SOP Sample for MS in Computer Science in USA - Mid-Career Finance

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

Data has extensively transformed the economies around the globe in the past decade. Having been a part of one of the world's largest banks, I feel privileged to have witnessed and worked on this transformation firsthand. Being in the finance domain I see a huge potential for data analytics and its application in the coming decades. With the Master of Science program in Computer Science at [UNIVERSITY_1], I want to sharpen my machine learning, data science and analytics, and programming skills to be a participant as a leader in this change.

During my undergraduate studies, I focused on exposing myself to as many opportunities as possible to explore different trending paradigms at that time, and also myself in various extracurricular activities. As Research Wing Head at the [STUDENT_ORGANIZATION_1], I guided a team attempting to create a snakebot to guide disaster management officials. It used heat sensors and machine learning to identify a human under the debris. With another team, we worked on a real-time device locator in a 3D space in college premises with precision enough to identify a person in a room. This project sprouted from the fact that if we know the distance of a device from four different points in 3D space using the signal strength, we can locate it with extremely high precision. We used Android programming to achieve this. Additionally, I mentored and worked with another set of students to design, develop and deploy an end-to-end digital platform for managing various operations during the college's annual technical festival. I was a teaching assistant for multiple lectures to assist my fellow peers and junior students on different subjects including competitive programming, python programming, Linux tools with bash scripting, and android application development. As my final year project, we worked on an e-learning system to teach operator precedence at the elementary level. We attempted to integrate a sentiment analyzer to adapt to the learner's facial feedback. I participated in and won several Hackathons, one of which secured my job with [COMPANY_1]. The exposure and the recognition I received at my undergraduate college bolstered my confidence and have pushed me to dream bigger. I have been inspiring many with my journey and I'm proud to be called to mentor a team of students at the [HACKATHON_1]. It is a national initiative by the Government of India to support various Digital India initiatives and is the largest hackathon in the world by the number of agencies participating and companies involved. We developed a complex matching algorithm to connect farmers to the retail market.

I am characterized as the most enthusiastic person in the room, and this enthusiasm continued from undergraduate college to my workplace. Joining [COMPANY_1] in 2017 was a turning point in my life as I got surrounded by the brightest minds from all around the world. I participated in various competitions and volunteered for events, from hackathons to dancing and sports, and well managed my time. Participating in these activities allowed me to connect and learn from the leaders themselves. In my day-to-day business, I got the opportunity to interact and work with amazing people around the globe on business-critical complex systems and TeraBytes of data. Two years after joining citing my performance, I was promoted to Associate Developer with responsibilities to lead my team on modernizing the technology stack, adopting firm-wide standards for data security, and rationalizing applications to a simpler and efficient architecture. Our technology team and traders had identified a huge pain point for the trading assistants. I took this as a challenge and developed a Proof of Concept on the day of [COMPANY_1]'s Global Hackathon. It was a custom XGBoost machine taking in tabular features and synthesized data using NLP to predict the category of comments and further synthesized comments. It was recognized across the [CITY_1] region among 15,000+ technologists. I volunteered at [COMPANY_1]'s 'Force for Good' initiative, which allowed me to contribute to society on a larger scale. We worked with a women empowerment Non-Profit Organization for 8 months where we understood their problems, developed and delivered a solution using ionic framework and firebase, and trained them to continue maintaining the software in the future. It was selected as the official entry for the [CONFERENCE_1] from [COMPANY_1], across all projects in India. This year, I am selected for the technical lead role under the same program where I will be driving the project from a technology perspective.

[UNIVERSITY_1] is a top and prestigious university, and by getting admission to [SCHOOL_1], I want to grow professionally as a technical architect and personally as a leader to make a greater impact on society. By experiencing top-quality practical and collaborative education at [UNIVERSITY_1], I aspire to expand my role in the financial industry in the data applications domain. With hands-on experience in DevOps, cloud, and machine learning, I look forward to working in a direction where these technologies work together to deliver wonderful solutions. The curriculum at [SCHOOL_1] gives me academic freedom and a variety of highly relevant courses for my profile such as cloud and distributed computing and machine learning. I aspire to develop my knowledge to be able to develop machine learning models and deploy them to multi-GPU clusters. The low student-to-faculty ratio will keep my energy directed and let me explore my interests with constant guidance from the erudite faculty. The experiential learning program opens up immense career development opportunities. The network builds networth which allures me to be a part of the vast network of alumni, students, and professors at [UNIVERSITY_1]. I admire the vast social media presence and recognition of various activities by student communities, which excites me to join numerous communities and the social initiatives that are driven by these communities to grow socially. I put forward my energy, experience, helping, and avid learner attitude to achieve this.