Writing a letter of motivation for a Masters program in engineering
In this article, I will try to explain my personal views on how to write a letter of motivation for a Masters program in engineering. I will provide my own letter of motivation, wich I used to apply to ETH Zurich for Computational Science and Engineering MSc program. Looking ahead, I can say that I was accepted to the university with this letter.
More about the Computational Science and Engineering MSc program in ETH Zurich you can find by following the link.
I will begin with a structure that I used:
- A hook;
- How my previous studying and knowledge will help to solve the problem;
- How my future studying and knowledge will help to solve the problem;
- Conclusion.
One thing that everyone must remember is that admission office recieves tons of letters each year/month/day depending on the popularity of the chosen university. In this case people who read your motivational letter don't have enough time and strength to carefully look through the whole letter. What most of them actually do is that they read the first paragraph fully and continue reading the whole letter only if they think that it worths it, otherwise they end up reading only first sentences of each following paragraph.
I hope you understand now that the first paragraph is the most important paragraph in the whole letter. In this passage many people write so called "a hook". A hook is a little anekdote, or your personal view, or even joke. Pretty much everything which can attract the reader is a hook.
In my case I wrote about my lifelong passion of thinking about space travels and how to improve the safetyness of them.
If you thought that everything in this letter is true, then you could not be more wrong! This is the biggest mistake which applicants from all over the world make. The purpose of the essay is not to write a truthful story (although it is also an option), but to sell yourself and your skills. I was applying for an engineering major, therefore I wrote about how much I wanted to solve an engineering problem and to change the world. In fact, I really chose this topic, because I love the rigour and complexity of the theory of magnetohydrodynamics.
But be careful with an anekdote! Not only should it attract the audience, but also it must show how this anekdote, how your real or fake interest, relates to your studying. Maybe you can give readers a few hints of how educated you are and how much you know already. In my case I wrote about a particular stage of landing process that I am interested in, mentioned how it relates to my academic field of interest and a direction of solving the problem, again relating to the academic program which I chose.
At the end, the reader must experience the following things:
Now that you have a good introduction, it is time to write one of the main paragraphs. This paragraph is, in my opinion, the easiest one, because you must explain how your previous education and, therefore, the obtained knowledge will help you either in solving a problem or in studying in the university in general. My chosen program is a combination of mathematics, physics, and computer science, which is the exact combination of fields that I am and was interested in, dealt with, and studied.
The second difficult part of the essay is the section where you write how the chosen program and the university itself will help you to achieve your goals in life. In this part you must persuade the reader that based on a thorough research and, probably, after contacting students who are studying on the program, or even a professor, you came up with a decision that this university and this program are the best possible option for you. In my case, I contacted a professor, who is specializing in my field (and who became my supervisor in the end), and searched through a university's online library of students' theses, looking for topics I am interested in, to show that people are working in this area and get results.
Last but not least is the conclusion. The purpose of this section is to summarize all what you have wrote so far with one idea in mind: "I am a student whom you want to accept". In my case, I also added a sentence about my long term goal to become a professor and that ETHZ will help me to achieve this task.
Of course, each university wants you to achieve your full potential, to do your best, so why not specify it?
Now you have a complete logical letter, which shows your knowledge and explains your passion for studying in the chosen university. That's precisely what the admission committee is interested in.
If you are thinking also about applying for a scholarship, here is another article which explains how to modify the written letter of motivation for the scholarship committee: Writing a letter of motivation for a scholarship.
A hook
I hope you understand now that the first paragraph is the most important paragraph in the whole letter. In this passage many people write so called "a hook". A hook is a little anekdote, or your personal view, or even joke. Pretty much everything which can attract the reader is a hook.
In my case I wrote about my lifelong passion of thinking about space travels and how to improve the safetyness of them.
If you thought that everything in this letter is true, then you could not be more wrong! This is the biggest mistake which applicants from all over the world make. The purpose of the essay is not to write a truthful story (although it is also an option), but to sell yourself and your skills. I was applying for an engineering major, therefore I wrote about how much I wanted to solve an engineering problem and to change the world. In fact, I really chose this topic, because I love the rigour and complexity of the theory of magnetohydrodynamics.
