Scholarship / Master of Data Science - Supporting Statement for Australia Awards Scholarship [4]

Hello everyone,
I am planning to apply for Australia Awards Scholarship to study Master of Data Science in one of my preferred institutions. I would very much appreciate an honest feedback and opinion for my statement on how did I choose my course and institution. It will be a great help for me to revise my statement. Also, it currently has 2335 characters which exceeds the 2000 character limit so any opinion on how to make my writing more concise would be very very helpful. Thanks.

How did you choose your proposed course and institution?

In past decades, the availability of large amounts of data generated from customer behaviour and other sources has allowed financial institutions to transform its risk management practices using data analytics. Though these developments haven't fully taken place yet in the Mongolian banking industry, the major banks have started exploring advanced data analytics solutions to implement.

According to a survey conducted by McKinsey & Company, primary challenge for implementing data analytics solutions is putting together a team of skilled data analysts and programmers. In other words, without the right talent, any raw data is meaningless. Therefore, the integration of data analytics into risk management, for instance, improving underwriting process with machine learning, will require professionals who have skills in both fields.

Based on what I have observed during my work in risk management department, I am confident that there are opportunities for Mongolian banks that can be generated from their customer data to tailor traditional banking services to a more flexible, customer centered services while achieving more granular risk assessment process.

With these reasons in mind, I have decided to leverage my knowledge of statistics and pursue a postgraduate degree in data science and lead the effort to extract insights from unused and unstructed data.

My preferred institutions for this course are Monash University and The University of Queensland. This is because of their focus on industry based, hands on experience for students and excellence of their Data Science faculties. Both universities acknowledge that practical experience is essential for delivering IT solutions and therefore include an industry experience project to solve real world data science problems in their courses. Also, their faculties of IT is composed of internationally recognised experts who I am excited to meet with. For example, in Monash University, Professor Wray Buntine and Professor Dan Lubman are the sole recipients in Australia of a grant from Google AI Impact Challenge.

From these two universities, my priority is Monash University because the course that it offers is more tailored to the student. Depending on the background of the student, the course can include foundation units in programming, databases and maths.