varadsanpurkar
Dec 13, 2021
Graduate / "Review on SOP for MS-CS/MCS with work experiences in 2 different companies" [2]
Hello, I will be applying to MSCS and have work experience in 2 companies for 4 years. Experience is relevant to Computer Science but not specific to Data Science or ML which is my primary research interest. Shall I include it in SOP? Secondly, I feel that my introduction paragraph is weak and unclear. Can you review the structure of SOP and provide guidelines to improve the introduction also?
- Thanks for your consideration
Being deeply inspired by my mother, a computer engineer, I crossed paths with computers at an early age. From creating the first HTML page under her guidance to developing a multi-functional web application for hospitals as my profession, I always enjoyed programming. Being a part of the software developer fraternity, I often feel exhilarated by seeing the way single software brings efficiency and precision to solve daily-life problems. This feeling of joy, never-ending zeal for programming, and finding solutions to real-life problems using software propelled me to pursue graduation in Computer Science. This decision was segued after considering my area of interest, academic and professional background, and penchant for research and using it for developing innovative technologies.
My fascination for computers was heightened during my undergraduate course at Maharashtra Institute of Technology, Pune, through extensive laboratory and classroom courses like Algorithms, DBMS, AI & ML, Operating Systems, etc. Although I faced a few hurdles in understanding the theoretical concepts of Data Science, AI & ML, I built a strong foundation and developed more liking towards these subjects when I created self-learning projects like Stock Value Predictor, House Price Prediction. These projects marked my first foray into exploring machine learning algorithms. Thus, I presented a seminar on-"Image Captioning with Region-Based Attention and Scene-specific Contexts". I created a simulation using Convolutional Neural Network to generate words describing the images and the Long-Short Term Memory algorithm to structure meaningful sentences using the generated words. This seminar enhanced my fundamental knowledge of machine learning and motivated me to perform further research in this field.
Thus to dive deep into machine learning, I decided to work on an "Automatic Emotion Detection System" as my final year project. As the objective was to detect the sentiments of a person without using facial gestures but by physiological parameters, that are not controlled by the person, we in the team of 4, used signals like Heart Rate, EEG, ECG, Respiration Rate, etc. as input to ensemble learning model and assigned them to class labels of a different emotion. We optimized the Random-Forest algorithm by assigning weightage to the best tree formed and trained the model using Eight Emotion Sentic Dataset which reduced the time complexity and increased accuracy by more than 80%. Such a system can greatly help healthcare professionals/psychologists to monitor the sentiments of those who are unresponsive to external stimuli. My main contribution in this project was to prepare a dataset for model training and optimizing the Random-Forest Algorithm. We received appreciation from doctors to whom we demonstrated this system. These seminars and projects were paramount to me as, for the first time, I discovered ways to bridge the gaps between technology and real-world fields like healthcare, stocks, finance, etc.
With an interest in creating software applications in these real-world fields, I joined a healthcare-IT organization, Softlink International Pvt. Ltd., in July 2018, as a Trainee Engineer where my job was to develop applications to increase digitalization in hospitals. These applications were developed in the ASP.NET MVC framework to which I was initially unfamiliar. But with dedicated learning, I gained expertise in ASP.NET MVC, HTML, C#, AngularJS, etc., and promoted to Software Engineer and successfully handled four projects during my tenure. Working for one of the projects as a full-stack developer, I created an entire web application from the beginning for a renowned hospital in the USA. This application helped doctors in assessing patients and making digital reports without visiting personally. I developed an approach of using "EPPlus" library to convert all unformatted reports into formatted reports automatically which enhanced the readability of complex reports. For this advancement, I received word of praise from the manager and client and this approach was used in the company's other projects. This enriching experience sharpened my research skills while equipping me with healthcare protocols like HealthLevel-7. Working as a full-stack developer I experienced every step in the software development life-cycle, right from requirements gathering to deployment. Although this experience built a foundation of my professional career, it couldn't satiate my thirst for learning nuances in computers and providing more reliable software applications. Thus, when the opportunity presented, I joined FIS Solutions, in Jan 2021, as a Senior RPA developer in the ML department. Working as lead-developer of one of the projects, I worked on designing optimized common API in a proprietary platform, Decisions, integrating 4 distinct applications which reduced delay faced by the user by 13.5% and expected to save the overall cost to 2.3M USD. So far at FIS, I have experienced how to handle high-budget projects and how simple optimization can develop more reliable, user-friendly applications. At FIS, I participated in the "WiT-ACE Hackathon", in a team of 6, where we demonstrated a Tree Tracking System to minimize the extravagant tree cutting. We implemented a prototype where we fetched the real-time location of planted trees using GoogleMaps JS API, stored it in the SQLite database, and plotted coordinates on a map. Furthermore, I suggested an approach to assign a QR code to each tree to show more information about that tree just by scanning it. Although we stood in the top 20, we received an appreciation for an idea and asked to continue the work for future competition. Overall, my fruitful career with both organizations helped me consolidate my technical competence with management skills.
