Ph.D. Motivation Letter

Hi everyone,

I'm writing a motivation letter for a Ph.D. application, and since English is not my native language I would really appreciate if someone could reviewing it and giving some hints on how to improve it. Thank you very much beforehand for spending your time to take a look at it.

This is my letter.

Dear Sir or Madam:

I am writing to apply for a Ph.D. position at XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. Specifically, I would like to be considered for the position titled: “XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX”.

In 2013, I received my Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with a thesis in High Performance Computing. I continued working on that project the next year, and after its completion, I earn an Iberoamerican research award in Spain, for “outstanding scientific research work”. By the end of December, this year, I will finish my Master of Science degree with a focus in Natural Language Processing, under the supervision of Dr. XXXXXXXX. I will complete my degree with honors and placed among the very best students of my year.

I became passionate about the NLP area two years ago, before starting my Master’s degree. Like other capabilities of our brain, it remains a big mystery how it is able to process the language. In recent years new methods, such as those based on Deep Learning, have gained a lot of interest because of the good results obtained on a wide range of NLP tasks using them. The scientific community is only scratching the surface, but it is an immensely interesting topic in which I would like to pursue a Ph.D. in order to deepen my knowledge and contribute to its development.

My master’s thesis work focused on the application of deep neural networks for Author Profiling (i.e., identifying gender, age, language variety, personality traits) on social media texts. I became conversant with the most common types of neural networks used nowadays for NLP and acquired a core formation in NLP through different curricular courses. Moreover, I strengthened my education by working in research projects about Sentiment Analysis and Author Profiling in the research lab in which I was undertaking my degree.

Furthermore, this year, I was accepted in the NLP research group at the XXXXXX, Italy, headed by Dr. XXXXXX, to carry out a research stay for four months. During the visit, I focused on the task of passage reranking for Question Answering, using deep neural network architectures. I had the opportunity to work on a task different from those familiar to me from my university group, broadening my preparation in the field and providing me with a rich international experience by interacting and collaborating with Ph.D. students and researchers.

Given the long history and reputation of XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, having world-renowned researchers, I believe it is one of the best options for me to continue my studies through a Ph.D. I am confident that I will exceed your expectations because of my academic achievements, practical background, and the international experience gained from my research stay. Additionally, if given the opportunity am sure I will meet my goals, bringing to your center my commitment to excellence.

Thank you for considering my application, and I look forward to receiving your acceptance.