Posts by Diahr

Diahr

Jan 4, 2022

Letters / Motivation letter for Master's program in Data Science (no specific instructions for the content) [2]

Good day, everyone.

I have written a motivation letter but I am not sure about the contents. In the letter, I tried to present a story as to how I came to the desire to apply for the program. However, I feel that it may be too focused on the progress rather than on the results. Yet, I am not sure if it would be better to elaborate further on past achievements since they are already mentioned in the CV and several letters of recommendation. For instance, in the 4th paragraph, I only mentioned that I overcame a problem when in fact, it resulted in a publication, which got the best paper award.

I will be glad for any feedback. Thank you in advance for your work.

The directions from the university are as follows:

The motivation letter should be written in English. The maximum length of the motivation letter is about 4000 characters. There are no specific instructions for the content of the motivation letter except for the general advice that you should write a separate motivation letter for each study option you apply to.

THE MOTIVATION LETTER:

Dear admissions committee,

During my second year at the university, I had an assignment for an English class: to present one's research essay before classmates. However, no one had slides at hand due to sudden schedule changes, so we decided to deliver it the old-fashioned way---with blackboard and chalk. The presentation, as I lectured, drew figures, interacted with the audience, quickly became a memorable experience. It made me realize that I wish to conduct research and share it with others.

Ever since I have been looking for opportunities to participate in academic events. One week, our department had a visit of [visiting professor] from [university A] to present his non-profit educational project [project A] to students of [city]. I loved the project's idea of teaching children from all around the globe to code, so, having asked the professor from our side, I was appointed as [visiting professor]'s assistant. The chance provided me with unique experiences: accompanying [visiting professor] around the campus; helping him prepare presentations; as an interpreter, assisting communicate with the audience; further, volunteering as a software developer. All this sparked my interest in international collaborations, strengthening the desire to become a professor one day.

Because of the new interest, I started to look for opportunities to spend a semester abroad. My application for the [scholarship name] scholarship was successful, and I began an exchange at [university B]. There, to my content, I was able to take master's courses in computer vision and statistical modeling, getting precious knowledge in areas related to machine learning, which has always interested me. Over time, I had become confident enough in the material of both courses and wanted to apply it in the real world. Therefore, having a goal of conducting research and, if possible, strengthening collaboration between universities, I came to ask a practice sessions assistant about the possibility of volunteering in the computer vision laboratory. Several days after, I was appointed to the [project B] project to save endangered [A and B species] ringed seals.

Since then, I have been working on ringed seals pattern patch matching: participating in weekly meetings, helping to write articles, independently investigating other re-identification approaches. The investigation led me to global pooling techniques used in image retrieval, which substantially improved the patch matching accuracy. However, they have the drawback of losing information about the spatial distribution of features. To overcome it, I employed knowledge gained from the statistical modeling course. Presently, I wish to further research representation learning by combining computer vision and statistics. Specifically, I want to investigate the applicability of Bayesian methods to CNN features to ensure robust metric and continual learning.

I believe that [target program]'s doctoral track is the best place for me to contribute to the field and to strengthen international cooperation. First, there is a computer vision professor [professor A] whose doctoral students have been working on problems closely related to that of my interest: semantic matching, image retrieval, continual learning. Therefore, I think I can be a valuable asset to his research group, further investigating these topics from a slightly different angle. Second, [target university] has a Probabilistic Machine Learning group with world-class researchers in Bayesian Deep Learning. Considering [target university]'s focus on collaboration, I am confident that we could work together on such interdisciplinary research, sparking ideas in each other. Lastly, [target university]'s emphasis on internationalization would give me an excellent opportunity to expand my international research network. Thus, I could give back to the world by increasing the number of research and educational collaborations around the globe.

Thank you for your time and consideration. I am looking forward to us pushing frontiers of computer vision together.