But be careful with an anekdote! Not only should it attract the audience, but also it must show how this anekdote, how your real or fake interest, relates to your studying. Maybe you can give readers a few hints of how educated you are and how much you know already. In my case I wrote about a particular stage of landing process that I am interested in, mentioned how it relates to my academic field of interest and a direction of solving the problem, again relating to the academic program which I chose.
At the end, the reader must experience the following things:
- He must be attracted to the story that you wrote;
- He must see that you have a simple understanding of what you are writing about;
- He must see that everything that you wrote somehow relates to the program which you apply for.
Previous studying
Now that you have a good introduction, it is time to write one of the main paragraphs. This paragraph is, in my opinion, the easiest one, because you must explain how your previous education and, therefore, the obtained knowledge will help you either in solving a problem or in studying in the university in general. My chosen program is a combination of mathematics, physics, and computer science, which is the exact combination of fields that I am and was interested in, dealt with, and studied.
Future studying
The second difficult part of the essay is the section where you write how the chosen program and the university itself will help you to achieve your goals in life. In this part you must persuade the reader that based on a thorough research and, probably, after contacting students who are studying on the program, or even a professor, you came up with a decision that this university and this program are the best possible option for you. In my case, I contacted a professor, who is specializing in my field (and who became my supervisor in the end), and searched through a university's online library of students' theses, looking for topics I am interested in, to show that people are working in this area and get results.
Conclusion
Last but not least is the conclusion. The purpose of this section is to summarize all what you have wrote so far with one idea in mind: "I am a student whom you want to accept". In my case, I also added a sentence about my long term goal to become a professor and that ETHZ will help me to achieve this task.
Of course, each university wants you to achieve your full potential, to do your best, so why not specify it?
Now you have a complete logical letter, which shows your knowledge and explains your passion for studying in the chosen university. That's precisely what the admission committee is interested in.
If you are thinking also about applying for a scholarship, here is another article which explains how to modify the written letter of motivation for the scholarship committee: Writing a letter of motivation for a scholarship.
Letter of Motivation to ETH Zurich
(Computational Science and Engineering MSc program)
I have always been fascinated by space travel. After much research on this topic, I discovered that space flights are extremely dangerous and many things can go wrong, thereby causing serious, even life-threatening, problems for the crew of the spacecraft. Human life is something sacred, something that we must protect by all possible means. That's why my desire is to make space travel safer. Inarguably, one of the most important and dangerous stages during any space flight is the process of landing, which consists of several stages. Probably, the most difficult stage to analyze is the entrance of a spacecraft into an atmosphere. Successful completion of this task requires numerical calculations and analysis of the dynamics of plasma flowing around the spacecraft. The result of these calculations provides the necessary spacecraft dynamics information, and whether the materials, which the spacecraft is constructed of, will withstand a given temperature.
To be able to solve this problem requires a synthesization of mathematics, physics, and computer science. Throughout my university years, I concentrated in different fields of study: computer science, celestial mechanics, cluster computations and continuum mechanics are among them. This interdisciplinary interest makes me think that your CSE program is a good match for me because it allows for the continued study of most of these topics in combination. As an undergraduate, my intense and thorough study of my major area subjects, as well as those subjects that didn't relate to the program curriculum, made me achieve higher results and more in-depth understanding of some fields of study than others in my cohort did. This makes me a good candidate for your program.
On the ETH E-Collection, I was able to find quite a few fascinating works in the field of both theoretical and computational MHD, the area in which I hope to concentrate during my MSc studies. Such works like Computational Magnetohydrodynamics with Discrete Differential Forms and Experimental and numerical study of electrically-driven MHD flow from the ETH E-Collection can be used as tools for solving my problem. The research interests of Dr. Mishra Siddhartha from the Department of Mathematics Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations and Computational fluid dynamics are the main theoretical tools for solving MHD problems; these and his lecture series about Numerical methods for MHD Equations and Numerical methods for hyperbolic PDEs could usefully inform the work I hope to do. After contacting Dr. Mishra, he said that he is interested in my particular problem and that he may supervise me if I will be accepted to the university.
In sum, I think that ETH Zurich is the best university for me to achieve my full potential and be able to make a valuable contribution to the ETH community. My long-term goal is to become an academic who will be able to break down complex subjects and explain them in detail in a way that would capture student interest, and I know ETH would help me on the way to this goal.
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