In this article, we will focus on writing your Statement of Purpose (SOP). By the end of this article, you should:
- Understand what the SOP is used for by the immigration officer, and why it is so important
- Be able to identify key mistakes that many people make when writing their SOP
- Understand that the SOP in fact has only one central topic, and that all other topics are secondary except for this one: the SOP is about who you are
- Understand why only you can write your SOP, and why you should never rely on an agent to write it for you
- Understand the importance of getting proper guidance from an immigration professional who understands what the SOP is and how it should be written.
Table of Contents
📖 What is an SOP and Why It Matters
The SOP is not a test of your English writing skills, or ability to write a data-filled report, or a fact-driven summary of your academic and professional credentials that would impress a hiring manager. The SOP is not a visa cover letter or an academic essay either. It is a very different and unique type of text.
The SOP is an opinion-driven, highly personalised autobiography that focusses on your life experiences, personal goals, and how your reflections on these have led you to want to become an international student.
The reason this approach is necessary is simple: the immigration officer does not, in fact, care how smart you are or how good you are at your job. The immigration officer reads the SOP to see what kind of person you are: are you the type of visa applicant who would come to New Zealand and break the rules, such as working illegally or overstaying your visa? If your ideas are clear, logical and show real purpose, then the officer will believe that you are a genuine student. On the other hand, if your SOP is extremely vague and appears to hide who you are and what you think, then the officer will think you may have ulterior motives in applying for a student visa.
In a way, writing the SOP should be quite easy once you thoroughly understand that in fact you are the top expert on planet earth on the topic of the SOP: the SOP is about you, and you are an expert on yourself!
However, it is in fact very challenging to get into this mindset, so we will look at the Top Five mistakes people make when writing their SOP.
Mistake #1: Claiming You’ll Immediately Return Home After Studying in New Zealand
Example:
“After finishing my course, I will definitely return to my country immediately. I have no interest in staying in New Zealand at all. I do not care that my course is on the Green List, because I have no interest at all in applying for residence.”
Studying in New Zealand is a very costly commitment in terms of money, time, and sacrificed career development in your own country. It is a big investment, and it is reasonable that you would want a big return on that investment after you finish your course.
If your course offers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity at a Post Study Work Visa, then it would be very surprising for you to abandon that opportunity just to go back home to a country you already live in. Most people would prefer to stay in New Zealand for a time after they have graduated, and explore job opportunities so they can get some real-life work experience in New Zealand, and possibly even explore residence pathways. If that is not how you view things, then you are in the minority and you would need to explain why your motivations are so different to everyone else’s.
Furthermore, expressing absolutely no interest in staying in New Zealand after your studies makes you appear totally uninterested in New Zealand as a country. If so, the officer may then wonder why you are even coming to study here in the first place!
Rather, it is better to remain open minded and tell the truth. And in fact, the truth is very simple: if you have never been to New Zealand before, you cannot possibly know for certain if you will stay or leave after you finish your course!
You may come to New Zealand and fall in love with the place. Perhaps you intended to only stay for a few years, but after discovering what the country has to offer may change your mind and go for residence. On the other hand, you may arrive in New Zealand planning to apply for residence later on, but end up extremely disappointed with the country and decide to abandon your plans and leave.
The better option, therefore, is to present both options as viable: that if you have options to remain in New Zealand after your studies, and that you also have good opportunities in your own country if you are unable or unwilling to remain in New Zealand. This is far truer and more credible than swearing an oath in your SOP to return to your country the very day after your classes are over!
Of course, if you genuinely do plan on leaving New Zealand after your studies, then you can say so in the SOP. However, you will need to explain why you are in such a rush to return, such as that you have a time-limited promotion from your employer available conditional on you completing your New Zealand course.
Mistake #2: Focussing too much on how close you are to your culture and your family
Example:
“I was born in XXX and have lived here for all my life. Therefore, I cannot imagine living in another country than this one, as the culture is too different. Also, I have a husband and young child, and I love them with all my heart. I could not possibly live away from them for longer than a year. Therefore, I will need to return to my country as soon as possible as I will miss my family too much.”