Yours faithfully,

[Name]

Diahr

Jan 7, 2022

Writing Feedback / Oral communication plays a more vital role than the written one in our life [3]

The writing prompt reminds me of one of the TOEFL independent writing tasks. As a student, who did pass the exam and got 28/30 points on writing, I believe that I may help you a little bit. However, please take my answer with a grain of salt as I am just a student who learned some core ideas behind effective written communication.

Your essay is quite strong and shows a clear paragraph structure. Nevertheless, your introduction lacks a clear thesis statement. Now, I can advise you to spend a few minutes before writing the essay on preparing a short outline. Nothing fancy, it should just state whether you agree with the main idea or not. Below it, you should write two to three reasons why you agree/disagree. Three is better, but if you do not have time or can not come up with the third, it is always fine to have only two. For instance, in your essay, you have two reasons:

1) Spoken communication is more powerful because nowadays people can easily get in touch with others through the internet.
2) I find that oral (=spoken) communication is more powerful since it requires direct interaction between speakers.

When having this little outline you can actually start writing an essay. And it will be easier, too, because you already know what to include in your thesis statement.

About the thesis. It should clearly present your opinion and be arguable (=contain your reasons). For this task, your thesis could have been something like this:

"I totally agree that spoken communication is more powerful than written because nowadays people can easily get in touch with others through the internet and because it requires direct interaction between speakers."

See, now the reader will know what exactly the essay will be about. If you are more into advanced grammar, you may also use colons. For instance,

"In my opinion, spoken communication is more powerful than written: it is easily accessible through the internet; it requires direct interaction between speakers."

Again, I am not a native speaker and may have made a mistake since it has been several months since I took the test. Nevertheless, you get an idea: lists can be utilized in the thesis to, well, list your reasons.

Now, you may also want to meat-up your introduction. To do so, you may start with some general statements. E.g., people have been communicating for decades and throughout have invented different kinds of communication. After such a statement, you may write a sentence about opinions that people have about these types of communication. For instance, your sentence here: "People, who disagree with the idea that spoken communication is more beneficial than written communication, may argue that written communication is more accessible, as messages can be viewed anywhere." is perfect. However, you may want to write about the other side of the conflict as well. For example,

Some people disagree with the idea that spoken communication is more beneficial than written communication since they believe that it is more accessible, while other people may find spoken communication more enjoyable as they can see other people's reactions.

So, to sum up, the introduction would look something like this:

People have been communicating for decades and throughout have invented different kinds of communication. Some people disagree with the idea that spoken communication is more beneficial than written communication since they believe that it is more accessible, while other people may find spoken communication more enjoyable as they can see other people's reactions. In my opinion, spoken communication is more powerful than written: it is easily accessible through the internet; it requires direct interaction between speakers.

It is a draft, for sure, but may give you an idea. Now, having a clear thesis statement, you can easily start each paragraph with a topic sentence (since you have written them all in the outline, remember?)

Overall, your examples are sound and understandable, so just focus on a thesis and topic sentences.

Keep up the work and good luck!

Diahr

Jan 7, 2022

Scholarship / Academic objectives and Computer engineering [5]

@Somebody3 Hello, I only finished my bachelor's several months ago, so please take my answer with a grain of salt.

As I see it, you only answered the question "what?" It is all good to start a business that will focus on quantum computers. However, the reasoning is not compelling. Try to think "why" you want to start a business. It is difficult for me to come up with reasons since I do not know your situation, but to answer such a question, one has to come up with a specific problem that he wants to solve. Maybe you want to find habitable planets? For this reason, it may be useful to simulate the universe, which, however, will require an abundant amount of computing power. Now, quantum computers shine in this aspect as they can do billions of operations per second. And there you have it: the reason.

Try to think about your long-term goals. Maybe about something that you wish to achieve in 5 years after finishing studying at the university. Then start to go from this goal to the use of quantum computers, then to the quantum tech research lab at the university, which will give you the skills needed to attend your goal.

I understand that it may be difficult for a future undergraduate student. But you can do it. Just try to take a walk and think about what you would like to change in the world and why. It helps me all the time. Good luck!