Letters / My passion for programming. Motivation letter for Master degree in Computer Science [3]

I want to apply for a master's degree in European universities and this is my motivation letter for one of them. I am not an English speaker, so maybe the sentences are mediocre. I know that this letter is too long. I really hope that you could give me some advice on the content and where should I simplify it. Thank you so much!

The letter focuses on my passion for programming. The writing structure of this letter is: Introduce myself, Show my experience of game development to present, Talk about my AI project which sparks me to learn more in specific fields, Present my career plan under the influence of my graduation project, Explain my motivation to study in xxx university in details. [My motivation to pursue a master degree is explained in paragraph 2-5.]

LETTER OF MOTIVATION

Dear Sir/Madam,

I have just obtained my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Technology from ABC University in China. I want to apply for the Computer Science program offered by Xxx University in the academic year 2022, focusing on the Software Systems and Technologies track. I hope to get the opportunity to study at Xxx University to prepare myself to be a great full-stack development engineer in the future.

I have already completed almost all of the core curriculums in computer science at ABC University, and my harvest in the past four years is not limited to this. When I first went to the university, the simple C program running in a DOS environment made me feel the wonder of the code, since the logic written by me could be displayed on the interface. This sparked my interest in programming and application development. In the second semester of my freshman year, I participated in an open innovation experiment at ABC University and developed a simple stealth game with Unity3D. The game plot and scheme were designed by my teammates. I was mainly responsible for the control of the character's movement and the construction and rendering of the environment. These attempts made me deeply feel the charm of programming. It was like building blocks, where I could use code and supporting software to realize the contents of the design drawings. It gave me a great sense of achievement. In the following summer vacation, I also participated in a Unity practical training project held by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and gained a better understanding of game development. I realized that due to my lack of insight and passion for game plot design, I was unable to give full play to my creativity. So I continued to explore new areas where I could apply my ideas, design, and programming skills.

In my sophomore year, I joined the College Students' Innovation and Entrepreneurship Training Program, a scientific research funding program in China for college students to design, experiment, and manage their projects independently. My teammates and I used the optimization model based on Resnet50 to recognize the faces of pigs in a pig farm. After tagging the original images with Lableimg with my teammates, I was responsible for the subsequent work, like processing the dataset and building, training, and optimizing the network structure with Keras. The fact amazes me that a complex mapping function from input variables to output variables can achieve the task of image recognition. I believe that even if I want to do some work related to application development in the future, mastering some machine learning knowledge will enable me to solve problems better. However, when I successfully optimized the network performance by tuning the parameters, I was not always completely clear about the exact principles. Therefore, I would like to learn the relevant theories relatively systematically.

In addition, what impressed me most was Google Colaborary, a deep learning cloud computing platform. We used the cloud GPU it provided to train the network and the computing time was reduced from 7 hours(on my laptop's CPU) to 40 minutes. This experience exposed me to the concepts of distributed computing and storage, load balancing, and virtualization. They are ingenious solutions for high computing power requirements and I am keen to study them in-depth. The pig face recognition project was the first project I did at university that involved multiple fields of computer science. Rather than studying a single algorithm, I preferred such a development task that integrates a variety of technologies. I was fascinated by the complementary wisdom contained within them, and I knew that it was difficult for me to master them well only with undergraduate education.

Although my courses and projects involved many fields, I didn't determine my favorite direction until I was working on my graduation project. I chose to develop a WeChat mini program (similar to the Google Instant app) for text voting and selection voting services. I used HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the front-end work, and implemented the back-end work with the cloud database, storage, and server provided by Tencent Cloud Development. Although the back-end work was simplified, I was interested in traditional back-end technologies and I now am learning Redis, Kafka, Nginx, and others by myself. I enjoyed working on this project, despite the difficulties I encountered. When I successfully developed the mini-program with functions and interfaces as designed in advance, I felt the pleasure of creation. I exactly knew that I was suitable for this kind of work, where the developer needs to realize the actual business logic and data model and make the application run. Then I thought about how much time I was always willing to spend on programming and development-related course design at university, so I decided to make full-stack development engineering my future career. Even though my WeChat mini program has not been used on a large scale, I still care about the high concurrency, high availability, and high performance issues that would be encountered if it were to go live. I think I need to learn systematic theory and have more experimental experience to be able to deal with these issues well in the future.

During my four-year exploration in the University, I determined my career plan for the future. Meanwhile, I realized my lack of knowledge and experience in specific fields. Therefore, I hope to continue my postgraduate study to meet my strong thirst for knowledge and make myself more competitive. Xxx University appeals to me. I learned that the Computer Science program focuses on both theory and application, which matches my needs and expectations. I am so taken with the curriculum. The core courses provided by this project, such as Operating Systems and Principles of Algorithmic Techniques, can further consolidate my CS theoretical foundation. At the same time, Cloud Software and Systems, Concurrent Programming, Distributed Algorithms, Big Data Platforms and other courses provided by the Software Systems and Technologies track can let me learn more knowledge helpful to the full-stack development and pay better attention to the performance. My desire to carefully study cutting-edge technology can also be realized in Xxx. In addition, the art major of Xxx University is world-class. I have learned from your official website that Xxx gives students great freedom in choosing courses and I want to take some courses from the art department to improve my aesthetic ability. I think this can help me design and implement beautiful and user-friendly interfaces with UI engineers in the future.

I am very eager to study at Xxx University. I believe that my creativity, inspiration, foundation, and skills can bring new vitality to Xxx. I hope you can consider admitting me.