napa Writers’ Conference, Wesleyan Writers Conference, and the Key West Literary Seminar being some of the more well-known ones I’ve personally attended and recommend).
• On success . My final note on the application process is less of a tip and more of a reminder. When the time comes around to February or March, and should you find yourself not getting into the programs of your choice, recuperate from the rejections and take them in stride. View the result both as a sobering reminder of the odds stacked up against anyone applying for an MFA, and also as an opportunity to become better prepared, so that if you do get in later, you will be in an improved position. Similarly, should you be fortunate enough to get into your top programs, view the achievement as the means to an end, and not the end in itself. If a study were to be conducted on MFA admittances, I’m almost sure that the findings would show that acceptances to programs are in no way predictive of future success in publishing. Only diligence and perseverance are positive indicators of writerly success, and in this sense, we all can take comfort in the fact that all of us have a fair shot if we’re in it for the long haul.

Image: The Hopwood Room, where some workshops are held at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, University of Michigan.

Related Posts

You are what you eat., 1 thought on “5 uncommon tips on your mfa creative writing application”.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this post. It’s exactly what I dd in my sample. Anyone who wants to see real successful samples of statements of purpose should read this post: 10 Statement Of Purpose Examples: How To Wow The Admission Committees Of Fully-Funded MFA Programs (Guide + Samples +Tips) https://www.creativewritingnews.com/statement-of-purpose-examples-2/

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

• Graduate Studies
• MFA in Creative Writing and Environment

MFA Application Guidelines

How to apply.

Thank you for your interest in applying to the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University.  Below you will find basic information about required application materials along with some tips about how to prepare your writing samples.  We hope this information is helpful, and we look forward to reading your application.

Complete Application Guidelines : Please visit the following page for links to relevant application upload websites and for complete application guidelines: How to Apply .

MFA TEACHING ASSISTANTSHIP SUPPORT

We make every effort to offer assistantship support to all the students admitted to the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment.  At present, starting half-time 20 hours per week teaching assistantships for MFA students total $19,675 ($1,967) paid out over 10 months from Aug 16 through May 15).  Teaching assistants with half-time assistantships also receive a full tuition waiver scholarship (approximate value $10,140) and health insurance coverage.

The teaching load for teaching assistants is four classes a year (2 classes per semester), teaching in the ISUComm Foundation Courses or Speech Communication programs. Teaching assistants receive excellent preparatory training to support their teaching from the directors of these teaching programs. They are carefully mentored during their first year of teaching.

Other Support: The MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment is home to the Pearl Hogrefe Fellowship in Creative Writing. Click here for more information.

APPLICATION DEADLINE

January 5 is the single application deadline for admission consideration for entry the following academic year (beginning fall term).

WHAT YOU WILL NEED TO APPLY

Application Requirements and Instructions All of the following materials are required for your application to be complete and must be uploaded electronically via the Iowa State University Office of Admissions online application system:

• Online Graduate Application (and application fee)

Statement of Purpose

• Curriculum Vitae/Resume

Creative Writing Sample

• Expository Writing Sample
• Three Letters of Recommendation
• Scanned Official Transcripts and degree statements
• Hogrefe Fellowship Application Form, if applicable
• Teaching Assistantship Application if applying for a teaching assistantship (see additional instructions on the English Department’s How To Apply website)
• English proficiency official examination scores sent directly to ISU by the testing agency for TOEFL/IELTS/PTE/Duolingo (upload unofficial scores to your application account)
• Audio or video file to demonstrate competence in spoken English

Portfolio Requirements

In 750-1000 words, discuss how the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment would further your academic, artistic, and professional goals (leave the actual admission application form blank where it requests a 500-word statement of purpose). Consider addressing some of the following in your Statement of Purpose:

• Fieldwork experiences in natural or urban landscapes that have influenced your practice and/or aesthetic as a writer;
• Writers or currents of environmental thought that have influenced your work;
• Issues of place, landscape, the natural world, or environment with which your work engages;
• Organizations you’ve worked with or activities you’ve completed that are related to ecological or environmental issues;
• Creative projects with an environmental dimension that you have started or anticipate writing while in the program.

Be sure to include education (academic degrees, programs of study, educational institutions), work history (including teaching and editing experience, if applicable), and publications, productions, exhibits, honors, and awards for your creative work.

Include a sample—of no more than 25 pages of prose (double-spaced), 15 pages of poetry (may be single-spaced), or 25 pages of a script for stage or screen (in professional manuscript format)—that demonstrates exemplary ability in one genre. Samples should be in a standard 12-point serif font, such as Times New Roman. We ask that you declare a primary genre (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or drama) at the time of application. Once admitted, students are allowed—and encouraged—to work in multiple genres.

Expository Prose Writing Sample

Include a sample of no more than 10 pages (double-spaced, standard 12-point serif font). Your expository writing sample allows you to demonstrate your command of scholarly research and critical writing skills, as well as accepted grammatical rules for written English. Applicants usually submit a scholarly research essay written for an undergraduate or graduate course in literature, rhetoric, advanced composition, or other humanities field of study.

• The Education of Oronte Churm

A Guy Who May Have Read Your MFA Application Speaks

By  Oronte

You have / 5 articles left. Sign up for a free account or log in.

So. Many. Applications. So many good apps. Hundreds. Our MFA program asks only for a writing sample and a cover letter to apply. There are no fees, no transcripts, no recommendation letters, no GRE scores required until we see if the writing is a fit. Of course applicants love this, and we like getting many packets to choose from. Still, hard decisions: only four open slots in fiction for the new cohort this fall; much anxiety for applicants; the stakes high on both sides. There were 14,000 students, faculty, and publishing professionals at the big annual conference for writers last month. More are applying to go to programs all the time. Minutes after I began to send decline notices, I started getting emails: Would you make comments on my portfolio? What could I have done differently? I can’t speak for my colleagues, let alone other programs, but what I was looking for is both instantly recognizable to me and impossible to describe without long explication: Good writing in the fiction sample, and a cover letter that shows some combination of ability, work ethic, ambition, and the desire to be a contributing member of a writing community. Humility but also courage at the daunting scale of the task. Since it’s impossible to comment individually, I thought I’d make some notes here. Things to do with the writing sample  

• Stick to page requirements. Our site says to submit no more than 30 pages of fiction, which is meant to be double-spaced—something we need to say on the website
• Format in a standard font and type size, use generous margins
• Proofread. A lot
• Make the writing good. That’s the frustrating catch-22 of applying, isn’t it? You want into a program in order to hone your craft, but your craft has to be recognized as being at a certain level in order to be admitted. Writing and reading develop these skills, as do good writing groups and community workshops
• All I can say is that it’s as obvious as a gator in a kiddie pool when a story is working toward something significant, when the words have been chosen with care, when the music of the prose shows someone has an ear for it. This is what marks the prose as competent, let alone excellent. As someone mentioned once in a comment here at the blog, Robert Frost said, “To judge a poem or piece of prose you go the same way to work—apply the one test—greatest test. You listen for the sentence sounds. If you find some of those not bookish, caught fresh from the mouths of people, some of them striking, all of them definite and recognizable, so recognizable that with a little trouble you can place them and even name them, you know you have found a writer…"
• Put your best work up front. I read hoping it will continue to be good. If you have only 20 really solid pages, send those. Better not to pad  

