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What do they want to see in this? I have checked their website and could not find any useful information. They also ask for a Research Statement. Should I just think of Statement of Interest as a Personal Statement and not mention any research since there is a seperate Research Statement? Thanks!

Hi All, (Not sure if the is the right forum for this sort of a question. Please excuse me if not) Here is my background: I was enrolled in a decent PhD economics program (top 30) back in 2018. Soon after I started out in August, my personal life took a a turbulent turn and pretty early on (circa Dec'18 - Jan'19) I decided to drop out of the program and return to my home country, due to urgent family+personal reasons. Now that things are returning to normal slowly but surely, I want to pick up the pieces and get back on track. So I am planning to apply for next year's cycle. But I have a ton of questions that are making me pretty concerned. Could you guys please share your thoughts on these ? 1) Whether I should talk about these developments in my personal letter, in detail? (emphasis on "detail") 2) I am skeptical about whether the schools I am applying to will buy this. (For understandable reasons) the schools might suspect that I dropped out because I failed my prelims (truth is, my aim was only to graduate with the Master's degree and come back ASAP) 3) Don't know if my previous letter writers will consent to writing a letter again. 3.1) Since nothing has changed between the last time they wrote it (2017) and this year I wonder if the same letter can be reused? 4) Will the fact that I was once enrolled in a PhD program, in general, hurt my chances of re-entry into another? Thanks a lot, all!

Topic: Not everything that is learned is contained in books. Compare and contrastknowledge gained from experience with knowledge gained from books. In your opinion, which source is more important? Why? Everyone has their own preferred way to gain knowledge. I agree with statement that not everything learned is contained in books. I feel that way for two reasons which i will try to convince in the following paragraphs. First of all, we can find very personal advice from cyber source, such as blog, video log and beauty website, and from communication easily. Recently, it is been popular to share one's personal experience over social media which is practised and valued for that person. Also, you can see if things written in books are actually real from personal results. For instance, I saw many videos made for to check if some kind of home remedies and hacks are true. Some of those were total failures if I were to try for myself. Moreover, as an graduate striving to find very helpful but rare professional papers to gain knowledge, it is easy to find from internet. Depending on where one lives, studies or works, finding books from reliable source is hard. For example, I felt that way when I was in university and studied about rare earth elements, because that specialised field of study was not popular in my country. At that time all source I could search for scientific paper was internet, which was easy accessible. In addition, becoming cyber is environmentally friendly as we do not need to print on papers. For these reasons I presented, I believe the most important source to gain knowledge is internet which might also help environmental conservation.

I was kindly wondering what are the questions and categories I should hit on when writing the PS. Thank you!

What kinds of information, both normal and special types, would resonate the most in a personal statement for MA in Economics? Especially if I'm trying to get a TA position? Thanks in advance.