If you have written something like this, then congratulations: you have proven that you are no different to any other person on earth! The SOP is written to show you as someone special, who unlike most people in your community, as you are someone who needs to study in a faraway country like New Zealand. Therefore, simply stating that you are familiar with your culture and that you love your family does not accomplish much.
The statement is also very meaningless too: do you really need to remind the officer that Indians are familiar with Indian culture, or that mothers tend to love their children?
Of course, all people are familiar with their own culture and all people love their families. However, this also includes people who break the rules and overstay their visa! Overstayers and illegal migrant workers love their families and their own culture as well, and since the SOP is provided to prove that you are NOT a potential overstayer or rule-breaker, statements like these have absolutely no value in the SOP.
Furthermore, many students will apply for their visas first, and then apply for their family visas later. INZ knows this perfectly well, and statements like the above make them doubt your honesty and credibility throughout the whole SOP. For instance, many people are especially interested in Masters-level degrees specifically because these courses offer work rights for the partner!
There is a far better way to talk about your family than this. Just mention that your family is well-settled in your country, such that if they were unable or unwilling to join you in New Zealand they would still be able to lead a normal life. Talk about your spouse’s job, your stable accommodation, your children’s schooling, etc.
As for describing your culture: though not vital to do so, there are better ways to do it than to tell the officer something meaningless like “As an Indian, I am used to Indian culture.” Instead, you could talk about your hometown and how vibrant your city is, for instance, or what type of social life you enjoy.
So far, the first two mistakes are of a similar kind: the types of incomprehensible statements that arise when a nervous SOP-writer tries to make strange statements simply to please an immigration officer (instead of simply telling the truth and writing what they think).
Moving on, we will go onto stylistic errors that can turn a sentence into an extremely dull and meaningless list of words, rather than a dynamic and personalised nugget of self-description.
Mistake #3: “The Noun Mountain”
What I call the ‘noun mountain’ is a common mistake where the writer focusses on cramming as many ideas into a single sentence as they possibly can, hoping that if they do this then at least one of their ideas will impress the immigration officer.
Example:
“After completing this management course, I can work as a General Manager, Operations Manager, Sales Manager, Marketing Manager, Project Manager, Human Resources Manager, Chief Executive Officer, Regional Team Leader, or Finance Manager, etc.”
Imagine your spouse and you were going to a restaurant and you asked them as you leave the house: “Do you know what you would like to eat tonight?”
Your spouse answers: “Yes, I know exactly what I want to eat. I would like to eat Japanese food, Indian food, Chinese food, German food, Korean food, fast food, or fine dining, etc.”
You would probably be very confused and think that in fact your spouse in fact has no idea what they want! The same impression is given when you pile a long list of noun phrases separated by commas at the end of a sentence, with no explanation or differentiation whatsoever. You appear as someone with no goals, who will just take whatever job they can get after they graduate.
Instead, you should try to come across as somebody with a clear vision of the future that justifies spending so much time and money to study in New Zealand.
The example above gives nine possible job opportunities, which represents nine potential ideas (far too many to put into a single sentence). Instead of going for quantity, focus on the quality of a small number of well-developed ideas, based on how well you describe that idea.
One way to do this is to brainstorm some ‘Wh- questions’ you could consider about the noun phrase. For example, take this very plain and simple sentence:
“After completing this management course, I can work as a marketing manager.”
Now take the word ‘marketing manager’ and consider what additional topics you might think of to develop this point (by coming up with relevant ‘wh- questions’):
- Why do I want to be a marketing manager?
- How will I enter into a career as a marketing manager?
- What employers would hire me as a marketing manager?
- How does marketing management relate to my previous education/work experience?
- Why will this course specifically allow me to become a marketing manager?
- Why can’t I become a marketing manager already now, before studying this course?
