"He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast." Leonardo da Vinci expressed it hundreds of years ago.
The significance of theory has never been declined in the last hundreds of years in academia, not only in the realm of science like physics but also in engineering including Computer Science. Scientists and engineers enjoy theories on Computer Science attained by predecessors in their researches and work. I am a member of those who are putting the limited theories that I learned when I was an undergraduate into my present work.
During my four years in Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, with a major GPA of 3.7 and the top 15% ranking of 200 students, I've gained a solid knowledge of mathematics, programming language, computer network, database system and so forth. In a reward for my excellent academic performance, I was awarded the Scholarship of Outstanding Students three times in a row. Meanwhile, I also seized every opportunity to sharpen my research ability through helping my supervisor with his project sponsored by Ph.D. Programs Foundation of Ministry of Education of China. Finally we published the paper P2P-based Network Platform for Research Collaboration for the Computer Science Magazine in China and my graduation project on the same research area won the Outstanding Graduation of Jiangsu Province in 2010. Experiences above are all persuasive proofs for my theoretical groundwork which could aid me to pursue either practice of industry or more in-depth theory in MA program.
After graduating, I chose China Telecommunications Corporation (China Telecom), the largest fixed-line telecom operator in the world, as my starting point of career. Being a service engineer, my job was maintaining the CTG-MBOSS (China Telecom Group-Management & Business Operation Supporting System). It was mainly about systems debugging, trouble shooting, and end-user training. These three parts of work improved my abilities of problems solving, communicating and putting theories into practice. During the first three months as a service engineer, I answered thousands of phone calls reporting malfunction of the systems, and helped them to solve the problems on the systems by correcting the dirty data in the database; I also endeavored to ameliorate the production efficiency by programming to streamline work processes. My programs were to discard redundant nodes in work processes so that the production efficiency would improve obviously. Thanks to the theories I learned in university, I designed and implemented the systems based on several courses such as software architecture, design pattern and programming language. Despite the success of my systems, there are still many possible aspects can be improved. Lacking more profound theoretical supports, I could hardly do any more optimization all by myself.
From the forth month of my career, I was transferred to the Operation Support System (OSS) project team in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province to work as Party A's personnel. The Party B we were about to cooperate was IBM. In the period of requirement analysis and architecture design, I was totally shocked by the senior consultants from IBM due to their sophisticated, advanced and effective solutions to the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) deployment. Maybe IBM has already established standardized solutions and processes for its employees to finish their tasks, nevertheless the consultants' outstanding methodology of analyzing and handling difficult problems, their profound understanding of software architecture's theory and their best practices expertise won my respects and promoted the progress of the project greatly. Their solutions to the SOA for China Telecom Jiangsu Branch overcome the complex production processes within the enterprise by properly abstracting the provision nodes and business scenes illustrated their strong background of theoretical analysis. Through conversation, I learned that they had all received master's education or above, so that they could easily transfer the universal solutions into specialized solutions with their solid theoretical foundation on software architecture.
Combining these two working experiences, I have got one conclusion that I should get further education in order to possess more profound theoretical basis, if I wish to achieve my higher career goal. MA program such as software engineering, database system and information retrieval is my best choice to fulfill my future career. That is the reason I choose your distinguished university. I believe my inspiring soul, keen observation, and welcome personality, will add a distinctive value and dimension to your university.
Experiences above are all persuasive proofs of my theoretical groundwork which could aid me in pursuing either practice of industry or more in-depth theory in MA program.
Despite the success of my systems, there are still many possible aspects which can be improved.
During the forth month of my career, I was transferred to the Operation Support System (OSS) project team in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province to work as Party A's personnel.
Their solutions to the SOA for China Telecom Jiangsu Branch overcame the complex production processes within the enterprise by properly abstracting the provision nodes and business scenes illustrated by their strong background in theoretical analysis.
They'll be lucky to have you as a student!
Good luck in school and have fun!
:)
