Graduate / SOP - Arizona State University (I don't have a great profile but want to try my best with my SOP) [3]

My interest in computer science backs to my school days. It was when I saw a personal computer in my aunt's house, I was fascinated by the working of windows operating system, though I did not what it was actually , I learnt my drawing through paint in the system, playing games, listening to my favourite music. As I grew up, I came across the wonderful features of Internet(search engines, mail services , orkut , facebook). I started wondering how these applications were created and this fuelled my interest in Computer science which made me choose as my Bachelor's degree. I came from a family where people had only basic level of education and Iam the only one pursuing a Bachelor's degree till now. This, with my interest in Computer science motivated me to aim for high level education in top universities of the world and be the first in my family. My passion for science and mathematics helped me to crack the All India Engineering Entrance Exam(AIEEE) and I got admission into Pondicherry Engineering College under Pondicherry University.

In my sophomore year, I had Java programming language taken by Prof. Dr.Manoharan, where I really knew the power of programming language. His teaching was pretty good, that I started playing with programming creating gui applications, remote machine communication and connecting databases. From then , I started creating any small applications whenever I learnt a new programming language. In my third year, I created a standalone application of Online Voting system, in an idea of people casting their vote from anywhere in online for their respective constituencies using C# and MySql database. When I learnt Web Technologies, I created a website though did not host it, named Reviews and Ratings , where people can review and rate any product and also find experiences of people with the products using HTML,CSS and Java script.

In my third year, I did a paper presentation with an idea of an application "Mood Therapy" which detects the mood of a person through his emotions and tries to change his mood with music.That is, when a person is sad , it tries to make him happy with suitable songs.The already existing applications recognises emotions of person where the person has to provide the images of his happy,sad,anger faces which was drawback.My idea of recognition of emotions through facial expressions is calculating the deviation of feature regions between normal and emotional face where the user has to provide only the image of his normal face.And also, nowadays its difficult and time consuming to maintain and search for songs in the large playlists.My motivation of this idea was to make a music player act smart and plays songs inline with our emotions which increases human computer interaction.I was awarded first prize in paper presentation competition among 100 participants conducted in Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Technology,Pondicherry.

Iam currently working on my academic project as project leader with a team of 3 members titled "Prediction of phishing attacks using artificial neural networks using efficient feature extraction technique" to develop an anti-phishing system that predicts phishing websites by extracting significant features from the website and using neural networks to predict output. There is already a system that extracts website features and provide it to neural networks for output.But, limitation is that it uses large number of features for prediction. The proposed system idea is that reducing the number of features by recognizing significant features with experiment results so as to decrease the complexity of neural network which is a drawback of existing system. Iam also preparing a thesis of this idea to present in an International Conference.

Apart from my academics,I was always enthusiastic in organising symposiums , seminars not only in my department but also in the college.I was the coordinator of paper presentation event in Cybyrus'15, a national level technical symposium conducted in our college under Department of computer science and that was when I faced the challenge for my organising abilities in which 300 papers were to presented in two days and categorising into various fields,scheduling timings for participants and faculty for reviewing.Finally, the event was a big success and received applause from my teachers.My leadership skills improved from my school as I was the Class representative of our department in 2013-2014.I also actively involved in Literary events in our college in terms of both participation and organisation.There were many cultural and fun events every year in my hostel which is organised fully by students kept my participation in extra-circular activities active.

Iam applying to ASU for MS in CS as my current goal is to explore and continue my study in this field. I was exposed to subjects like Database systems,Web Technology in my under graduate course in CS and want to have more insight into the subjects and gain knowledge and do a significant contribution to the computing world ,which I was fascinated from my school age.Among the various concentrations offered in ASU in MS in CS,I was attracted to Big Data Systems as it is growing need of many technologies.I believe that graduate education provides me with opportunities to learn advanced courses and achieve my goal of becoming of a competent software developer in this fast-growing era of technology.

Attending your prestigious university with excellent computing resources and under the guidance of eminent faculty will be beneficial for my graduate studies.With students and faculty from diverse regions will help me mingle in multi-lingual community in US.If given an opportunity, I will strive hard to add reputation to the university with my performance in all aspects.Looking forward to be a part of your university.

Thank you for your time and consideration
High regards
Harshini.