Should You Name a Professor in Your SOP?

Should You Name a Professor in Your SOP?

Two public admissions pages, both written by the faculty who read the applications, both live right now, giving opposite instructions.

The University of California, Santa Barbara's physics department tells applicants: "Applicants are strongly encouraged to contact individual faculty members whose research interests align with their own early in the application process and to list potential advisors on their applications."

The University of Florida's English department tells applicants: "You are welcome to write to faculty members and let them know of your interests, but you should NOT seek a faculty advisor or faculty research sponsor ahead of applying."

Neither department is confused. They are describing two different machines.

The disagreement is about who has the power to admit you

The clearest statement of the underlying variable comes from Mitch Prinstein, the John Van Seters Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in his freely published applicant guide (revised 2021):

"Some programs allow each faculty member to make unilateral decisions regarding graduate admissions. Thus, your application is really meant to convince a single person to admit you, and your potential match with that person will be evaluated directly. Other programs make group-based decisions to varying degrees."

David Wittman, professor of physics and astronomy at UC Davis, describes the same split from the physics side:

"At some places, a faculty member must sponsor you for admission, whereas at others (most I would say, including UC Davis), a committee compares you with a large pool of applicants."

That is the whole disagreement. If one professor can admit you, your statement is a letter to that professor. If a committee admits into a department, your statement is a document for a room.

What the mentor-admit programs say

Where a single faculty member sponsors a student, the instructions get remarkably literal.

Northern Illinois University's clinical psychology program states it flatly: "We admit students to work with specific faculty members. In your statement of purpose (i.e., personal statement), please specify which faculty member(s) you are interested in working with and why."

An Ohio State psychology advising resource for graduate applicants collects examples of how programs word the question, including one that goes further still: "Include a rank-ordered list of the three faculty members with whom you most want to work."

The University of Rochester's clinical psychology program explains the reason: the committee "considers carefully the applicant's statement of aims to assess the match of his/her interests with program faculty and resources. Therefore, it is important for applicants to be as specific as possible about their research and training, and to specify the faculty member(s) with whom they would like to work."

Clinical psychology is the field where this instruction is published most often and most literally, which makes it the clearest place to see the mechanism at work — what clinical psychology programs read for reads eight of those pages side by side, from optional mention to a rank-ordered list of three.

And UCSB physics adds the second, sharper instruction that many applicants skip: "It is very important to indicate in your Statement of Purpose which faculty member(s) you are interested in working with and to be specific about which research areas you are interested in."

Some biology programs push the contact requirement into the application itself. The University of Florida's biology department asks for "a clear statement about the program you wish to enter in our Department ... and your prospective advisors (with whom you should already be in contact)."

What the pooled-admission programs say

Now the other side, and it is equally explicit.

Ohio State's statistics department publishes an FAQ item titled "Should I Seek Out an Advisor?" The answer begins with one word:

"No. Unlike some other departments, we admit students to the statistics department to work in statistics, but not to work with a particular faculty member."

The same page notes that master's students are typically advised by the Graduate Studies Chair, and that PhD students settle advisers around their third year. Naming a professor is not evidence of fit there. It is evidence you did not read the page.

Florida's English department gives the same instruction with a reason attached: "We encourage our admitted students to take courses and work with a range of faculty before choosing directors and committees." The department is protecting a design choice about how students find advisers, and it wants your statement to describe interests, not to pre-negotiate a supervision arrangement.

The middle position most faculty actually hold

Between the two poles sits a large, calm, and fairly consistent group: name faculty, but name them as evidence, not as flattery.

Jonathan Aldrich, Professor in the Software and Societal Systems Department and the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon, puts the mechanism plainly:

"Mention the names of specific faculty if you know you want to work with them. This helps to ensure the right faculty will read and evaluate your application. It's OK to mention more than one name, but naming the whole department is superfluous."

Norman Ramsey, now a retired professor (emeritus) at Tufts University, makes the routing function explicit and then adds the condition that does the real work:

"The admissions committee will use your statement of purpose to try to figure out who might be your research supervisor. If you know you want to work with particular faculty, by all means mention them by name. Just be sure to demonstrate you know something about them--if you appear to have picked a name out of a hat, you are unlikely to be admitted."

Faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder's computer science department, who compiled the department's PhD statement guidance, ask for "What research area(s) you are interested in and, specifically, which professors at CU Boulder would be a good potential fit. Consult the faculty's research to find specific overlaps of your interests with ours."

The University of Toronto's computer science department asks for the same thing with the justification attached: "Mention the professors with whom you would want to work in the department that you are applying to, and why you think your interests align. This shows that you've done your homework on the department."

Iowa's political science department wants names too, but frames them as teaching relationships rather than supervision contracts: "Be sure to mention which faculty members in our department you're interested in as teachers and mentors."

Notice what all four have in common. The name is never the point. The specific overlap is the point, and the name is how the reader checks it.

How to tell which reader you have, in about ten minutes

You do not have to guess. The programs publish this.