During my undergraduate, I was a committee member of outreach events like "Teknothon", "Linuxication", and organized free sessions from industry experts for students. While maintaining a work-life balance, I have followed my passion for fitness and nutrition and completed certification in nutrition in 2020. Bolstering FIT India Movement, I started providing free nutrition counseling to many people to achieve their fitness goals. I have also been a member of "Robin Hood Army", a social service group, since 2020, where I contributed to free food donation drives during COVID-19 and educational drives in nearby villages. These extra-curricular activities played a vital role in developing my network and keeping me acquainted with my social responsibilities.
I always envisioned myself working as a research professional for the eminent industry in my life. Graduation in CS will allow me to acquire nuances in this field and groom me as a full-fledged research professional. Post my graduation, I envisage myself working for an eminent organization and contributing to cutting-edge technology to enrich human life. In the long term, with the blend of technical competence and management skills, I see myself as the CEO of a company, leading an organization and contributing to the technologies which will make a significant difference in society.
Master's program in Computer Science (MCS) at _______ university perfectly aligns with my career interests and will put me at the forefront of current developments. The department offers comprehensive coursework which will provide me with a clear understanding of this subject and the skills to execute it. I am specifically interested in courses offered on Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Algorithms which will help me achieve my research objectives and infuse tremendous value into my profile. Current projects like "______", "____" in your ___ lab align with my experiences and interests and motivate me to be a part of it. The work of __ and __ in "____" fascinated me even more and inspired me to study under their mentorship. Such an expert faculty combined with an invigorating environment will be an excellent platform for me to hone my skills and technical competence for research. I believe, my good academics, professional experiences, and commitment to research deems me fit to be considered as a suitable candidate for your graduate program and I look forward to being a part of your vibrant student community with my unique culture. Hence, I resolve to approach the program with enthusiasm and uphold the reputation of the university. Thank you for considering my application.
Hello, I will be applying to MSCS and have work experience in 2 companies for 4 years. Experience is relevant to Computer Science but not specific to Data Science or ML which is my primary research interest. Shall I include it in SOP? Secondly, I feel that my introduction paragraph is weak and unclear. Can you review the structure of SOP and provide guidelines to improve the introduction also?
- Thanks for your consideration
statement of purpose
Being deeply inspired by my mother, a computer engineer, I crossed paths with computers at an early age. From creating the first HTML page under her guidance to developing a multi-functional web application for hospitals as my profession, I always enjoyed programming. Being a part of the software developer fraternity, I often feel exhilarated by seeing the way single software brings efficiency and precision to solve daily-life problems. This feeling of joy, never-ending zeal for programming, and finding solutions to real-life problems using software propelled me to pursue graduation in Computer Science. This decision was segued after considering my area of interest, academic and professional background, and penchant for research and using it for developing innovative technologies.
My fascination for computers was heightened during my undergraduate course at Maharashtra Institute of Technology, Pune, through extensive laboratory and classroom courses like Algorithms, DBMS, AI & ML, Operating Systems, etc. Although I faced a few hurdles in understanding the theoretical concepts of Data Science, AI & ML, I built a strong foundation and developed more liking towards these subjects when I created self-learning projects like Stock Value Predictor, House Price Prediction. These projects marked my first foray into exploring machine learning algorithms. Thus, I presented a seminar on-"Image Captioning with Region-Based Attention and Scene-specific Contexts". I created a simulation using Convolutional Neural Network to generate words describing the images and the Long-Short Term Memory algorithm to structure meaningful sentences using the generated words. This seminar enhanced my fundamental knowledge of machine learning and motivated me to perform further research in this field.