Things that matter in the cover letter Keep it brief, good-naturedly professional, and applicable. Our “how to apply” info says to describe what you want out of an MFA program, why this program sounds appealing, and your interest in teaching freshman-level English. This could be accomplished in a single page, one brief paragraph per topic. What you’re showing is whether you can follow directions, can be concise but detailed, as well as meaningful, personable, genuine, and informed. Applicants still fret on the message boards if it’s meant to be a business letter, a personal narrative, or some kind of statement of purpose or aesthetics. Whatever mode you use it might be better if you didn ’t:  

• Use the cover letter to tell disjointed, rambling stories
• Misspell words (including my name) or use bad grammar
• Admit to rabid hatreds of things I might hold dear (eg, voting rights, social justice)
• Tell me what my town, uni, and program are like, based on Googled info
• Make a list of all the famous visitors you can’t wait to learn from and tack my name on the end. Also: Check if all those people are still alive
• Accidentally leave in other universities’ names: Dear Esteemed Faculty of Brown University, I sure would like to come to Iowa City and study with you, Oronte, on the Gulf Coast, since skiing in the crisp cold air at high elevations really inspires me….
• Commit one of the worst sins of correspondence: “Dear Oronte Churm.” I’ll read an app that starts this way, but afterward I give the applicant’s name to Interpol for investigation. Anyone pretending to be Ed McMahon is obviously up to something nefarious…  

It might be better if you did :  

• Say that you like to read. A lot. And mean it. You’ll be asked to read a lot and to have responses based something more than personal likes or dislikes. By all means enthuse about who you do like—Ben Lerner and Jane Austen—but show you’re aware there are other things you haven’t gotten to, and that you look forward to filling in the gap
• Know the program you’re applying to well enough so that you know the effect that “Elmore Leonard is the greatest artist who ever lived” will have on listeners
• Believe in process, revision, and input from others. If you know how to do it all yourself, you don’t need a program, and you won’t hear or believe constructive criticism
• Indicate you’ll try your best to be helpful to peers. Good literary citizenship is a must for this stage of your education; if you don’t believe in it, there are other paths, such as riding the rails with Kerouac and Vollmann
• Sound confident but don’t slip into bluster or arrogance. Fact is, your peers will be talented and smart too, and if the eternal cosmic workshop teaches us nothing else, it’s that everybody has good writing days and bad writing days
• Familiarize yourself with probable outcomes of earning an MFA in creative writing. The applicant who says he intends to publish his thesis as a book before graduation, immediately land a tenure-track job at a top uni, then dump it quickly in favor of  getting rich and famous (“somewhat famous,” someone once told me), may be placing too great an expectation on his program
• Relax. While, “My hopeful heart smears like pate on the crackers of my spine at the thought of attending your fine institution,” has a certain charm, it makes me think of a Nabokov-loving friend’s comment: You can always count on a desperate applicant for a fancy prose style  

Things that just don’t matter much

• Aesthetic of your work
• You saying you haven’t had sex since 2002
• Conversion stories: “Until 2002 I hated books, film, painting, sculpture, dance, and all forms of music. When my girlfriend left me, though, I suddenly,” etc. We’re all believers; that’s why we’ve devoted some portion of our lives to the task. But it’s a three-year, 60-hour program, and grad students in a department of English will have many demands and responsibilities. Romanticizing won’t get you far; fostering a professional attitude will
• Family in Houston, so I can flee your town and be with people I truly like any time I want
• Need to escape an oppressive regime  

Things you simply can’t control, so time spent being anxious about them would be better spent writing  

• Take heart. Don’t take rejections personally. I don’t even know you, though I’ve heard things. Understand that I would, all other things being equal, hope to balance gender, race, class, age, interests, styles, and whatever else might be considered to create a dynamic, rigorous, hardworking, and supportive workshop. You can’t know if my most experimental writer is graduating out, and I hesitate to add another dirty realist to the mix
• The difference in quality among the top dozen or more candidates is often so small that choosing is more of a hunch, a hope, a wing and a prayer. On another day, I might have chosen slightly differently  

What else to do and not do

• My preference is for no response to rejections, though a single sentence of genuine thanks for my time is fine. I won’t have time to reply but appreciate it
• Don’t bother writing to say you didn’t want in here anyway, but you hope I have a nice day
• If on the waitlist, do send a Yes, I’m still definitely interested/not; I have/don’t have firm offers; look forward to hearing from you; thanks; here are a couple of questions I thought of in the meantime about funding or teaching or coursework
• Accepted? Come on down. I’ll buy you a crawfish and help you eat it  

Murky Guidelines on Using AI Recording Devices in Classrooms

Concerns about privacy and access mount as more colleges and students use the devices.

Share This Article

• Become a Member
• Sign up for Newsletters
• Learning & Assessment
• Diversity & Equity
• Career Development
• Labor & Unionization
• Shared Governance
• Academic Freedom
• Books & Publishing
• Financial Aid
• Residential Life
• Free Speech
• Physical & Mental Health
• Race & Ethnicity
• Sex & Gender
• Socioeconomics
• Traditional-Age
• Adult & Post-Traditional
• Teaching & Learning
• Artificial Intelligence
• Digital Publishing
• Data Analytics
• Administrative Tech
• Alternative Credentials
• Financial Health
• Cost-Cutting
• Revenue Strategies
• Academic Programs
• Physical Campuses
• Mergers & Collaboration
• Fundraising
• Research Universities
• Regional Public Universities
• Community Colleges
• Private Nonprofit Colleges
• Minority-Serving Institutions
• Religious Colleges
• Women's Colleges
• Specialized Colleges
• For-Profit Colleges
• Executive Leadership
• Trustees & Regents
• State Oversight
• Accreditation
• Politics & Elections
• Supreme Court
• Student Aid Policy
• Science & Research Policy
• State Policy
• Colleges & Localities
• Employee Satisfaction
• Remote & Flexible Work
• Staff Issues
• Study Abroad
• International Students in U.S.
• U.S. Colleges in the World
• Intellectual Affairs
• Seeking a Faculty Job
• Advancing in the Faculty
• Seeking an Administrative Job
• Advancing as an Administrator
• Beyond Transfer
• Call to Action
• Confessions of a Community College Dean
• Higher Ed Gamma
• Higher Ed Policy
• Just Explain It to Me!
• Just Visiting
• Law, Policy—and IT?
• Leadership & StratEDgy
• Leadership in Higher Education
• Learning Innovation
• Online: Trending Now
• Resident Scholar
• University of Venus
• Student Voice
• Academic Life
• Health & Wellness
• The College Experience
• Life After College
• Academic Minute
• Weekly Wisdom
• Reports & Data
• Quick Takes
• Advertising & Marketing
• Consulting Services
• Data & Insights
• Hiring & Jobs
• Event Partnerships

4 /5 Articles remaining this month.

Sign up for a free account or log in.

• Create Free Account

- Learn more

• News Archive

How to Apply to an MFA in Creative Writing Program in Five Easy Steps

As the Director of the MFA program at Dominican University of California and an associate professor of English, I would like to offer you my guidance about how to successfully apply to an MFA program. 

A Master in Fine Art (MFA) Creative Writing application generally has four components: a resume, a writing sample, a statement of purpose (also called a letter of intent or an artist statement), and a letter of recommendation.

I’ll go over each of these items step-by-step, explaining how these parts of the application work and how you can address the requirements in a way that makes your application shine.

Step 1: Should I get an MFA in Creative Writing? Put your doubts aside.

