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I submitted my applications for United States doctorate programs in computer science with a personal statement. This statement detailed the meaning of research, academia, and AI to me, as well as my experience in the field and why I wish to attend that school, instead of career goals and in-depth examples of why I wish to pursue my specific subset of AI. This initially happened because I read a few posts detailing what people like to see in a computer science application that required a personal statement, which I absentmindedly assumed was the same thing as a statement of purpose. How much of an issue will this pose? Do I still have a change of getting accepted? I've applied to top 30 schools as I am coming from a fairly strong undergraduate university and have research experience.

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  • Why do you care? You can't know for certain either way! So you'll just have to wait and see anyway regardless of what anonymous people on the interwebs tell you...
    – user2705196
    Dec 15, 2019 at 1:16
  • I was planning on pursuing graduate school, but if my chances of acceptance have drastically dropped, I need to start planning on applying for jobs in industry when I graduate.
    – jarbus
    Dec 15, 2019 at 1:19
  • I wouldn't sweat the SOP too much. But you should definitely have a good plan for industry no matter what. Nurturing your industry connections now will be tremendously useful even after grad school... Maybe even during grad school!
    – user2705196
    Dec 15, 2019 at 1:29

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No one can really judge how others will look at your application, but there are a number of people here who are currently involved in doctoral admissions who say they ignore (or merely scan) the SoP. You missed an opportunity to detail your future plans and a specification of field, unless you stated that elsewhere.

But, I doubt that it is disqualifying. If your admissions materials paint a solid picture of your accomplishments and your letters of recommendation stress your likelihood of success you should be fine.

But if you have a chance to amend your application, you might want to do that. And fix it for future applications you might make.

This might be more of an issue outside the US-Canada region, I think, but probably not a huge deal here.

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