Scholarship / 'I took some practical steps to choose the proposed universities' - Chevening: Studying in UK Essay [5]

Hi, I am applying for Chevening Scholarship. I would like to get some advice regarding my essay, besides i need to cut several more words (10-20) to reach it maximum allowed words. My proposed universities are : Edinburgh university - MSc Data Science, Bristol University - MSc Advanced Computing, and Lancester University - MSc Data Science.

The instruction of the essay is :
Outline why you have selected your chosen three university courses, and explain how this relates to your previous academic or professional experience and your plans for the future.

Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia is well known as one of the most congested cities in the world. It is predicted that over four million residents of the sorrounding Jakarta commute to and from the city each working day. Unfortunately, I am one of them. It turned out supply of public transport failed to fulfill the demand, people began to collectively opt for private vehicles over public transportation. These issues are also involving many other big cities in Indonesia. The bad truth is, Indonesia is one of the countries in the world that does not have a well-functioning public transportation system to handle it huge and centralize population.

Government and industries are in the move in developing better infrastructure. Besides, they are also concerning on utilizing information technology by opening public transportation data so that any computer scientist can get involved in building smart services for the cities. I was challenged and find out how information technology will help us to have a better transportation system. I absolutely think that big data and data science is a good place to start looking for a solution.

There are many things that we may learn from real time data given from the commuter patterns. To help commuters efficiently use public transportation and government to make an effective policy. Lately, I am volunteering on non-profit projects that utilizing government open data to develop smart services for Jakarta. We built a mobile app to give commuters insight which public transportation could they take ranked based on the availability and the efficiency. In addition, the application use crowdsourcing method to gain real time data from commuters and algorithms to validate and rank them. There are a lot of thing that we could explore, gain more data and implement some machine learning algorithm to get more insight from it. That is why I am very keen to learn about data science.

I believe that UK is the best place to do it. Although data science is quite new for the academia, UK universities are earlier in offering the program. There a lot of top universities already offering this program since couple years ago along with the world class facility to support the study.

to choose the proposed universities
There are some practical steps that I took to choose the proposed universities :

1. Searching the universities that offer MSc in data science or machine learning with help of search engine.
2. Learning some related research that the universities have been working on.
3. Sort them based on their global rank, location, entry requirements and the courses they offered in the program.

My first choice fells to Edinburgh University as one of the top university in UK for computer science subject and has a very good supporting facility for data science students to do their work. The second and third went to Bristol University and Lancaster University respectively.

Had my cum laude bachelor degree in computer science, almost three years working experience in software development project, determination and indepedence skills would help me to complete any of these three programmes very well.