There is, in fact, a huge amount of detail and opinion to bring around a single word, such that the short sentence above can be turned into a detailed paragraph. It is up to you, as the SOP writer, to ensure that each idea you come up with is rich in thought and context, not simply dumped carelessly onto the page.
On a side note: very often, the use of ‘etc.’ and ‘such as/for example’ can sometimes convey an impression of hesitation rather than decisiveness. For example, compare these two sentences: in which one does the plan appear more confident?
“After completing this management course, I can work as a marketing manager.”
“After completing this management course, I can work in many jobs, such as marketing manager, etc.”
Even without description, I think most people would agree that the first sentence looks much more convincing. Therefore, use the words ‘etc.’ and ‘such as’ as sparingly as you can!
Mistake #4: Too many facts, not enough opinion
Example:
“In my MBA, I studied papers such as Information Management Systems (where I scored an A-), Corporate Business Finance (scoring a B+), Business Strategy (scoring an A), Business law (B+), Small Business Development (C+), and scored on overall GPA of 5.0”
Consider the task the immigration officer has in reading your SOP: they want to know who you are. Does the paragraph above say anything at all about the student?
No, the paragraph is about the student’s academic transcript, not about them. Furthermore, the paragraph does not tell the officer anything useful at all, since they could simply get this information by reading the student’s actual transcript!
Other common versions of this mistake include:
- Detailed country descriptions about New Zealand that go into the country’s economic data, export markets, NZQA education provider category ratings, populations of cities, etc.;
- Descriptions of the New Zealand course you wish to study that simply list the academic modules, copied from the school’s website;
Remember the advice above that the SOP is all about you and your opinions. Topics like ‘New Zealand’, and ‘My previous degrees’, and ‘My work history’ are ONLY important to give you a platform to describe yourself and your opinions.
For example, the student in the example above talks about their own MBA. Without a doubt, their MBA is a relevant topic to discuss in the SOP. However, it would be far better to talk about what the student’s favourite one or two papers were in that MBA, and why those papers were so useful or interesting to them, and why those papers led them to become interested in their chosen New Zealand course. This would involve expressing an opinion, which the example above completely fails to do.
Or when describing your interest in New Zealand, why not mention some country-specific facts that actually interest you, and say why they are interesting! This would be much more personalised than simply talking about New Zealand’s economy and education system without any commentary that comes from your own mind.
Mistake #5: Using a ‘task-focussed’ approach to discussing your work history
Example:
“In March 2018, I joined XYZ Software Solutions as a Senior Software Engineer. In this job, I designed, coded, and debugged software components using modern programming languages and frameworks. I also collaborated with product managers, designers, and other engineers to gather requirements and define technical solutions. I was expected to write clean, maintainable, and well-documented code, conduct code reviews and provide constructive feedback to peers.”
There are two ways you could describe your job. The most obvious one would be a task-focussed approach, like the example above, where you simply list a job description or talk about what you do/did at work.
If you were writing a cover letter for a job application for a hiring manager, then the types of descriptions above would be quite appropriate: this is because doing a job is indeed about performing specific tasks. The employer does not care what you plan to learn about, and how you will improve your skills in future. The employer only want to know what you can do for the company if they hire you.
On the other hand, learning a course is about learning new skills and acquiring new knowledge, not about carrying out duties. Therefore, you should instead adopt a skills- or learning-focussed approach to describing your job.
For instance, the writer above could first talk about joining XYZ Software Solutions as a Senior Software engineer, and what the experience was like for them in the beginning, middle, and end of that role. How did their previous knowledge allow them to enter the role? What challenges did they face in the beginning, and how did on-the-job learning help them overcome these challenges? What did they know by the end of the role, allowing them to get a promotion or a better job elsewhere?
Notice again that a skills-based approach talks far more about the writer and their thoughts, rather than focussing on the job itself – this is exactly what the SOP calls for, which makes a skills-based description much more personalised, as well as education-relevant.
