Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement; MS in Business Analytics SOP

Hi, Kindly review my SOP for MS in Business Analytics. Your feedback/comments are welcomed.

Data Science and Business Analytics

"Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement. "-W. Clement Stone
After achieving outstanding scores in high school, I was qualified to pursue my dream to become an engineer. My interest in business analytics and software engineering grew since I had the opportunity to work in two most prestigious software companies in India. Throughout my journey, I have come to appreciate business analytics as the crucial element of success for any business. Moving forward, I envision myself finding a position within the same bracket of decision makers who determine the wave of businesses across the globe. I want to pursue Masters in Business Analytics as a successive step to achieve my career goal to become expert in data analytics and I cannot imagine of any other platform than enrolling in a Master's program at one of the greatest institutions in The United States such as yours.

I elected Electronics and Telecommunications as my major in engineering college as it offered multiple courses, not just in electronics and telecommunication but in Computer science and digital data as well. As my journey continued, I graduated as Bachelor of Engineering excelling with distinction in my final examination. Each year several companies in India extend employment to the best engineering students. I was, with no doubt, one of them. I seized an excellent opportunity to work with a very renowned software company in Pune, Tech Mahindra Ltd., which offered me an associate software engineer position to handle a project with ATT known as Fulfilments. It is one of AT&T's Strategic Marketing Solution Group that is involved in the process of getting information of customers who buy AT&T services under specific promotion campaigns. To accomplish this, I had to work as a developer and an analyst with Databases such as Teradata v13.10 along with other tools and utilities such as Mainframes, Quality Center, AOTS BMC Remedy, Teradata SQL Assistant, etc. Throughout my tenure here, I received several awards and pats on the back. My work was appreciated internally by my team, my supervisors and by my clients in USA. This was one of the reasons to get appointed as a team lead which gained me the experience of mentoring new team members as well.

My affinity for software and data analytics did not end here. To accelerate my career and skills, I sought to even bigger challenges. I cracked one of the most difficult interviews with Infosys Ltd Company. After being appointed on a project with Barclay's, a UK based company, I worked on a module- Mortgage, that deals with various mortgage products Barclays offers like First-time buyers, Remortgage, Buy-To-Let, Existing Mortgages. Here I worked on Teradata and data warehousing more closely in financial domain which was critical, real time and demanding. This project provided me a chance to explore and get some hands-on Unix Operating System. My demonstration of professionalism in executing my tasks earned me more accolades and recognitions. One such award was regarding my contribution to automation of time consuming manual processes. Applying my knowledge in UNIX, Microsoft Excel Macros and Cognos, I could automate few such processes to eradicate manual intervention thus saving human efforts and cost.

After working with these companies for several years, I have understood importance of Business Analytics and use of different software tools and techniques for data analytics. I must now add the comprehension of global economy to my fundamental knowledge, and further embellish my intellect by mastering the prowess of business analytics to gain an edge over the others. I find the Business Analytics program at University of Texas at Dallas to be an ideal choice as it offers excellent coursework such as Data Science, Marketing Analytics, Decision and Operations Analytics, Financial Analytics, Healthcare Analytics, and IT for Analytics. Additionally, the program covers tools like SAS, R, Python, Hadoop, Stata, and Tableau. It will craft my skills necessary in data analytics such as Hadoop which many service providers are extensively using for Big Data analysis. It will cultivate my IT expertise of data analytics along with Data science and will assist me to extract knowledge and insights from data in various forms, either structured or unstructured. I can expand my understanding of financial analytics in the creation of ad hoc queries to answer specific business questions. Your program offers an extensive platform which would cater to my aspirations and help me review my learning of the years gone by. My keen desire to continue my future studies at your graduate school stems from the fact that it is one of the top colleges in USA having fine record of academic excellence and is backed up by expert faculty and research facilities.

UTD's Master of Science in Business Analytics course will be a stepping stone for me to grow in field of Data science. I am confident that with my engineering background and statistical work experience, I will not only contribute to the diversity of the class but will also bring in creative and effective ideas in duration of the course. My intellect, diverse skill sets and excellent undergraduate record are a testimony to my ability to do justice to your demanding graduate program. I intend to contribute to innovation and research by implementing my knowledge base and skills in the field of data science and Business Analytics. I sincerely hope that you will give earnest consideration to my application and grant me the opportunity to continue further studies in your esteemed institution.

Namrata, the essay is too full of information. It takes a tremendously long time to read, decipher, and analyze all of the given information in your essay. There are even some instances when the reviewer might question the validity of your claims due to its lack of proper information presentation. You need to cut down this essay in a manner that will highlight your abilities as a professional, represent your academic needs in relation to your profession, and then culminate in the kind of educational experience you hope to achieve as a student.

For starters, you need to stop bragging about how you got your job in the essay. You may brag, but limit it to only one sentence. For example, you can say "Having graduated magna cum laude from my class, I was immediately snapped up for employment by...". You can also say that "My accomplishments caught the eye of XXX to offered me the chance to come work for them..." You need to brag with a purpose, not just keep bragging in the paragraphs without proof. Each time you say that you received several awards, you need to say what those awards are and why it is important to the profession. Don't waste your time giving a job description in the paragraphs, the reviewer is going to be familiar with that. Instead, explain what accomplishments you made which led to the awards and recognitions. Forget the pat on the back. That doesn't mean zilch. You can get a pat on the back as a simple act of encouragement. It doesn't necessarily relate to a job well done. Highlight your job acquired skills in relation to your desire for higher study.

Explain what your career plans are that require higher education. What position do you envision yourself achieving in say, 5 years? Why do you believe that achieving this position is important to your career path? What is your endgame?

You need to better paragraph your discussion topics. Make the university discussion a stand alone paragraph that does not enumerate the classes you will be taking. Instead, discuss how you plan to use these classes to advance your learning. Which classes in particular are of interest to you? Why? How about the training experience? What sort of programs do you look forward to participating in at the university? How does that participation help to enhance your abilities as a future, higher ranking professional? Don't say "It will cultivate". The better wording would be along the lines of "By participating in these classes, I expect to enhance my interests in..." Such sentence presentations show that you have high expectations for these class participations of yours and as such, you will not suddenly drop out of the class as some masters students are prone to do.

It was a nice touch closing the essay with a mention of how you hope to help enhance the class experience. That works well towards increasing the diversity aspect of the university program. Keep that idea, but make it shorter. Overall, the essay has potential but comes across as too wordy. The reviewer may end up losing interest in what you have to say by the end of the first paragraph because your essay is so long winded, it becomes extremely difficult to read and remember. Remember, too little technical information is bad, too much information technical information is even worse because the reviewer will tend to not remember anything at all about your essay. It will cease to "pop" off the page.