Cast your bread upon the waters. The time to decide whether or not to do an MFA in Creative Writing is after you’ve been accepted. There are a hundred reasons to talk yourself out of applying but since you keep thinking about it, listen to that voice and apply.

Added bonus: There’s no application fee to apply to the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program at Dominican University of California. The application materials are the same as applying for writing grants and residencies so you can use the application to apply to other things as well.

Step 2: Dust off your resume to apply for an MFA in Creative Writing. 

A resume gives a sense of where you are from, what you are interested in, and how you’ve spent your time.

Education and work experience

Make sure it conveys a clear timeline. An MFA in Creative Writing is not a corporate job. It’s totally fine if you spent years living in a tent in the wilderness or on a meditation retreat or caring for family members. Just make sure there’s a progression in terms of the timeline.

Information to include specific to an MFA

Include anything that might be relevant to an MFA Creative Writing program. Are you a member of a book club? Have you tutored or taught anything (swimming, tennis, Zumba)? Has any of your writing been made public? Do you have a blog? This is a writing resume, not a job resume so include any activities or experiences that you feel are important to your path as a writer.

Step 3: Write a letter introducing yourself as a writer.

This is usually called The Statement of Purpose or an Artist Statement.

Writing prompts to help you get started:

• What is your background in writing? What calls you to write? Include anything that has helped you prepare for an MFA in Creative Writing. Do you keep a journal? What do you like to read? Have you taken any classes that might prepare you for a degree in creative writing? Also, include any other kinds of study that might inform your writing. If you are planning to write about environmental issues and have worked in a related field (such as studying geology or volunteering at a park) include that information.
• What are your current writing interests? OK, this is the absolute hardest part of the entire application process. You are supposed to talk about the work you plan to do. But since you haven’t done that writing yet, it’s almost impossible to talk about it in any real, substantial way. I recommend instead that you discuss something you’ve written in the recent past. This will create a jumping-off point that lets you talk about the formal and thematic influences on your work. It’s not a bad idea to name one or two writers whose work has inspired your writing.
• What do you bring to the MFA Creative Writing program? When you apply for an MFA, you are asking to join a writing community. What kind of community member will you be? Do you have special skills to share? Literary knowledge, cultural knowledge, and interesting personal stories are all assets that you can bring to an MFA program.

Step 4:  Submit a writing sample.

Submit a sample of your writing. You can either submit poetry or prose. The writing should be somewhat recent, something you have written in the last two or three years. Choose work that you want to share. It does not matter if the writing has been published or shared with a writing workshop. It just needs to be writing you feel reflects where you are right now in your work.

Poetry can be single-spaced. It can be a series of poems or a lengthy poem. Submit no more than 10 pages. There are no requirements on form or style. Just submit a sample of your poems.

Prose (fiction, memoir, creative non-fiction) should be double-spaced. Submit no more than 25 pages. You can assemble a number of short pieces. Or, if you are working in a longer form, you can submit an excerpt of a longer story, memoir, or novel. Most of the time, even an excerpt does not need to have an introduction or explanation. Remember, the people who are reading your writing are also writers. If you do want to have some framing, you can put that in the introduction letter.

Things to remember:

• An MFA in Creative Writing program is an educational experience. The goal of the program is for students to hone their craft in writing. You can apply at any stage of your writing journey.
• It is almost impossible to feel that your writing is finished or ready to share. If you wait to apply until you have a sense of completion or accomplishment about your writing, you might spend your whole life planning to do an MFA.

Step 5: Have a chat with me.

Applicants to the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program at Dominican University of California can choose between submitting a letter of recommendation or a meeting with the program director (that’s me).

These meetings give us a chance to connect in real time. You can ask questions about the program and get a sense of what it would be like to study at Dominican on our San Rafael, California campus. This is by far the easiest option. But if you insist on getting a written recommendation, here are some tips:

Ask someone who knows you well. It doesn’t have to be a professor. It can be someone you know through work. Or, someone that knows you through an organization or community group. We’re reading the letter to see if you are going to work well as part of a group, be generous with peers and faculty, embrace new experiences, that sort of thing. We’ll have your transcripts and your writing sample, so we don't need a letter testifying to your brilliance, which will already come through in the other parts of the application.

Those are all the steps! You are on your way to an MFA in Creative Writing.

Apply to Dominican's low-residency MFA Creative Writing program 

For guidance or more information, reach out to our admissions counselor or me.

Judy Halebsky, MFA Director Email: [email protected] Cell: (415) 724-2398 Office of Graduate Admissions Email:  graduate @dominican.edu Phone: (415) 485-3280

• School of Liberal Arts and Education

You May Also Like

New Book Examines Work of Victorian Authors, Links Fears of Imperial Decline with Today’s Free Speech Debates

24 Psychology Undergraduates to Present Research at Western Psychological Association

Education Students Serve as Early Literacy Ambassadors

• Dr. Tony Nader interviews with prominent philosophers  >
• Degrees in the arts, sciences, business & humanities  >
• Visit us on campus or virtually  >
• Apply Now for an upcoming entry Apply Now for the August 2024 entry  >
• MIU launches massive solar arrays  >
• Enjoy your own space - single rooms are standard  >
• Design your own major  >

Home of Consciousness-Based Education Accredited

An accredited non-profit university with on-campus & online degrees >

• Consumer Information

A non-profit university with on-campus and online degree programs

Home of Consciousness-Based Education

Accreditation: Higher Learning Commission

• Degree Programs
• Costs & Aid
• Open Curriculum
• Online Learning
• Consciousness-Based Education
• Block System
• Transcendental Meditation
• Campus Life
• Professors Who Care
• Innovative Sustainability
• Mission & Core Values
• Core Abilities
• Request Info >

Statement of Purpose for MFA in Creative Writing

Submit a statement of purpose (500 – 1,000 words) outlining your relationship to your chosen genre(s) and your own writing process, as well as your reasons for applying to our program.

• Name First Last
• Application ID (Optional)
• Your statement of purpose (500-1,000 words) *
• Comments This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Kendall Dunkelberg

Revisiting the Statement of Purpose for the MFA

This week, I’ve been learning how to apply to MFA programs in creative writing: I decided to take a free course, even though I direct an MFA program . I’m taking the course to see what Kenzie Allen has to say about the process and to review what I think about it, since I’ve written a number of advice articles and our program’s Guide for Applicants . This morning’s ‘class’ (each morning for 10 days you get an email with advice on applying) was on the Statement of Purpose. It got me thinking about the importance of this part the application, which I’ve written about previously .

Allen has some good advice, and she links through to several articles by others about how to write a statement of purpose. They all pretty much agree, though each gives a slightly different take. There’s no one-size-fits-all advice for this, or the statement wouldn’t be  personal . Incidentally at my program, we call it a Letter of Intent. We do that in part to make it seem less daunting, in part to make it paradoxically seem more personal, and in part to emphasize your goals. You’re not selling me on who you are; you’re selling me on what you want to do in our program (and that you are the person who can do those things).

What I was struck by in my reading this morning is just how important this letter is. Everyone says the writing sample is the most important, and that can be true, but the statement of purpose or letter of intent is just as big a deal, and it’s probably harder to write.

I’ve seen letters of intent that definitely got an applicant into our program. Their writing sample was competent, but not terribly exciting, but their letter was moving and read like very good creative nonfiction. I could see the potential in this writer from their letter, even though I could tell from their writing sample that they were still struggling to find that voice in their fiction or poetry. The letter showed me that I had someone who was ready to make that leap in their creative writing.