Also, when talking about your job, avoid extremely technical descriptions like this:
I have expertise in software platforms such as .NET Core, Microservices, Domain-Driven Design, RabbitMQ, Apache Kafka, cloud platforms (Azure, OpenShift), CI/CD workflows, DevOps, and Kubernetes
The immigration officer is not a specialist in your field and will not understand this. Jargon like this will not benefit your SOP.
The dangers of allowing an agent to write your SOP for you
Now that you understand what the SOP is, you should understand why no education agent or LIA (including me) is capable of writing your SOP for you. It would be as if I gave you my CV and academic transcripts, and expected you, the reader, to write a 10-page biography that explains all of my life experiences as an LIA and describes my opinions and feelings in great depth. This would be literally impossible for you to do in a convincing way, no matter how good a writer you are. Similarly, as your LIA it would be impossible for me to write an SOP about you, a complete stranger who I just met.
Unfortunately, however, some agents still have dedicated SOP writers and handle the entire task for the client. The attitude is that you “leave it to the professionals”, who know what they are doing.
This is indeed very convenient, but it is a bad idea for two reasons.
Firstly, this is dishonest. This is because the agent will present to INZ a text that they wrote, but pretend that it was you who wrote it. This is no different than for me to use your name to open a bank account, for instance – it is clearly not allowed.
Secondly, the agent – who knows almost nothing about you – can only write the entire SOP using vague generalities like “New Zealand has an excellent education system” (a sentence says nothing at all about who you are and could have been written by anybody). Sometimes, they will copy/paste standard text paragraphs and pass these onto INZ, such that five applications received from the agent have almost the same SOP. If INZ discovers this, they are very likely to decline the application. Of course, many students still get approved despite applying using fake, agent-written SOPs. However, they are successful due to luck (because INZ did not realise the SOP was fake), they are not successful because their agent followed INZ’s expectations towards the SOP.
If there is nothing else you learn from this article, we hope you remember this:
Never, ever allow an agent to write your SOP for you! If for whatever reason the applicant is unable or unwilling to write the SOP (for example, the applicant is a very young primary school student), then it is much better for the agent to instead write a cover letter in the agent’s own name, rather than to write an SOP that pretends to be you but is written in the agent’s voice.
Why you should seek good professional help in writing your SOP
Although an agent or LIA should never be the one to write your SOP from scratch, this does not mean that a competent agent or LIA cannot help you to improve your own SOP, so that you come through in the text as the best possible version of yourself. As you can probably tell, writing a good SOP is extremely challenging, and doing it perfectly on your own without any practice or experience will not be easy.
While a mediocre or even poor SOP does not necessarily mean that a visa application will be declined, an excellent SOP can make the different between approval and decline, especially if your application has certain weaknesses in it. We have observed weak cases get approved thanks to a great SOP, and we have seen strong cases get declined thanks to a sloppy agent-written SOP. The SOP is, in my view, by far the single most important document you will submit to support your application.
With a good LIA who takes the SOP seriously and helps you amend it so that you portray yourself in the best possible way, your chances of success are likely to be much higher. With Choose New Zealand we will provide you with even more guidance than what you see here (this article is just a brief introduction to what the SOP should contain), and can review your SOP so that your second, third, or fourth draft meets the mark and can be tendered to INZ with confidence.
A perfect SOP
So, will you PLEASE give me a sample now of what a perfect, A+, flawless SOP looks like, so that I can write one like it?
Oh, you would like to know what a perfect SOP looks like? Sure, please see below:
There is no other way to put it: the SOP is a mirror, and you should see yourself in what you write from the very first word to the very last and the reader should know exactly why YOU, not as a generic “student” but as a unique person with unique life experiences and unique opinions, would want to study in New Zealand!
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This article is written by Choose New Zealand Licensed Immigration Adviser, Alain Koetsier (License No. 201900930)
DISCLAIMER: This article is for general information purposes only and is not a guide on how to apply for a visa. The article does not replace actual immigration advice tailored to your individual circumstances: if you trust your immigration adviser, you should follow their recommendations regardless of what this article describes.
