please help me with your valuable comments:
Statement of Purpose
I am Rajan K. Zachariah and I graduated with an MS degree in Information Management from the University of Maryland at College Park in Dec 2009. I wish to pursue a Doctoral program in Computer Science to fulfill my long term objective − a research career in academia. I am fascinated by inter related computer science fields such as Artificial Intelligence, Computer Networks and Database Systems. I would like to be a part of the University Of Maryland's advanced research (initiative/project/work) on Network Security and Cloud Computing.
I have always been intrigued by technological innovations and concepts that stimulate the mind. I was a top performer in both mathematics and science throughout the high school. Later, I got a chance to dabble with computers and was fascinated by the way they worked. I planned and worked towards a career in software engineering. I did my undergraduate studies in Computer Science & Engineering from Anna University, a top ranking university in India. I was involved in two research projects during my undergraduate studies. I worked with Prof. Rajan Babu and his research group on distributed systems. The research project was to create a Linux cluster of all the lab machines which could enable us to rent out computing cycles during night time so as to use idle computing resources. Later, I was involved in another research project called 'Adapt', an XML implementation with a goal to make software programming a language independent task. This project was selected as a finalist in the All India CII (Confederation of Indian Industries) contest in 2004-05. For My undergraduate internship, I did a research project at Center for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at Defense Research & Development Organization, Bangalore. The project involved developing an Interface Designer using Java (and Java swing) which could be implemented to design forms that could print, fill, scan and synchronize with an OCR engine and enabled the hand-written data on forms to be directly inserted into the database.
Towards the end of my under graduation, I got placed with Wipro Technologies, one of the largest software service organizations in India. I worked as a software vendor for Microsoft. As a Senior Software Engineer in their Software Automation & Tools division both in India and in Seattle, I was exposed to various ideas unknown to most parts of the world, including technologies like Medusa, Surface and an early version of Azure. I met people who influenced and shaped my thinking on user perception beyond technical capabilities. I was introduced to advanced technologies involving secure distributed computing and concepts like knowledge management and decision making systems. As a result, I was motivated to do a Masters in Information Management, where much importance is given on business and user needs with the help of technology. By this time, I really started to understand that technology is an instrument to empower users in terms of communication, collaboration, entertainment, etc.
...