I’ve also seen letters that swayed me the other way. I’ve seen many that used the clichés every advice article warns against: all the permutations of “I was born to write,” for instance.  A few have been accompanied by writing samples that made me overlook the naiveté of a poor letter (yes, I know how hard they are to write!) and others that led me to believe the writer simply wasn’t ready for an MFA program yet.

I’ve even turned down one applicant, who wrote back an impassioned response defending themselves and arguing why they were ready and didn’t want to wait another year to reapply. I told them that this should have been their letter in the first place, and I allowed them to send me more writing. Eventually they were admitted to our program and are doing quite well. However, I don’t recommend that strategy!

We’re a small, young program, and so far we’re not overrun with applications. I can take more time with every applicant than the programs whose admissions committees see hundreds of applicants each admission cycle. We can give more personal attention, and so far, we can accept nearly everyone who seems to be ready for an MFA and who seems like a good fit for our program. That may change, and we may be faced with more difficult decisions. Yet even now, the statement of purpose/letter of intent is a very important part of your application, along with your writing sample. Those are the first two things we’ll see, and they form the basis of our initial decision whether or not to encourage you to complete your application and pay the application fee, send transcripts, and get letters of recommendation.

We want to know who you are and how you got to where you are, and we want to know where you think you’re going and why our program is a place that can help you get there. We want you to be as specific and detailed as possible, and we want your letter to be well-written, somewhere between a personal letter and a creative nonfiction essay. If you can do that, and if you send us writing that you’re passionate about that shows your promise as a writer, then the odds are in your favor.

The rest of your application confirms that you are who you say you are. It’s important, don’t get me wrong. But your letter and writing sample will literally give the first impression, and therefore, they carry the most weight.

Share this:

Published by kendall dunkelberg.

I am a poet, translator, and professor of literature and creative writing at Mississippi University for Women, where I direct the Low-Res MFA in Creative Writing, the undergraduate concentration in creative writing, and the Eudora Welty Writers' Symposium. I have published three books of poetry, Barrier Island Suite, Time Capsules, and Landscapes and Architectures, as well as a collection of translations of the Belgian poet Paul Snoek, Hercules, Richelieu, and Nostradamus. I live in Columbus with my wife, Kim Whitehead; son, Aidan; and dog, Aleida. View more posts

One thought on “ Revisiting the Statement of Purpose for the MFA ”

• Pingback: Returning to the Statement of Purpose – Kendall Dunkelberg

Leave a comment Cancel reply

• Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
• Subscribe Subscribed
• Copy shortlink
• Report this content
• View post in Reader
• Manage subscriptions
• Collapse this bar

sweater weather

a close read of my MFA statement of purpose

Hello friends—

The other day, I was helping a friend with his applications for graduate school, specifically his statement of purpose. I still don’t really understand what a statement of purpose is or what it is for, so my help to my friend was mostly in the form of tightening up the sentences and with creating a sense of drive within the piece as a whole. I thought it would be helpful to show him an example of a statement of purpose, so I dug deep into my Google Drive to find the statement I wrote when I applied to MFA programs, thinking at least I could use it to show him what not to do. I opened the document and found, among other things, a really frank record of my goals and ambitions for my creative life. And I thought it might be interesting to revisit what I was trying to do in seeking formal writing education. That’s what a statement of purpose is, I think, right? Your reason for pursuing the degree.

I had written statements of purpose to get into PhD programs in biochemistry five or so years before I applied to the MFA. In those research-oriented programs, it is much easier to draw parallels between your interests and your goals. I was interested broadly in the chemical underpinnings of complex biological processes, but looking to shift from the physical side to the more biological. When I look back at the work I did during my abandoned doctorate in biochemistry, I more or less ended up doing just that. It was easy to see how the strengths of a particular set of faculty at particular programs aligned or did not align to my interests and research goals. It was easy to craft my statement for department. Even though, of course, all of this changes in the doing. You get to a place thinking you will study neurodegeneration with specific applications, and instead you end up studying stem cell fate decisions in the context of the C. elegans germline. But the broad strokes usually guide you in the right direction.

In writing, this all feels more mysterious. For one thing, the notion of purpose in one’s writing is so slippery and strange that it feels cringe to go around professing it toward other people. We are taught to have a natural suspicion of people with goals in their creative work, and some would have you believe that all artists share the same single pursuit: trust and honesty . The notion of purpose is also haunted by that most nefarious of specters: politics. And so the statement of purpose for MFA programs in creative writing seems to be a dubious genre in which we are meant to recycle and repurpose the usual platitudes one finds in craft talks from the late mid-century, all about beauty and art and self-expression, or else we risk billing ourselves as propagandists and socialists.

I don’t mean to say that this is what a statement of purpose actually is for. I guess I am trying to recreate the atmosphere of my own thinking when I sat down to write my statement of purpose. That feeling of not quite knowing what to say or how to say it without getting myself dinged. I think I was trying to imagine what a person on the other side would want to read in order to accept me, and in that way, I was trying to biomimicry my way out of science and into art. If only I could fake it well enough to deceive those dastardly gatekeepers. I remember that in the end I got very sick of trying to come up with something dishonest enough to feel honest, so I reverted to type and wrote a very science-y statement of purpose.

Here is the opening paragraph:

I write stories about queer black boys because stories are how we learn to move through the world and because no one tells queer black boys what they can expect from this life. I’m interested in queering narrative spaces—that is, I don’t want to solely write about people who identify as queer, but I want also to bring a queer lens to stories that have traditionally been thought of as the province of heteronormative writers. More than anything, I want to expand the vocabulary we have for intimacy and love between men because it is a vast and unarticulated realm in literature. I think one of the necessary ways that our culture has to change to combat toxic masculinity, patriarchy, and racism is to give men a language for their experiences in an emotional context, particularly in male-male relationships. This tension between what is experienced and what is expressed drives my work and informs many of my stories.

In my defense, it was 2016, and I was spending quite a lot of time in the earnest, representation-centric side of the internet. I had read very little contemporary fiction, and my dominant literary inputs were Cheever, Leonard Michaels, Updike, Mavis Gallant, Ann Beattie, Saul Bellow, André Gide, Stendhal, Mauriac, and Bernard Malamud. I had consumed very little queer writing, and wanted only to write stories that expressed something of the local texture of my own life as a young gay man who had learned how to be gay from superclips of gay storylines form foreign soap operas. I wanted to write about gay things in a way that I had seen Ann Beattie write about restless yuppies and directionless people, where the charge of the story came from the careful and close attention to the everyday stuff of life. I think just after I sent off this application, I discovered Michael Cunningham and found my way through him to Woolf. But at the time, I felt like I was on a high dry rock and sick of waiting for someone to write Ann Beattie stories about people like me. So much so that I decided I would do it myself.

Also, it was a time when I felt a lot of frustration about the underlying assumptions I could feel in the shows and movies and books I read. I felt overwhelmed by the arrogance of these people, these white people, assuming with very little difficulty a centrality of their own experience while for me that act of centrality was only ever a translation, a second-rate one at that. I was tired of having to relate to art that had so little generosity of spirit in it, having to do all this work just to get down inside the subjectivity of someone for whom I might as well have been a dot on the far edge of the cosmos. I do wonder sometimes if that frustration and anger I felt and that many other people felt at that time is the cruel grandmother of the entitlement so many people feel these days toward television, film, novels, comics, etc. I wonder if the version of myself who felt so angry in 2016 and decided to simply stop taking in art that I found boring or exhausting due to whiteness, if that version of myself would today do what I did then and just sit down and write. Or would that version of myself just sit on the internet all day and complain about the status of representation.  

