Hello, I am a Portuguese student and I am going to apply to several PhD programs in Electrical Engineering / Computer Science in different universities (MIT, Stanford, CMU and UC San Diego).
Bellow is a draft of the "template" I wrote for my SoP. If someone could criticize it, point out what can I improve, or give me useful suggestions, I would be very grateful.
Thanks in advance
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Since I can remember, I have always enjoyed imparting knowledge and sharing my skills. Both in college and high-school, I devoted a fair amount of time helping my colleagues understanding the subjects in which I was most interested. Additionally, from the moment I took my first courses on image and signal processing and machine learning, and started to realize the potential impact of these tools on a wide range of real-world applications, from medical imaging analysis to speech or language processing, my future career plans became clear. Hence, I am seeking admission to the PhD program in ... at ... University because I intend to pursue an academic career, where I can focus on research and teaching activities associated with signal processing, machine learning and related subjects.
Academic background
As a high-school student, I excelled in all science related subjects, while playing in a soccer team recognized by the Portuguese Soccer Federation (Federaçăo Portuguesa de Futebol) where I was team captain for 2 years. My high grades, along with a perfect score in the math national exam, gave me full freedom to choose from any Course/University. After a year in the Aerospace Engineering course at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), I realized that the Integrated Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) was more focused in the areas I was most interested, which is why I changed courses.
In the first few years of the undergraduate course in ECE, my grades in some courses did not reflect my true potential. At the time, I was still uncertain about my future and since I had no specific goals in mind, I was unmotivated. However, in the courses that most interested me and which are mostly associated with the area I now intend to pursue in graduate school (such as Algebra, Calculus, Signals and Systems or Automatic Control), I always achieved excellent marks scoring within the best 10% of students according to ECTS scores. After realizing that graduate school was my future, I focused completely on the course and completed the specialization on "Systems, Decision and Control" with an average grade of 18 (in a 0 to 20 scale), which corresponds to the 99th percentile in a population of previous students that completed the same course. After graduation and up until now I have been working as a research assistant in project "ADIAR - Alzheimer's disease: Image Analysis and Recognition" at ISR-IST (Institute for Systems and Robotics).
Research experience
Apart from small projects carried out individually or to fulfill the requirements of academic courses, most of my research experience is linked to project ADIAR, where I started working in the last term of the course for my final thesis. The goal of this project is to get a deeper insight into the manifestations of Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer's disease on 3D brain images (such as FDG-PET, PiB-PET or MRI), and to improve the accuracy of automated systems for the diagnosis of these medical conditions. My MSc thesis, entitled "Automated Diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease using PET Images," which was awarded the highest possible score (20 on a 0 to 20 scale), focused on the study of the discriminative power of a wide range of features, including original generalizations to 3D data, and the use of different feature selection algorithms. After graduation, I kept working on the same project, and I have been studying, among other things, the use of visual dictionaries in a bag of features approach, ensemble classifiers and semi-supervised learning. I was also responsible for the inter-subject registration of a large dataset of MRI and FDG-PET brain images. This research has produced, so far, 4 conference papers (3 of them on international conferences) and 1 journal paper. It is also worth mentioning that during the time I have been working in project ADIAR, I was awarded 2 research scholarships from the Portuguese Government's Foundation for Science and Technology (Fundaçăo para a Cięncia e Tecnologia, FCT).
Aptitude for graduate studies
I am aware of the challenge that working on a PhD represents, and the difficulties that await me. However, I know that I have the qualities required to be successful in this endeavor. First of all, I am deeply focused and committed when I set up a goal for myself, and pursuing an academic career in a major university or research center is a long-term goal for which a PhD is an essential requisite. I am also proactive and can work independently. Additionally, as can be seen in some of my published works, I have the ability to come up with novel and innovative ideas and to approach problems from different perspectives. Finally, going beyond academic requisites, I try to attend relevant courses and symposia which may be relevant to my areas of interest. I attended the "LxMLS - Lisbon Machine Learning School", which is an annual one week seminar focused on a wide range of Machine Learning topics and their application to Natural Language Processing problems. I also attended a graduate level course on Estimation and Classification during the last fall semester, and plan to attend a second graduate level course during the next spring semester, called Non-linear Optimization.
Areas of interest
Even though for the last two years, my work has been focused on Machine Learning applied to biomedical images, my research interests go beyond this. Speech processing and natural language processing are two additional areas that capture my interest. ... University has [MAIN REASON WHY I'M APPLYING TO THESE UNIVERSITY], which is why I am applying to this program. I found Prof. ... line of research particularly interesting, in particular, ... My interests also align with the ones of Prof. ..., mainly due to ...
Concluding remarks
In conclusion, even though I already had the opportunity to join industry, my mind and my heart are in the academic realm. I feel that the PhD program in ... at ... University is a great opportunity for me to embrace a scientific career that is only worth pursuing in a world class university. The prestige, quality of education and research possibilities make me want to join ... University to further my studies.
PS: I would like to thank the admission committee for the time spent reviewing my application.
