I am applying graduate program in civil engineering and planning to go to Columbia University. Please review my personal statement harshly, i appreciate any criticizm.
1) please check my grammatical mistakes
2) the content (like what do i do in graduate school, my acadmic acheivement as well as my working experience, why i am a qualified student, etc)
When I was young, I knew I would inevitably become an engineer in the future. It was because my father was a civil engineer and dedicated his life to that field. The genes of engineering just happened to be in my blood. However, my dad once tried to prevent me from following in his footsteps. His argument was established based on his life-long experience working in the engineering worksite. He said the job was very stressful and gave little time for rest. He always worked from Monday to Saturdays from 8am to 6pm. Moreover, he sometimes needed to work overtime until 7 pm. Although my dad did not want me to be an engineer, it did not stop me from choosing engineering to be my major in college. I found that engineering has enchanted me since I was young as I am particularly interested in buildings.
I always believed the only standards that could have judged if I were a qualified engineer was my GPA. In college, I studied hard and got as many A's as possible. Thus, I once had a GPA as high as 3.9. However, an idea of getting a high grade changed when Professor Jim Quinn told us that a boss won't judge his employees' abilities on their college GPA. Instead, a qualified engineer should satisfy the needs of a project and should be able to provide a solution to an intractable engineering puzzle in the report. Therefore, the skill of writing an easy-to-comprehend report is pivotal to both my graduate study and career. However, I did not do so well in my first engineering writing class. Nevertheless, I learned quickly and improved in my second engineering writing class. While writing a report, I needed to perform plentiful amount of research. That enhanced my researching skills and made me realize that the world is "big" and I have not grasped as much knowledge as I thought I did. I am still far from being an erudite person. The desire to acquire more knowledge motivates me to continue my study in graduate school.
The appreciation toward buildings and structures has driven me to study civil engineering in graduate school. I deeply understand that civil engineering is important to the development of human society, especially I live in Hong Kong where is the most vibrant city in the world. As I have a chance to select an area of concentration in Columbia University, I would like to focus on structural engineering. I eagerly want to participate in constructing the city by making tunnels, designing roads, bridges and large-scale building structure. By saying that, I did research about the graduate courses in Columbia University, I am so interested in some of the civil courses such as Advanced design of steel structures and concrete structures ( CIEN E4226y, CIEN E4232y), the Design of large scale bridges and large-scale building structures (CIEN E4233x, CIEN E4234y). I am so excited just by imagining that I have a chance to undertake the complete design of a building structures from conducting the initial design concepts and the selection of the materials, to calculate the force distribution on the beams and on through all the major design decisions. I promise I will do extremely well in my graduate study because those are what I am really interested in and give me great satisfaction.
Moreover, my academic achievement at Stony Brook University has proven I have the competence to deal with the intense curriculum in graduate school. Solid mechanics and engineering dynamics were my two favorite classes because those two classes required complex quantitative and force analysis. I obtained huge satisfaction when I was able to tackle all the hard questions by calculating the force distribution on every truss so that the whole structure did not fail. I learned quickly and often obtained very high points for every midterm. In order to challenge myself, I always picked the hardest question in every section of the textbook and fully utilized the knowledge that I learned in class to solve it. However, I still felt that my knowledge was lacking. Although I was able to calculate the force that every joint was able to resist, I am missing necessary knowledge such as finite element analysis that could have helped me solve much more complicated questions, or even predict failure due to unknown and theoretical stresses.
In my freshman year, I worked as a summer trainee at Dix Construction & Transportation Ltd. This company mainly helps the government build sewage pipes. The working experience at this company taught me that possession of good communication skills is necessary for every engineer. That is because an engineering project is usually a massive group project which requires coordination from each member in the group. As a sophisticated machine, like a project, is composed of numeral compounds, each pulley or engineer plays their own role; more importantly, they need to "talk" to each other in order to make the whole machine run smoothly.
Furthermore, the working experience deepened my understanding of the drainage system and kindles my interest of fluid dynamics. One of the managers there told me that he once helped the company save a lot of money by combining two pipes into one pipe. The insight of knowing how to make such changes requires an abundant knowledge of fluid mechanics and structural analysis. What he had done fascinated me because designing a pipe that could bear the turbulence of the water created inside and the amount of flow withstood by one pipe was not an easy task. Moreover, he also told me that what I learn in the undergraduate program is insufficient and suggested me to go to graduate school while I was still young. I found his words convincing and I wanted to possess as much knowledge as possible to resolve convoluted problems. That is why I decided to go to graduate school.
After completing my masters degree, I would like to work in a engineering consulting company such as AECOM that designs and analyzes large-scale building structures or bridges. At that time, I hope I will become a qualified civil engineering consultant that can contribute my effort to a civil engineering project. I sincerely hope Columbia University can provide me a chance to study and fulfill my goal.
I knew I would inevitably become an engineer in the future.
... this does not sound very logical. It is better you present your passion for engineering in a more convincing way to them.
When I was young, I knew I would inevitably become an engineer in the future. It was because my father was a civil engineer and dedicated his life to that field.
I guess you can combine these two ideas and present one interesting sentence. Tell them you got inspired by your father.
The genes of engineering just happened to be in my blood.
... this does not sound good either as an idea... Fails to make much impression and sometimes they may take you wrong thinking that you try to boast