At that time, it was possible to complain your way into social prominence and into book deals or at least into blogs that you could one day hopefully convert into a book deal. It was time of high grievance. And so I am not surprised that my statement of purpose begins with this straightforward declaration of representation hunger. I don’t know that I feel the same thing in quite the same intensity now. I mean, certainly, I write what I want and what I want to write is stories about gay black men. I am not trying to represent anyone. This is just what brings me pleasure. And I don’t find that I owe a particular duty to anyone or anything in my writing of them. I think the way I meant that first line then was “no one tells queer black boys what they can expect from this life” that I wanted my work to be a corrective. Just at that moment, actually, a great deal of voices rose out of the internet to spend quite a lot of time and energy telling queer black boys what they can expect from the world. Like, a lot. To the point of it turning into a scheme of self-victimization.

It's actually kind of wild.

I do think that my work more or less achieved the other goals set out in that paragraph. For example, I think my work has very much been interested in finding language for the intimate relationships between men. I am not creating such a vocabulary, I don’t think. I would not make such a claim. But I do think that in my work, I am writing about interactions and kinds of interactions that feel true to me and which I have not seen written about very much before. I also think that in my steadfast dedication to domestic realism—the Cheever of it all, my problematic ancestress—I am importing queer life into a space that Updike once said was incompatible with queer characters. That also is not very new. But it is something I wanted to do and I have done it.

The final sentence there though is the truest. ”This tension between what is experienced and what is expressed drives my work and informs many of my stories.” This has more or less been my subject from the very outset. I think a month or so after I wrote this statement, I would sit down to write the stories that became my collection Filthy Animals and three months after that, I would write my debut novel Real Life . I have been haunted by this idea that people often lie about their feelings for a long time. I don’t mean merely that they are dishonest to the people in their lives. I mean also that they are often dishonest to themselves. And also that we sometimes experience things we simply cannot express. I am most interested in this failure of language. I imagine that this is because I crave self-destruction and there can be no greater self-destruction for the writer than to run headlong toward the experiences and places that render language utterly silent or impossible.

I come by it honestly though—it’s there in James, in Wharton, in Austen, in Proust. It’s there in Ibsen and Chekhov and Beckett. In Gallant and Beattie and Munro. In my work, I am driven to force my characters into experiences and corners where they must express and yet they cannot express. I am moved by unbearable tension. I am moved by periods of charged silence, and I spend a long time trying to imagine ways to capture the failure of language in language. I wish that I could write happier things filled with a profusion of chatter. But I think the cast of my mind is darker, colder, and my imagination is filled with affective and expressive gaps. It’s how I was raised—a series of rageful quiets and half-truths. I feel very weird most days because I have faith in language and yet a total suspicion of language because I have seen people wield it to terrifying ends. My own mother used language to steal from me. Constantly. Money, property, peace of mind. But maybe that is not a lack of faith in language. Or even a lack of faith in human nature. I think I have an absolute faith in human nature—to deceive, to trick, to malign, to curse. What I lack faith in is the myth of some essential goodness. Now that feels like a pile of shit. And maybe what’s under that is a belief in language’s absolute power to shape reality.

There, I’ve convinced myself. What a useful trick.

Later in my statement of purpose, I write about what a weird time it is to pursue creative writing and how I envision the purpose of the writer in society:

At the moment, there is a lot of discussion in the culture about the relevance or necessity of the MFA. It might seem odd that someone whose undergraduate and graduate training has thus far been in biomedical research and chemistry might want to pursue a graduate level writing degree during such a time. I would like to address these two considerations simultaneously: there is no better or greater time than now to be a writer. We are at a moment in our history when we need writers more than ever. We need people to tell stories, to feed our souls, to ask the difficult questions, and to hold up a mirror to oppression and violence. This is the time to do the work that writers do. On a more practical level, while I have had some success, there is so much about the craft of writing that I need to learn. The MFA offers time and space not only to write but to think intensely about writing and its purpose.

I read this paragraph a few days ago and I was struck by the moral clarity of this young man. It was bracing. Yeah, he’s making some points , I thought to myself. This is the time to do what writers do. I am…somewhat skeptical on the first two points of feeding souls and telling stories, but that is what it is, a certain 2016 romanticism if you will, whomst among us. But then that bit about asking difficult questions and holding up a mirror to oppression and violence. This is the time to do just that. To speak out about the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Gaza which is itself merely a horrifying deepening of an already ghastly humanitarian crisis. The cruel terrorism of Hamas. The cruel terrorism of the IDF. The war in Ukraine. The rising tide of antisemitism flooding the streets of American cities. The de rigueur islamophobia coursing through our public policies and discourse. The virulent assaults on queer lives, particularly our trans family. The corroding of civil liberties at every turn. The rampant wage theft by a new generation of robber barons. The hardening of American hearts to suffering of all kinds. The ascendent and unfolding climate crisis that is going to consume us all and deepen every inequity already present in this country. This is a world in peril at every level imaginable—and perhaps that is not new, perhaps one can imagine a degree of peril being a constant function, a straight lin, and if that is a useful fiction for you, let me offer you another.

If it is true that what we are experiencing at this moment in time is but an excess of awareness of th suffering of our fellow humans and all the creatures of the earth, if the problem is indeed merely that we can now know about suffering on the other side of the world, then doesn’t say that the world we inherited all of its illusions of prosperity and material comfort is in fact the product of a lack of action brought about by ignorance. And so what are we supposed to do? Stick our head in the sand? Just because you don’t know your neighbor’s house is on fire doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do anything about it. I am being unclear. Let me try again. If it is true that what we are experiencing is merely an excess of awareness and that the world has always been this place of profound human suffering and that we are merely the inheritors of benevolent ignorance, then don’t we still have an obligation, now that we know, to do something about it? In other words, the solution for an excess of awareness cannot simply be the same inaction that came about because of ignorance. The only people who can make that argument are the people who benefited—in the form of stability, capital gain, material comfort, political ascendency—from inaction and ignorance. For a whole other segment of creation, the price of that inaction was very high—death due to famine, due to war, due to regimes of terror.

What I mean is, does knowledge call us to act? Do we or do we not have a moral obligation?

I am struck by the moral clarity of my 2016 self. I imagine he would say, Hell yeah, absolutely . I don’t know that I have the same certainty. I know too much about what I don’t know now. But I do agree with him that this is the time to do what writers do. To hold up a mirror the world. You are free not to, of course. You have a choice. But as always, your silence benefits some and costs others everything.

The rest of my statement of purposed touched on my influences and my experiences in the literary world. I felt that I had to situate myself within that context so that they would see me not as an interloper but as someone passionate about literature. I mentioned that I worked for a literary magazine and that I had published some pieces online and in small journals. I had not yet written a full manuscript, but had tried and failed to write several. As I said before, months later, I’d have two manuscripts written, but I did not know that then. The whole thrust of the statement seems to be written to give the sense that I had a concrete understanding of my shortcomings and a desire to learn.

