letter of Motivation
Specific Instructions include:
Why did you choose this program.
Why this College
What makes you suitable for this program
What industry you wish to pursue your career ie academia , Entrepreneur, Private Industry
Atmost 2 pages.
Respected Sir/Madam,
My name is XXXXX, A final year student of Computer Science & Engineering. I am writing this letter to express my interest in the M.Sc Data Science & Artificial Intelligence Program of TU/e.
I chose this program for my Masters because of my keen interest that I developed in this field during my initial years of Engineering. As a first year student our professors encouraged us to explore various aspects of Computer Science such as Data Science, Embedded Systems, Web Development, IOT and many such topics.
Even though most of us chose CSE out of our passion, CSE itself encompasses a variety of subjects for a student to find their calling. I spent my first year of engineering discovering, learning Data Structures, Frameworks such as React, NodeJS, Bootstrap etc which was typical for a First Year Student to explore, Yet I always felt the need to do something different as all that mattered to me was going beyond what was part of my
curriculum. This led me to take up Andrew Ng's Machine Learning MOOC on Coursera.
The first year of our programme especially the portions of Engineering Maths were planned such that any beginner would be able to grasp the mathematical aspects of classic Machine Learning Algorithms which was helpful in understanding Andrew Ng's course. Consequently, I began implementing what I learnt on Kaggle as it has numerous datasets to experiment with. Practicing on Kaggle introduced me to various problems when dealing with datasets like missing values, Handling Categorical Data, Using Univariate and MultiVariate analysis to study the effect of diff variables, Various Encoding methods that may affect the accuracy of the model, All this which are an instrumental part of Data Science.
As a Future Engineer I believe that the technical expertise & knowledge that I gain would be better utilized in innovation and solving real life problems. A small step towards this goal was when I developed one such project, An end to end ML Model to predict a Cryptocurrency price using Time Series Analysis and deployed the model on a website created exclusively for obtaining Cryptocurrency related information by utilizing various APIs to gather information such as Historical Price, Volume etc and finally Visualisation of Historical Prices and Future ones. Various methods such as LSTM, ARIMA, RNNs were used along with various hyperparameters such as batch size,epochs, loss functions and their accuracy was compared with the rest to find the perfect fit.
With my continued interest in this field of Data Science & Artificial Intelligence; As part of my final year thesis under the guidance of Prof XXXX, I am currently working on Left Ventricle Segmentation of Heart which employs various deep learning methods to segment the Short Axis MRI Image of the Left Ventricle. An important aspect of this research problem is to improve the accuracy of the existing methods of MRI Image segmentation. The Improved Accuracy is significant when analyzing the abnormalities that may or may not exist inside the heart.
I strongly believe that TU/e is the most suitable and the appropriate University for me because of its vision to incorporate science with society to help solve problems of different variety of domains and rely on data-driven decision making. TU/e focuses more on enhancing critical thinking of its students which enables them to push themselves to come up with innovative solutions, learn new concepts that could push one to truly be the kind of Engineer that the world needs. All this made me choose TU/e. As a Technical University, It is well regarded not only in the Netherlands but also throughout the world with its excellent reputation that is upheld by its Alumni. Being situated at Eindhoven, I feel that this would provide me with excellent opportunities to work with startups as it is often observed that startups are known to push beyond what is possible and bat for innovation.In addition to its academic programs and research opportunities, TU Eindhoven also offers a welcoming and supportive campus community which would be helpful for me as an International Student. Moreover curriculum wise, The choice of 6 courses that lays a foundational knowledge would be helpful for me to explore my interests especially the "Data Mining and Machine Learning" core course with its Machine Learning Engineering electives.
I believe that I am well suited for graduate studies in this programme for several reasons. One such is that I am hard working and a persistent student, Though I had a bit of a rough start in the beginning of my undergraduate programme I strived to continuously improve to the best of my ability and have been successful till now. Having opted for subjects such as AI, Foundation in Mathematics for Computing in my UG programme, Going through courses from Coursera & Udemy have laid a strong foundation in my understanding of the mathematical perspective of Data Science and instilled a solid understanding of classic ML/DL Algorithms and its real life applications.Though one may feel that they've done enough, I personally feel that there's still gaps in knowledge when it comes to this field such as How do I find the optimal number of layers for a Neural Network ? Is a certain loss function good enough for my purpose ? What hyperparameters do I need to experiment with to conclude that the given model does not overfit ?. These difficulties reinforced my desire for a master's degree in data science and helped me recognise the significance of a methodical approach that a school curriculum could provide.
In addition to collecting and analyzing data, I believe that the discipline of data science and artificial intelligence also involves dealing with stakeholders and understanding their expectations. The success of a project is greatly influenced by having outstanding communication skills and the capacity to ask the appropriate questions because this sector involves a wide range of diverse domains, including finance, healthcare,etc.
Due to my involvement in various student clubs and my experience engaging with people from various intellectual and socioeconomic backgrounds while living all over the country, I feel that this would be an added advantage for this programme.
I believe that this programme would help me pursue a successful career in the Corporate world which would be intellectually challenging but with great opportunities that would not only help me gain valuable experience but would also establish my credentials.