Thus to dive deep into machine learning, I decided to work on an "Automatic Emotion Detection System" as my final year project. As the objective was to detect the sentiments of a person without using facial gestures but by physiological parameters, that are not controlled by the person, we in the team of 4, used signals like Heart Rate, EEG, ECG, Respiration Rate, etc. as input to ensemble learning model and assigned them to class labels of a different emotion. We optimized the Random-Forest algorithm by assigning weightage to the best tree formed and trained the model using Eight Emotion Sentic Dataset which reduced the time complexity and increased accuracy by more than 80%. Such a system can greatly help healthcare professionals/psychologists to monitor the sentiments of those who are unresponsive to external stimuli. My main contribution in this project was to prepare a dataset for model training and optimizing the Random-Forest Algorithm. We received appreciation from doctors to whom we demonstrated this system. These seminars and projects were paramount to me as, for the first time, I discovered ways to bridge the gaps between technology and real-world fields like healthcare, stocks, finance, etc.
With an interest in creating software applications in these real-world fields, I joined a healthcare-IT organization, Softlink International Pvt. Ltd., in July 2018, as a Trainee Engineer where my job was to develop applications to increase digitalization in hospitals. These applications were developed in the ASP.NET MVC framework to which I was initially unfamiliar. But with dedicated learning, I gained expertise in ASP.NET MVC, HTML, C#, AngularJS, etc., and promoted to Software Engineer and successfully handled four projects during my tenure. Working for one of the projects as a full-stack developer, I created an entire web application from the beginning for a renowned hospital in the USA. This application helped doctors in assessing patients and making digital reports without visiting personally. I developed an approach of using "EPPlus" library to convert all unformatted reports into formatted reports automatically which enhanced the readability of complex reports. For this advancement, I received word of praise from the manager and client and this approach was used in the company's other projects. This enriching experience sharpened my research skills while equipping me with healthcare protocols like HealthLevel-7. Working as a full-stack developer I experienced every step in the software development life-cycle, right from requirements gathering to deployment. Although this experience built a foundation of my professional career, it couldn't satiate my thirst for learning nuances in computers and providing more reliable software applications. Thus, when the opportunity presented, I joined FIS Solutions, in Jan 2021, as a Senior RPA developer in the ML department. Working as lead-developer of one of the projects, I worked on designing optimized common API in a proprietary platform, Decisions, integrating 4 distinct applications which reduced delay faced by the user by 13.5% and expected to save the overall cost to 2.3M USD. So far at FIS, I have experienced how to handle high-budget projects and how simple optimization can develop more reliable, user-friendly applications. At FIS, I participated in the "WiT-ACE Hackathon", in a team of 6, where we demonstrated a Tree Tracking System to minimize the extravagant tree cutting. We implemented a prototype where we fetched the real-time location of planted trees using GoogleMaps JS API, stored it in the SQLite database, and plotted coordinates on a map. Furthermore, I suggested an approach to assign a QR code to each tree to show more information about that tree just by scanning it. Although we stood in the top 20, we received an appreciation for an idea and asked to continue the work for future competition. Overall, my fruitful career with both organizations helped me consolidate my technical competence with management skills.
During my undergraduate, I was a committee member of outreach events like "Teknothon", "Linuxication", and organized free sessions from industry experts for students. While maintaining a work-life balance, I have followed my passion for fitness and nutrition and completed certification in nutrition in 2020. Bolstering FIT India Movement, I started providing free nutrition counseling to many people to achieve their fitness goals. I have also been a member of "Robin Hood Army", a social service group, since 2020, where I contributed to free food donation drives during COVID-19 and educational drives in nearby villages. These extra-curricular activities played a vital role in developing my network and keeping me acquainted with my social responsibilities.
I always envisioned myself working as a research professional for the eminent industry in my life. Graduation in CS will allow me to acquire nuances in this field and groom me as a full-fledged research professional. Post my graduation, I envisage myself working for an eminent organization and contributing to cutting-edge technology to enrich human life. In the long term, with the blend of technical competence and management skills, I see myself as the CEO of a company, leading an organization and contributing to the technologies which will make a significant difference in society.
Master's program in Computer Science (MCS) at _______ university perfectly aligns with my career interests and will put me at the forefront of current developments. The department offers comprehensive coursework which will provide me with a clear understanding of this subject and the skills to execute it. I am specifically interested in courses offered on Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Algorithms which will help me achieve my research objectives and infuse tremendous value into my profile. Current projects like "______", "____" in your ___ lab align with my experiences and interests and motivate me to be a part of it. The work of __ and __ in "____" fascinated me even more and inspired me to study under their mentorship. Such an expert faculty combined with an invigorating environment will be an excellent platform for me to hone my skills and technical competence for research. I believe, my good academics, professional experiences, and commitment to research deems me fit to be considered as a suitable candidate for your graduate program and I look forward to being a part of your vibrant student community with my unique culture. Hence, I resolve to approach the program with enthusiasm and uphold the reputation of the university. Thank you for considering my application.