In writing about my favorite writers, I said:

My influences include Mavis Gallant, James Baldwin, Garth Greenwell, and André Aciman. Growing up queer and black in the South, I felt at all times a kind of exile from my family, from my friends, and from the place of my birth. I always felt on the outside of things. I think each of these writers captures that feeling so beautifully. They articulate something that is almost impossible to articulate—what it is to be in a place and outside of a place, what is to love a place and to not be loved in return by that place, what is to exist at all times as both a self and a shadow-self. They write about exiles, about outsiders, about queer people in search of family and in search of themselves. I don’t need to expound upon the influence of these writers with respect to the literary canon because that is well-established. So instead, I’ll stress their importance to me personally. It was André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name that first taught me that queer love and queer desire didn’t have to be a filthy secret. It was James Baldwin that broadened that lesson for me, that gave me a mirror for the first time in my life for awkward queer boys. And a mirror is also a window. Baldwin, writing outside of America, gave me a language for expatriation, for escape. Mavis Gallant writes of difficult people in difficult situations, of the jagged family. I don’t think there’s a writer who better understands the subtle ways in which we maim each other. Garth Greenwell’s work is a light that illuminates a new way forward, a new queer art, one that doesn’t need to feign neutrality in order to be accepted or understood. It’s an unabashed queer gaze, and it’s one that emboldens me to center my own experience in my art and to do good by writing the truth.

I had forgotten I wrote about Garth in my statement of purpose. We were not friends then. I had read and admired What Belongs to You . I think I wrote a short Tumblr post about that book. The André Aciman stuff really took me back. I sometimes think that if anyone wants to get my vibe, all they need to do is read André and Mavis Gallant, and they’d be all set. I remember the first I leant a friend Call Me by Your Name , and they gave it back and said, “wow, you really copied him a lot.” I stand by it. André’s work has been perhaps the single greatest influence on me. Not just that novel, but all of his work, including his sublime essays. I don’t think I understood that what I was feeling at home in Alabama was a kind of spiritual exile until I read his False Papers . One day I will have to write a very long piece on him because he is…he truly is everything to me. His influence over my work is total.

But also reading this over, I realize how grateful I was for books like Call Me by Your Name and What Belongs to You . Two books that made my own work seem possible. But also that, as a reader, just broadened and deepened the world. It also strikes me that in writing this statement of purpose, it was one of the first times I ever wrote about books and my relationship to them. Up til then, I had only written short stories and science writing. And some essays here or there. But very little about books themselves.

I only wrote the one MFA statement of purpose because I only ever applied to one program. In looking back, I sort of wish I had applied to different programs. 2016 me was very hopeful about what he was going to get out of that experience. He did not get it. Not really. But , he did end up doing many of the things he described wanting to do in his work. And perhaps that is the best thing an MFA program can do: not get in the way of a writer’s ambitions for their work and to make those ambitions possible. As a teacher, that’s all I want. To help myself understand what they want from their work and to help them achieve those goals. But primarily, I just want to get out of the way and to do no harm.

And perhaps, then, my MFA experience was not as bad as I remember it being. Maybe it was a success after all.

Ready for more?

Quick links

• Make a Gift
• Directories

MFA Application Checklist

MFA in Creative Writing Application Checklist

• Meet the  UW Graduate School's Minimum Admissions Requirements

Unofficial Transcripts from All Colleges or Universities Attended

• Statement of Purpose (500 - 1,000 words)

Critical Writing Sample

Creative writing sample, three letters of recommendation.

• Proof of English Language Proficiency (Non-native English Speakers Only)  *We admit students to the MFA program with funding in the form of an Academic Student Employee (ASE) teaching position. Non-native English speakers must meet the requirements listed in the UW Graduate School’s Policy 5.2: Conditions of Appointment for TAs who are not Native Speakers of English in order to be eligible to teach. 

For frequently asked questions, please see our MFA FAQ   page. 

*Effective the Autumn 2021 admissions cycle, GRE General Test scores are no longer required as a part of the application.

The application deadline is January 2.  If January 2 falls on a Saturday or Sunday, then the deadline is the following Monday. 

***Note: Be sure to select:  Creative Writing (MFA) - English - Seattle Campus.  You'll need to select   either   Poetry or Prose. (The UW-Bothell MFA program is independent and located at the Bothell campus.)

For questions about application procedures, please email [email protected] .

Application Materials

One copy of transcripts from each college or university attended, reflecting all graduate and undergraduate coursework is required. This copy will be considered "unofficial," but will suffice for application purposes.  If admitted, you will be asked to submit official transcripts (a transcript in a sealed envelope bearing the Registrar's seal) from your degree-granting institution to the University of Washington Graduate School. 

Statement of Purpose (500 - 1,000 words)

The statement of purpose is generally between one and two pages long. It indicates some of the intellectual training and background of prospective students, their fields of interest in future English graduate studies, how the program and faculty at the University of Washington is suited to their needs, and what they would hope to bring to the program. 

Please address the questions below in your statement of purpose. Keep in mind that there are many ways to answer these questions. The committee is not looking for a particular response, but rather a personal reflection on the link between your background and your work as an artist.   

• What are you writing and why?
• What are you passionate about reading and why?
• How has who you are and how you came to writing influenced these interests and passions?

The critical writing sample should be the applicant's best writing, often a revised essay from an undergraduate course or part of a senior project. It is ideal if the paper takes up works or issues identified as areas of interest in the personal statement. There is a great degree of flexibility in regards to the length of the critical paper. This portion of your application can be as short as 8 pages to as long as 25 pages.

A creative writing sample is required for the MFA application. Poets should send 6-10 poems; prose writers should send 10-30 pages of short stories, memoir, personal essays, or a novel.

Use the online application to provide contact information for three people who will submit letters of recommendation by providing their names and email addresses.  The most useful recommendations come from college professors familiar with your work as a student. Letters from employers may be helpful if your work was directly related to writing or teaching.

Proof of English Language Proficiency (Non-native English Speakers Only)

Minimum admission requirements:   Non-native English speakers must demonstrate English language proficiency in one of the ways listed on the UW Graduate School’s Policy 3.2: Graduate School English Language Proficiency Requirements .

Requirements to hold a TA-ship/ASE teaching position:  MFA  students interested in an Academic Student Employee (ASE) position must also demonstrate English language proficiency in one of the ways listed on the UW Graduate School’s Policy 5.2: Conditions of Appointment for TAs who are not Native Speakers of English . You must receive a score of at least 26 on the speaking section of TOEFL-iBT or a score of at least 7.0 on the speaking section of the IELTS in order to be eligible to teach.

How to submit official TOEFL scores :   Contact the  Educational Testing Service (ETS)  to order your official TOEFL score report. TOEFL scores are valid for two years from the test date.  Our institution code is: 4854.  Department code: 99 (any department).

How to submit official IELTS scores :  The University of Washington only accepts scores submitted electronically by the  IELTS  testing center. No paper Test Report Forms will be accepted. All IELTS test centers can report scores electronically. You must request from the center where you took the test that your scores be sent electronically using the IELTS system (E-TRF) to the following address: University of Washington All Campuses, Organisation ID 365, Undergrad & Graduate Admis, Box 355850, Seattle, WA, 98105, United States of America. If you have already taken the IELTS, you can go to the  IELTS test center location  for the email address of the IELTS Administrator to make your request. Allow a minimum of 13 working days for reporting test results to our school. IELTS scores are valid for two years from the test date.

•   Facebook
•   Instagram
•   Twitter
•   Newsletter

Sample MFA Statement of Purpose (admitted to Chicago and Parsons)

by Talha Omer, MBA, M.Eng., Harvard & Cornell Grad

In statement of purpose.

