Hi all,
Any feedback regarding my Statement of Purpose is appreciated!
This has too many specific writing considerations for a free consult. Please contact us privately. EF
This the requirement of the Statement of Purpose for UC Berkeley's Data Science program (there is no word limit, but the program consultant says it should be within 2 pages):
Please describe your aptitude and motivation for graduate study in Data Science, including your preparation for this field of study and your future career goals. Please be specific about why the UC Berkeley MIDS program would be a good intellectual fit for you.
The following is my Statement of Purpose
(I'm not native speaker):
The red plum blossoms revealed their fragrance on the branches, swaying in the cold winter wind, and blooming remarkably in the ice and snow. In the icy world, the red plum blossoms have become a beautiful landscape. The harshness of winter and the coldness of snow are the unavoidable pain that the plum tree can ever avoid; if they overcome it, they can bloom with brilliant colors. As far as I can see, life is the same. My life experience is like plum blossoms, slowly growing from a seed to a big tree, waiting for the day when it blooms stunningly.
I was born and raised in a small town in China, where students were not allowed to use laptops at school because teachers were afraid that they may spend too much time playing games on them. I didn't own a laptop until I came to the United States at age eighteen. At that moment, I was like a muddleheaded seed. The outside world was full of strangeness to me, making me look forward to but also afraid. Programming class was required in my freshman year, where I started writing my first line of code, and then the first function, the first project. Seeing the code I wrote instructing the robot to do all kinds of stuff, I knew that's what I'm passionate about and willing to do for my career. The challenging yet fascinating classes I took validated my thoughts - algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning, database, computer graphics, etc. Besides these, I also did research with professors for three semesters, where I designed and implemented the full stack of an Android app to track asthma patients' health conditions. Slowly, I began to adapt to university life. The help I received from professors and classmates made me feel safe and warm; the seed seemed to have found a big family and has developed a sense of belonging.
In order to grow quickly, the seed worked hard to absorb nutrients from the soil, waiting for the moment to break the ground. Not only did I handle the demanding school courses well, but I also gained lots of experience from the real industrial world. I joined my school's co-op program, which meant alternating semesters of school and work. I worked in Dell SecureWorks for three semesters, where I utilized the knowledge I learned in school and also expanded my skills to the real industry. I learned many helpful techniques from this co-op program: RESTful Web service, Spring Security framework, Ajax, Mockito library, MySql, Java Database Connectivity, PHP, AngularJS, Bootstrap, scraping, multi-threading, etc. After the co-op program was completed, I joined Yahoo for an internship, where I got familiar with big data and MapReduce. I worked on Yahoo's audience data systems with massive scale, which handled over 100 billion events per day. My project decreased input records by 99% and reduced cumulative CPU time by 60%. At the end of the internship, I wrote a paper and it was accepted to Extremely Large Databases Conference 2017. During college, I not only learned professional knowledge and kept a high GPA, but also gained broad knowledge from working in different companies. My college life was really fascinating and fulfilling. I could never forget how thrilled I was when I received a job offer from Google in New York- my dream company in my favorite city. I never heard about anyone getting hired by Google as an undergraduate new grad in my school before. At that moment, the seed sprouted, poked its head out of the ground and looked around excitedly and curiously under the spring sun.
In order for the small bud to grow into a big tree, it worked hard every day to absorb sunlight and nutrients, and actively grow upward. My positive attitude towards challenges helps me to excel at work. I joined the Google Ad Manager team, where we serve ads for big publishers, e.g., New York Times and Disney. The whole system was written in a strange language to me - C++, and the system is so complicated that many new hires decided to transfer to other teams rather than dealing with the complexity. I knew anything can be resolved with a certain amount of determination. I picked one of the most difficult projects, but also has the most impact - which fundamentally shifted the architecture to generate higher revenue. I designed and implemented this project independently, and drove it to finish with high quality. I was rewarded with an Engineering Excellence award and got promoted. During this project, I also faced the challenge that some engineers from the feature team were not convinced that this huge infra change would bring much benefit, and my work got blocked. I proactively communicated with them and persuaded them in the end. They even became strong supporters towards my promotion. I also worked on several code health related projects, and my favorite one was "Ad Selection Data Simplification", which made engineers' life significantly easier that I got the Code Health reward. In the process of growing up, the small bud would not always encounter sunny weather, and sometimes it had to fight against violent storms. As long as it faced with a positive attitude and an optimistic mood, it can always usher in a bright scenery.
Gradually, the small bud grew into a young sapling. In order to make itself strong, it continued to grow hard. The field in Google I've been working on for four years is ads' selection. The system to select the best ad to serve is still mechanic. Nowadays, our team is also developing machine learning models to predict the best ad to serve that users are more likely to view or click on, but the results are not satisfying, which cannot beat the current non-machine learning system we have. Therefore, I want to learn more in this area to develop a better machine learning model to select ads, and optimize more components in our system to utilize machine learning techniques. Additionally, I have a long term goal, that is, bringing traditional Chinese medicine to more countries. Many people are not convinced that this traditional Chinese medicine works because traditional Chinese doctors cannot explain why it works. Traditional Chinese doctors diagnose patients' symptoms and then prescribe different combinations of Chinese herbal medicine. They know what kinds of Chinese herbal medicine should be given based on different kinds of symptoms, but they cannot explain the logic behind it. I believe in Chinese herbal medicine because my sickness got healed most of the time with the doctors' prescriptions, so I think there is logic in this traditional medicine and it's just not found out yet. Even though it's a traditional industry, the symptoms can be clearly labeled for machine learning. If this can be verified with a machine learning model, more people will be convinced and benefit from this ancient medicine. Moreover, I want to develop an app where patients can get a diagnosis and the prescription conveniently.
The young sapling wants to continue to absorb nutrients to prepare for the gorgeous bloom, which is the reason why I'm applying for the Data Science program at UC Berkeley. UC Berkeley was my dream school when I was in college. I visited the campus once and it was breathtakingly beautiful. UC Berkeley is known for holding the best data science program and there are so many classes I look forward to, such as Applied Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, etc. What impresses me the most is the excellent diverse faculty. Googler professor Gillick teaches Applied Machine Learning; Professor Greiner who has a bachelor's degree in both biomedical science and theater teaches data visualization; Professor Shanahan who spent 20 years as a dairy farmer is now teaching Machine Learning at Scale. I always admire diversity, which is also the reason I love Google and New York, both of which embrace and value diversity. I could not be more certain that UC Berkeley is the place I want to be.
Day and day, the sapling grew taller and taller, stronger and stronger. Day by day, I'm excited to see a better self: from knowing nothing about computers to graduating from one of the most demanding schools - Georgia Institute of Technology with a 3.94 GPA, to joining my dream company Google as a software engineer. I am excited to start the next chapter and testify what I could achieve. The saplings will not be afraid of wind and rain, but strive to grow stronger all the time. One day, it will bloom proudly in the icy wind and show the beauty of red.