SOP Sample for MS in Computer Science | Early Career Internships

Statement of Purpose

It is said that one should embrace unpredictable and unexpected opportunities. Such a scenario was thrown upon me in high school when we were mandatorily opted for C programming. While other subjects constrained us to limited knowledge, programming gave an opportunity to be creative, flexible and presented various possibilities. Today, being a Senior Associate in [COMPANY_NAME], I want to thank the seven year younger version of me for opting Computing Engineering in Bachelors. I believe the best way to excel even more is by undertaking a formal training through Masters in Science in Computer Science.

My undergraduate experience has played an important role in shaping me as an individual and a professional. My contribution to the college initially took shape in the android app which I developed for our annual college techfest. It was eventually used by all the students and teachers alike. As I kept on developing experience in android app development, I participated in several overnight hackathons, got my hands on a couple of freelance projects based on Android and backend development. In 2018, the brightest period of my college life came by being one of the only four students who got selected in an Open [COMPANY_NAME] Challenge for Internship. As an Intern I worked in developing Visualisation and Analytics Dashboard using Ionic/Angular for exchange traded products so as to provide insights to Institutional Securities Business.

By the time I reached my final year, I had developed a Full Stack portfolio as I had practical exposure in UI-Backend integration and cross-platform app development. So as to explore something new, I participated in a machine learning based tech challenge. Me, along with my team, had developed an Automatic Attendance Management system based on Facial recognition for which we received 2nd runner-ups. We also authored a technical paper on this project's core implementation which has been submitted at "[CONFERENCE_NAME]" of [ORGANIZATION_NAME]. I was amazed by the things that are possible to do using machine learning and hence for my final year project at [UNIVERSITY_NAME], I decided to develop an Emotion Recognition System based on Facial expressions, Audio features & Textual features. We were able to identify primary emotions like happiness, anger etc along with secondary emotions like disgust, remorse etc and also acts like sarcasm, taunts.

I think that my college seniors played an important role in my development and I believe in giving back. I was a Teaching Assistant under our institute principal for the course on Programming Methodology and Data Structures to first-year students. I conducted weekly lectures and lab sessions, graded tests, guided students in their academic projects as well as curriculums. Along with this I also got an opportunity to be a training and Placement Coordinator at the institute, where I conducted multiple training sessions for my juniors to help them in their interview preparation. Furthermore, I was responsible for approaching companies interested in hiring graduates, scheduling and then managing their interview process with students. Additionally, in my post-college hours, I participated in several social service activities such as Beach Clean-up and Tree Plantation Drives which allowed me to contribute to the society directly and provide grassroot solutions.

My genuine interest and affinity towards expanding technical knowledge and several hands-on projects helped me bag a job as an Analyst at [COMPANY_NAME] in 2019. At [COMPANY_NAME], my daily work involved all the steps of SDLC, right from getting requirements from the operations team, discussing possible solutions with business analysts, coding and delivering the technological solution and at the same time keeping an eye on the production environment for any issues. One of the most challenging but enriching work came when I was asked to design an end-to-end high volume, high performance CSV data processing system. To meet the requirements, I had used spring-batch for processing small chunks of huge CSV files along with a custom map-reduce implementation for filtering out the duplicates and to report out the valid data within a pre-agreed time constraint. For this timely delivery in keeping [COMPANY_NAME] compliant with the regulators, I was recognized for Excellence via [COMPANY_NAME] 'Thank You' program by my colleagues. Along with this, I had eliminated the manual work of deployment amounting to 60 minutes by migrating it to a Jenkins pipeline which automated the entire process to a bare single click mechanism. I also contributed in modifying business logics for each regulator like MiFID2, SFTR, etc so as to meet with the regulatory requirements post-Brexit. In addition to this, I acquired the skill of scripting in python, shell, perl and became well versed with unix.

In 2021, consequent to the Covid norms which required solely work-from-home, I found an opportunity to be back in [COMPANY_NAME]. Currently I am Full stack developer responsible for development of the in-house Reconciliation platform which comprises over 1K recs each with approx 1M volumes of daily trades.

At this point in life, I feel that having acquired a strong foundation in theoretical concepts taught in undergraduate program and also in practical concepts through my professional experience, now is the right time to pursue graduate studies.

[About the field and how masters is the next logical step - Concluding para]

[Talk about Univ name, motto, Research projects, Professors, Student Community]