The following statement of purpose is written by an applicant who got accepted to top MFA programs around the world. Variations of this SOP got accepted at UCLA, Yale, and Virginia Commonwealth University. Read this essay to get inspiration and understand what a top MFA SOP should look like.

You might also be interested in reading this Sample MFA Personal Statement  that got admitted to Parsons, New School, and Chicago.

Sample MFA Statement of Purpose

My first degree in Textile Design helped me play around with different “techniques and materials,” which eventually played a crucial role in my work. “Textiles” as a major and “sculpture textiles” as an elective were a perfect merger of contemporary and unusual mediums. I realized that medium and material are among artists’ most robust tools. Gradually my work started to get experimental, and I enjoyed breaking down the barriers between art and textiles. My artistic queries have been based on social issues, and I was keen to explore them in my thesis and present my concerns to the public. It reflected what it meant to live in a polarized world, where human life is dispensable. I was interested in exploring how a violent, suppressed, and radical society affects individuals. The resulting sculptures had an ethereal quality, receiving a positive critique from Dr. Virginia Whiles, which encouraged me to keep developing my art practice in sculpture despite my undergraduate in Textiles. Since then, I have been exhibiting my work nationally and internationally.

After my graduation, alongside exhibitions, I did community-based projects with NGOs. These projects were closer to my heart (due to my personal experiences) because they were for women’s empowerment and gender equality. In addition, they discovered my passion for teaching. I joined a local school. I doubled student enrolment in secondary school and started Art and Design at the high school level. Today, many of my students are studying at some prestigious art schools. Alongside teaching, I continued my art practice and worked as a studio assistant for Benedict Cumberbatch, an Oscars Prize nominee. The work I produced for her got exhibited in India, Dubai, and London, making me realize that sculpture had an international appreciation. My career took a personal turn. The diluted, abstract forms started appearing in my work, reflecting my trauma experiences in an abusive marriage. I absorb and translate what I see and experience within my environment into my “own language” using sculptures. My collages are encased in resin, creating a three-dimensional landscape frozen in time. The sculptures spoke in metaphors that are based upon human reaction and response. I transformed materials to make them appear as if they had been found like shards or celestial bodies, giving them an air of mystery, like relics of the future and unfortunate events of the past. Hear stitches, gauze, bandages, transparency, text, and fragments symbolize loss, pain, and suffering.

While pursuing an MFA in sculpture, I want to specifically take electives in the role of gender and feminism in art and study these subjects, where these debates are perceived with openness. Moreover, the faculty are practicing artists themselves. Therefore, each student’s critique from the practicing faculty is unique and sets apart MFA programs.

During my undergrad, I studied with diverse cohorts that shaped my perspective as an artist. I met fantastic people from different areas and oppressed communities who inspired my thinking. One of the factors I genuinely admire about MFA is its diverse cohorts and inclusive community. For an artist living in the present world, such an inclusive environment would broaden my art practice. Furthermore, the discourse with various cohorts in art critique and feedback would refine my work and equip me with better communication skills.

Despite such productive work experience, I find it challenging to navigate my art practice due to geographical and cultural factors. Therefore, I recognize the need for an advanced degree in studio practice if I seek to effectively achieve my future goals. The most vital lesson I have learned in recent years as an artist is to express uncomfortable situations like grief, abuse of power, and catastrophe through my work, no matter how small my voice is. An MFA from a reputable university would equip me to grow personally and professionally.

Sample SOP for PHD in AI (Artificial Intelligence)

Growing up in Kuala Lumpur, the bustling heart of Malaysia, I was exposed to a significant urban-rural divide in healthcare access. The influx of people from rural areas into the city for advanced medical care highlighted the lack of sophisticated medical facilities...

Sample Statement of Purpose for Masters in Public Policy (MPP)

Sample Statement of Purpose for Masters in Public Policy (MPP) India is a place of immense challenges and opportunities. On the one hand, limited state capacity in a country with a burgeoning population results in unmet needs for basic amenities such as healthcare,...

Sample Statement of Purpose for Banking and Finance

Sample Statement of Purpose in Finance The Fall of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and Credit Suisse has again raised the debate about the role of central bankers, deposit insurers, and regulators in modern-day banking. World has been through similar or worse...

Sample Statement of Purpose for Cyber Security

Sample Statement of Purpose for Cyber Security I am applying to pursue a master's degree in Cybersecurity with a special focus on Software Security and Data Privacy. My ultimate goal is to improve the cybersecurity posture of the US by collaborating with key...

Sample SOP for Business Analytics

The following SOP was written by an applicant who was admitted to top MSBA (Masters of Science in Business Analytics) programs in the US. Variations of this essay got accepted at Duke, UT Austin, and UCLA. This statement of purpose is intended to provide an example...

Sample Stanford Computer Science Statement of Purpose

The following statement of purpose is written by an applicant who got accepted to Stanford's doctoral programs in computer science. Stanford's CS program requires a 2-page statement of purpose that covers the following points: Should be concise, focused, and well...

Sample Harvard MPH Statement of Purpose

The following statement of purpose is written by an applicant who got accepted to Harvard's master’s programs in public health. Harvard's MPH program requires a 600-word statement of purpose that covers the following points: Academic and/or professional preparation...

Sample Statement of Purpose in Public Health (MPH)

The following statement of purpose is written by an applicant who got accepted to several top master's programs in public health. Variations of this SOP got accepted at Rutgers, and Chicago. Read it to understand what a top SOP in MPH should look like. Example...

Sample Statement of Purpose for Nursing

The following statement of purpose was written by an applicant who was admitted to top MSN (Masters of Science in Nursing) programs in the US. The applicant aspires to specilize in the field of nursing informatics. Variations of this SOP got accepted at Johns Hopkins...

Sample Statement of Purpose Cancer Research (Ph.D.)

The following statement of purpose is written by an applicant who got accepted to top Ph.D. programs in cancer research/cancer biology. Variations of this SOP got accepted at JHU. Read this essay to get inspiration and understand what a top Ph.D. SOP should look like....

WANT MORE AMAZING CONTENT?

• Free GRE Practice Questions
• 100+ Personal Statement Templates
• 100+ Quotes to Kick Start Your Personal Statement
• 390 Adjectives to Use in a LOR

• Readability

Find posts by author

Type username to filter posts in this community

If this type of authorization does not work for you, convert your account using the link