1. Read the program's own application page, not the graduate school's. The department page is where the mentor-admit instruction lives. Florida English, Ohio State statistics, and NIU clinical psychology all say what they want in plain language on their own admissions pages.
2. Look for the word "rotation." Bioscience programs with first-year lab rotations usually admit into the program, then match. Programs without rotations more often admit into a lab — which makes finding the right supervisor part of building the program list, not a step after it.
3. Look at how funding is described. If assistantships are attached to individual grants and named advisers, that points to sponsor-led admission. If funding is described as a department-wide package, that points to pooled admission. Either way, what PhD SOPs miss about funding covers how to show you understand the structure without asking for money.
4. Check whether the page invites pre-application contact. UCSB physics asks for it in writing. Florida English asks you not to seek an adviser. This sentence is usually one click from the application checklist, and whether to email at all follows from the answer.
5. When the page says nothing at all, treat naming as low-risk if it is specific. Every version of the middle position above tolerates two or three well-evidenced names. None of them tolerate a list.

Nearby courses are not necessarily available seats; check cross-registration access at another university before making an external class essential to your study plan.

In a master's statement

The same rule applies to a master's application, with one prior question: does the degree come with a thesis supervisor at all?

• Thesis or research master's: name one or two possible supervisors, with the overlap. The University of Toronto's electrical and computer engineering department says "MASc and PhD applicants must demonstrate significant potential for research and are encouraged to mention faculty members whose research programs are compatible with their own interests." That sentence covers its research MASc and PhD applicants, not its course-based MEng.
• Course-based master's: name courses, labs and capstones, not advisers. Ohio State's statistics department notes that "Master’s students are typically advised by the Graduate Studies Chair." When nobody admits you into a lab, the reader is checking whether you are ready for the curriculum and have a use for it, so the specific course, project or capstone you will use does the job a professor's name does in a thesis program.

Both department pages were checked on October 30, 2026. Our master's statement of purpose guide gives the same answer in its FAQ. If the program page says nothing either way, step 5 above still applies: two specific names are low-risk, a list is not.

Constructed example: how to write the professor paragraph

Constructed example, written by us, not a real applicant statement. Context (invented): an applicant to a thesis-based MS in civil engineering whose undergraduate project modelled stormwater runoff. The professors and the paper are invented too.

My senior design project modelled runoff from a 40-hectare campus catchment, and its weakest point was the infiltration estimate: we used a textbook coefficient because we had no field data. Professor Dana Ortiz's group measures infiltration on urban green-infrastructure sites, and her 2025 paper comparing measured rates with design values is the reason I am applying to the thesis track. I would like to study how measured rates change model predictions for small catchments like the one I worked on. Professor Sam Lee's hydrologic modelling course would give me the calibration methods my project lacked.

What it does:

1. It starts from the applicant's own evidence, the weak infiltration estimate, not from the professor's reputation.
2. One supervisor, one concrete overlap. Delete both names and the paragraph still states a research question with evidence behind it, so it passes the deletion test in the next section.
3. The second name is tied to a course, not to supervision, which is how a committee reader would expect a second faculty member to appear.

For a course-based version of the same program, drop the supervisor sentence and name what you will use instead. Constructed example, written by us, not a real applicant statement.

My senior design project modelled runoff from a 40-hectare campus catchment, and its weakest point was the infiltration estimate: we used a textbook coefficient because we had no field data. The program's hydrologic modelling sequence and its capstone with a city stormwater department would give me the calibration methods and field data my project lacked, for a design role sizing green infrastructure on small catchments.

Write so either reader can follow you

The honest position is not that one camp is right. It is that you may not know which reader you will get, and your draft has to survive both.

A paragraph that reads "I want to extend the sparse-recovery work in Professor X's 2024 paper on Y, because my senior project ran into exactly the failure mode described in section 4" works for a sponsor-led reader, because it is addressed to a person who can act on it. It also works for a pooled committee, because with the name removed it is still a specific, checkable research interest with evidence behind it.

A paragraph that reads "I would be honored to work with the distinguished faculty at your esteemed department, particularly Professors A, B, C, D and E" fails both readers, for different reasons.

The test is simple: delete every professor's name from your draft. If the paragraph still says something concrete about what you want to work on and what you have already done, you are safe in either admissions model. If it collapses, the names were carrying weight they cannot carry. Our Faculty Naming Check is a single-topic read of a draft on exactly that question: whether the fit you claim is carried by the evidence around each name, or by the name itself.

If you want a second opinion on whether that paragraph survives the deletion test, a review against a published rubric will tell you which camp your current draft actually satisfies.

If the portal asks for a primary field, use choosing the primary subfield in a political-science PhD application to map the project to the institution’s actual training structure.

Related reading

• How many professors to name in your SOP — the count question, once you have decided to name anyone
• What faculty look for in a statement of purpose — the wider set of faculty-authored advice
• US graduate SOP requirements — how programs describe the document itself
• Research proposal or life story? — the second big disagreement between SOP readers
• The hidden rules of the SOP genre — why the conventions stay unwritten

All quotations in this article were re-checked against their live source pages on 16 August 2026. Departmental policies change; verify against the program page you are applying to.