Graduate / 'I was born in a small town in central Iran' - SOP at Computer Science [8]

I was born in a small town in central Iran. As a child, I went to an ordinary primary school. There, seldom did I pay attention to my school work, but I always was the top student in my classes. It continued this way until I reached high school and faced the great competition for university admission. For the first time, I scheduled my studies and tried hard to get a remarkable place in this contest and to enter a top university. I entered the Sharif University of Technology as a Computer Science student and began my studies in the Department of Mathematical Sciences. I was a fan of computers in that time, as were a lot of boys in my age, But, I realized that behind a complex program like a big computer game, there is a lot of code, a lot of algorithms, and a lot of math.

At the university, I faced an environment that was quite different from my high school. Furthermore I encountered a new environment in the dormitory I lived in, and these conditions affected my performance during the first semesters at the university. As I took courses in different areas of mathematics, I understood what mathematics is really about and became interested in it. After a while, I found myself proud of my decision of choosing Computer Science. As I expected, it combined the theoretical mathematics with the practical aspects of computers and allowed me to gain a considerable understanding of both the applicability of pure mathematics and the power of computers and sometimes their limitations. I realized that these powers were results of ingenious algorithms, and algorithms were, in effect, at the heart of all recent and perhaps future developments in science.

At the first year of my M.S. study, I worked as a developer in a company; I had to decide what I wanted to do with my life. I thought much during that time. From my childhood, I always wanted to know more, and more, about everything. I found myself not satisfied with that kind of job, instead, I decided to push forward in my studies as far as I can and begin a career as a researcher and scientist. The field of algorithms, their design and analysis, implementing them, and solving hard problems using them was perfect for me. It was so because I found it very diverse, and it fitted my desire: to know many different areas of science, as different scientific fields rely on similar algorithms for tackling their problems.

At the second year of my M.S. study, I worked as a member of a research team. The project was simulating the propagation of electromagnetic waves in different environments using techniques related to ray tracing. The project has been defined in the Electrical Engineering Department, and I worked on acceleration schemes for ray tracing. It was a problem in computational geometry, which is one of my main areas of interest. I always enjoyed computational geometry algorithms, especially, where a well-crafted data structure tames a problem. There, I implemented some known algorithms and devised new ones that were well suited for our problem. The results were gathered in an international conference paper. The experience was very pleasant for me because, for the first time, I was publishing my own findings to the world. In this work, I was indebted to my adviser who, with his support and spirit, taught me that, even in a well-thought topic, one can give new results if he tries well and looks deep enough.

During years of my education, I tried to learn skills necessary for reaching my goals. I improved my programming skills: from the first classes which I created in C++ in early high school, up until my work as a developer, and as time passed, I was better able to write good programs and debug code in little time. But, I knew I should develop my math skills too, so I took a lot of different courses in mathematics, ranging from Real Analysis to Combinatorics and from Stochastic Processes to Proof Theory. Also, there were engineering courses, ranging from Web Programming in J2EE to Object Orient Design and Digital Image Processing, which helped me improve my practical skills. All of these were in accordance with extending my knowledge as a computer science student.

Taking another step towards my goal, towards learning more from the right people, I am applying for a PhD program .... I aim to work on design and analysis of algorithms, whether practical or theoretical, and on implementation issues of algorithms, as these are the problems which I like and honed myself for.