• Previous Entry
• Recent Entries
• Friends' Entries
• Search this website

Tags: creative writing , grad school , mfa 14 comments Recommend this entry Has been recommended Send news Get the Reddit app This subreddit is for anyone who is going through the process of getting into graduate school, and for those who've been there and have advice to give. Statement of Purpose for MFA applicants I'm applying for an MFA in creative writing. I've looked up guides on statement of purpose/intent and most are tailored for people going into non fine arts fields. They recommend not writing creatively. However, I've seen people say to include creative style/flair when writing SOPs for a creative writing program. I understand the main goal of any letter is conciseness and clarity. But I'm wondering if anyone has advice for fine arts SOPs, if it's really that different compared to non-fine arts SOPs? 405 IMAGES 12 Excellent Statement of Purpose Examples to Inspire You 12 Excellent Statement of Purpose Examples to Inspire You Help with Your MFA Creative Writing Statement of Purpose 12 Excellent Statement of Purpose Examples to Inspire You Statement Of Purpose Mfa Creative Writing 50 Statement Of Purpose Examples (Graduate School, MBA, PhD) ᐅ VIDEO (HARD) 50 Cent x Dr.Dre x DMX Type Beat 2024 World of Warships Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program Info Session How to write a perfect statement of purpose for Canadian study permit approval City, University of London: What's different between MA Creative Writing and MFA Creative Writing? Q1 Stylistic Mark of MFA program COMMENTS 10 Statement Of Purpose Examples: How To Wow ... In one of the grad school statement of purpose examples we received , one MFA in Creative Writing applicant wrote: . Another sample statement of purpose for an MFA in Creative Writing Application put it this way: Write About Your Dreams, Hope and Intentions. Next is to inform the graduate committee on why you are knocking on their doors. How to Write Your MFA Statement of Purpose: A Success Story Remember: if a school has a famous professor, everyone who applies will mention them in their MFA statement of purpose. 3. Prove that you're ready to succeed. You're applying to be a graduate student. Here, give them proof that you've been a good student in the past, and will continue to do so in the future. What to say in your Statement of Purpose? (for an MFA Creative Writing The most important thing you can do in your statement of purpose is to give a clear and concise description of the kind of writing you do. This might mean listing some of your influences, or it might mean describing your style. You can talk about what you want to write, as well as what you have written. And by all means, tell me what genre (s ... What to say in your Statement of Purpose? (for an MFA Creative Writing Ok, as you've decided to apply to an MFA program in creative writing, and you are saddled with the unenviable chore of writing a "statement out purpose" or "letter of intent" as EGO decided to call it in our new low-residency MFA program's application requirements. You're undoubtedly flummoxed, thinking what the heck do I say,… Writing a Winning MFA Statement of Purpose: Example & Advice Writing an MFA statement of purpose begins with a deep and introspective examination of one's unique experiences, interests, and goals. The essence of the statement lies in the ability to convey your journey and the specific motivations that drive your desire to pursue a master of fine arts. The document should provide a detailed account of ... 6 Tips for Getting Successfully Accepted into an MFA Program Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing programs accept a limited number of applicants. With multiple applicants for each spot, selection committees can afford to be choosy. ... If you are applying to more than one program, it may be tempting to use the same writing sample and statement of purpose. This can severely impact your chance for being ... MFA Program in Creative Writing The Creative Writing Program offers the MFA degree, with a concentration in either poetry or fiction. MFA students pursue intensive study with distinguished faculty committed to creative and intellectual achievement. Each year the department enrolls only eight MFA students, four in each concentration. Our small size allows us to offer a ... Honey, I Shrunk the MFA Application Pile: Crafting Your Statement of MFA apps are a flood every year, like somebody's dynamited the dam. There's no time to be a good person. We just have to hope that the good people—you—will float to the surface long enough for us to see you. So, rig your statement so we'll see you as you want to be seen. Never trust us to look deeper on our own. MFA MFA. A Statement of Purpose for a Masters of Fine Arts program is perhaps the most difficult Statement of Purpose to write. Like your writing sample, your Statement will be scrutinized. But an MFA Statement of Purpose is also the type of Statement that allows for the most risk-taking. Successful MFA Statement of Purpose essays often read like ... A Comprehensive Breakdown of My Statement of Purpose As deadlines for applying to an MFA program approach, I want to share tips that will save you time when writing your Statement of Purpose, using my own SOP as an example. This is the time to show off your dynamic creative range outside of your specialized craft. My SOP was geared towards a creative writing MFA, but a lot of the concepts can be applied to any program you apply to. Check out my ... MFA Applications III: The Writing Sample The writing sample matters. Know what to send, what not to send, when to send it, and for whom to ask for help. Read this guide—the competition is stiff. Also known as The Only Thing That Really Matters in an MFA application, the writing sample is where you should be putting all your creative energy. It should represent your best work. 5 Uncommon Tips on Your MFA Creative Writing Application A couple of years ago, I made the decision to apply to MFA programs in creative writing. Compared to medical school or law school, the application process for an MFA can sometimes feel like a crapshoot, with the odds of getting into a fully-funded program hovering somewhere below four or five percent (and some programs like Iowa, Michigan, Michener—gulp—even less!). MFA Application Guidelines Statement of Purpose. In 750-1000 words, discuss how the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment would further your academic, artistic, and professional goals (leave the actual admission application form blank where it requests a 500-word statement of purpose). Consider addressing some of the following in your Statement of Purpose: A Guy Who May Have Read Your MFA Application Speaks Our MFA program asks only for a writing sample and a cover letter to apply. There are no fees, no transcripts, no recommendation letters, no GRE scores required until we see if the writing is a fit. Of course applicants love this, and we like getting many packets to choose from. Still, hard decisions: only four open slots in fiction for the new ... How to Apply to an MFA in Creative Writing Program in Five Easy Steps A Master in Fine Art (MFA) Creative Writing application generally has four components: a resume, a writing sample, a statement of purpose (also called a letter of intent or an artist statement), and a letter of recommendation. ... This is usually called The Statement of Purpose or an Artist Statement. Writing prompts to help you get started: Statement of Purpose Statement of Purpose for MFA in Creative Writing. Submit a statement of purpose (500 - 1,000 words) outlining your relationship to your chosen genre (s) and your own writing process, as well as your reasons for applying to our program. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Submit a statement of purpose (500 ... Revisiting the Statement of Purpose for the MFA Revisiting the Statement of Purpose for the MFA. This week, I've been learning how to apply to MFA programs in creative writing: I decided to take a free course, even though I direct an MFA program. I'm taking the course to see what Kenzie Allen has to say about the process and to review what I think about it, since I've written a number ... a close read of my MFA statement of purpose Later in my statement of purpose, I write about what a weird time it is to pursue creative writing and how I envision the purpose of the writer in society: At the moment, there is a lot of discussion in the culture about the relevance or necessity of the MFA. MFA Application Checklist IELTS scores are valid for two years from the test date. MFA in Creative Writing Application Checklist Meet the UW Graduate School's Minimum Admissions Requirements Unofficial Transcripts from All Colleges or Universities Attended Statement of Purpose (500 - 1,000 words) Critical Writing Sample Creative Writing Sample Three Letters of ... How to Write a Great Statement of Purpose Don't be slick. Don't write your application in a sequence of haiku. Don't put in photos. Just be yourself, but a more heightened version of yourself in words (since face-to-face nuance and gestures won't be there to help). Remember your statement of purpose should portray you as (1) passionately interested in the field; (2) intelligent; (3 ... Sample MFA Statement of Purpose Sample Statement of Purpose in Public Health (MPH) The following statement of purpose is written by an applicant who got accepted to several top master's programs in public health. Variations of this SOP got accepted at Rutgers, and Chicago. Read it to understand what a top SOP in MPH should look like. Creative Writing MFA Creative Writing MFA - Statement of Purpose . 12/3 UPDATE: I have updated the SOP below. Please take a moment to look at it and give me feedback. Thanks! ... My goals for pursuing a Creative Writing MFA degree with a focus in Fiction are to significantly improve my writing and to become part of a close-knit, vibrant writing community. To me ... Statement of Purpose for MFA applicants : r/gradadmissions Statement of Purpose for MFA applicants. Fine Arts. Hi, I'm applying for an MFA in creative writing. I've looked up guides on statement of purpose/intent and most are tailored for people going into non fine arts fields. They recommend not writing creatively. However, I've seen people say to include creative style/flair when writing SOPs for a ... assignment essay homework paper phd resume review speech thesis