Graduate /
A General SOP for MS in Computer Science [3]
General SOP for MS in Computer Science
Thank you in advance for reading my draft of SOP and giving me feedbacks. I think I might've made tons of grammatical errors.
And, could you give me some advice about the structure?
Plus, I have a little idea about the feasibility of applying a MS in CS by emphasizing my professional experiences in Machine Learning.
Or it depends on the master program? In this case, what should I shift my focus on? To say, more job-orientated?
Last but not least, I think the statement is quite lengthy especially with regard to my project experiences. Should I abbreviate it?
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I was admitted into traffic engineering but at the end of my first year became one of the few students who successfully switched major to information engineering. It was my participation in National Competition Transport Science and Technology for Students that became the first domino of my decision to go professional in the realm of computer sciences. With the theme of combination transportation and Bigdata, my teammates and I focused on the optimization of bus route and the improvement of passengers' experience. Under the instruction of Associate Professor XX, I overcame the difficulties of collection and analysis of seas of spatiotemporal data by developing an Android App and implementing algorithms. Through sensors and mobile network, the position, speed, and accumulation of buses are recorded and uploaded to Baidu Cloud. Then I evaluated the drivers by analysis of time series as well as support vector machine. Fortunately, we won the Second Prize and this experience shocked me with the productivity of coding and innovation, that is, to benefit the community and to invigorate the tradition industry. Although only received one-year basic programing training entry in C++ at that time, I was inspired to step further into the field of computer science, especially machine learning and software development. In fact, later, I finished Andrew Ng's lectures on ML and performed endless deduction of advanced algebra seeking for a deep and comprehensive understanding about machine learning.
As an undergraduate at the School of Information Science and Engineering of XX University, I benefited from a comprehensive exposure to the core areas of Computer Science and Information Engineering. Regardless of the stiff academic standard of my school, I excelled in most of my specialized courses and achieved 91.43/100 for my academic GPA. After studying computer science and signal related courses like database, basis of computer vision, I had my first forays into research during my junior year when I worked on a thesis project on data mining and deep learning in city computing. The aim of this project is to determine the Guangzhou citizens' sense of belonging to their city. I went further to use multithread in Python to crawl and download 60k+ photos and their information, to specify, longitude and latitude, taken time as well as comments etc. After data cleaning in pandas, I marked 3500 photos as training set and 500 photos as test set with 7 distinct tags, then trained Alexnet in Pytorch to classify all photos. Eventually I visualize the various zones of the Guangzhou citizens' sense of belonging using QGIS. This hands-on experience not only facilitate me to put knowledge of computer network and database learned in class into practice, but also initiated me into the object detection and classification in the field of the computer vision, on which I aspire further research during my graduate period.
The real trigger of m pursuing a master's degree program in XXX university was my laboratory experience at the second semester of junior year. After agreeing my application to join the research group, Professor xx offered me the opportunity to take the role of his research assistant and joined his team as the only undergraduate to attend the TianChi AI competition for healthcare. All 2887 teams were seeking best practice in deep learning to detect pulmonary nodule over 4 months including a summer vacation. I stayed in lab all days and nights immersed into Bengio's Deep Learning, Li Feifei's cs231n and papers springing up from ICCV and CVPR. Because failure to detect nodules whose diameters are below 6 mm, I implemented Densenet and developed a novel test strategy to achieve 70% detection rate of tiny nodules. Finally, we won the 25/2887 at the second season. Even though stopping at the final, as an audience sitting in the activity room of Alibaba headquarter, I was enchanted by novelty, practical utility and interdisciplinary application showed by top 5 teams. Cutting-edge technologies ought to create values for myself and people in the world.
I view of my professional experiences and academic tendency, I believe I would best fit in the master program of Computer Science, for one thing the XX University has long held a reputation for her leading role in various research fields like ML, of which I hold intense enthusiasm on and have research experience about. For another the XX would enable me to solidify my coding skill and theoretical knowledge through a comprehensive and systematic course setting in computer science. Courses in XX, XX, XX as well as adequate internship both in academic and industry will be offered, which exactly fulfills my belief in ML: high-tech to contribute real life.
I aspire a career as a researcher on ML in either corporations or research institutes, and I believe I will eventually be a qualified practitioner through painstaking work on the course set, as most of your students did. In this case, I intend to pursue a master degree in your department. With my deep-rooted interest in computer science and recognition of the quality of your university programs, I hope you will give my application every consideration.