SOP Sample for MS in Computer Science in USA - Early Career

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

Having studied in a residential school located in the heart of an esteemed engineering institute, [UNIVERSITY_NAME] ([UNIVERSITY_ACRONYM]), [CITY], I was always amazed to see how the college students leveraged technology to solve real-world problems. It was then that I attended a guest lecture of one of the [UNIVERSITY_NAME]'s alumni, [PERSON_NAME], founding member and CEO of [COMPANY_NAME], a bus ticket booking company. He shared his wisdom and experience of how he came up with the idea of [COMPANY_NAME]. During one of his vacations when he was unable to arrange any bus tickets to travel to his hometown even after contacting multiple ticket agencies. This made me think how technology can be used for solving real-world problems and inspired me to choose computer science as an elective in my high school and ultimately motivated me to pursue a Bachelor of Engineering in Information Technology from [UNIVERSITY_NAME] ([UNIVERSITY_ACRONYM]).

The holistic academic structure of the undergraduate degree at my alma mater instilled theoretical knowledge in me while simultaneously providing a competitive platform to demonstrate my technical talents and gave me an opportunity to work on practical projects with the help of subjects like Database Management, Data Science and Big Data Analytics, Operating Systems, and Data Structures and Files. Progressively in the degree, I developed an inclination towards Machine Learning and substantiated my knowledge by choosing this as an elective in the final year of undergraduate studies. To augment my theoretical knowledge, as a freelancing project, I worked on building machine learning models like Linear Regression, Decision Tree and Support Vector Machine Classifier to predict the severity of accident cases across the United States and created interactive dashboards and visualizations.

In my penultimate year, I led a team of four members while working on a database management project, Mall Management System. The preliminary idea was to improve the user experience by allowing all the required details about a store to be found with a single click and creating a separate admin portal for controlling and monitoring various tasks like collection of income, including rents, organizing promotional events, etc. I learned Java for writing scripts and the JDBC driver for maintaining connectivity between the database and backend for web-based applications. The website was hosted using a Tomcat server and the database was maintained on MySQL. This helped me to learn about these database services and contribute in a professional environment while working as a team to build websites from scratch.

During the National Election of India in 2019, I was unable to cast my vote as it required me to travel back to my hometown during my on-going undergraduate studies. This led me to think about and develop a secure and decentralized electronic-voting system design that could help common people cast their votes securely and from the comfort of their homes. It led me to explore and dig deep into Blockchain technology, as it is a widely known technology for establishing trust, security, and transparency. In this project, smart contracts were written in the Solidity language and ran on the Remix IDE. The Node JS server was used for storing vote details by creating nodes for every logged-in voter and was made immutable by connecting each block to its previous block's hash. Along with that, I made the system more secure by adding an extra level of authentication using a 16-character secret token which the user could receive in their registered email address and phone number.

My team and I presented this project at a technical competition, [CONFERENCE_NAME], organized by [ORGANIZATION_NAME], where the project received appreciation from the judges and we bagged third position in the event. I then co-authored a research paper based on this project, 'Blockchain based Decentralized Electronic Voting System', and presented this research paper at the fifth [CONFERENCE_NAME], London, UK. This research paper was then selected to be published in the January 2022 edition of the [PUBLISHER_NAME] series (Scopus Indexed). It was also recognized as the best paper at the [CONFERENCE_NAME]. I also volunteered as a member of the publicity and design team in [EVENT_NAME].

Following graduation, I worked as a Flutter Developer Intern at [COMPANY_NAME] in Australia, where I learned how to design Android and iOS apps using the Dart programming language. After my internship, I began working with [COMPANY_NAME] in [CITY] as a Graduate Engineer Trainee, and I was recently promoted to the position of Data Engineer. The learning curve has been steep throughout my 17 months of corporate experience, as I've improved my skills through several internal and client-based projects.

My first project, [PROJECT_NAME], was an internal project, in which I was responsible for developing the user interface using Flask, Ajax, JavaScript, and Bootstrap to migrate/ingest data from various databases and cloud platforms like AWS bucket, Azure container and Google Cloud Storage (GCS) to Snowflake, either through external or internal stages. In our team of seven members, I was the only person who was assigned responsibilities in the frontend as well as the backend. In the backend, I worked on data migration from GCS to Snowflake, where I used Python to write scripts that ranged from establishing a folder in multiple cloud platforms to ingesting continuous data through snowpipe and scheduling data intake using Airflow. On completion of this project, I then worked for [COMPANY_NAME], a Denmark-based client. Along with working on multiple projects, I also earned my certification in Azure Data Fundamentals offered by Microsoft.

The motivation to study at the [UNIVERSITY_NAME] derives from the fact that the education system bestows high academic standards and excellent research facilities. Furthermore, the curriculum of Master's in Computer Science and Engineering at [UNIVERSITY_NAME] will introduce me to a wide variety of engineering subjects. I greatly admire the work done by [PROFESSOR_NAME] in the field of Data mining, and information retrieval as well as [PROFESSOR_NAME] in Machine learning, and deep learning. In-depth study of topics like Machine learning and Data mining is what I aim to achieve through my graduate studies. Through my dedication and ingenuity I believe that I can be a valuable addition to the graduate school. I am confident that this MS program will pave the path for my career goals. The diverse campus will create for me a robust learning environment, and I would take great pride to be part of the [UNIVERSITY_ACRONYM] family.

[APPLICANT_NAME]

Fall 2022