Statement of purpose admission essay example

The common adage goes that learning only ends when one goes to the grave. I belong to the school of thought that believes that the brain is an empty slate that is continuously filled with knowledge during the journey of life. I am a good example of a learned mind going by my relatively modest experience in the world of computers. My area of concentration has always been and remains machine learning and computational theory.
In briefly commenting on my academic and professional goals, I wish to state the fact that I purpose to pursue academic research and coursework on machine learning and computational theory. I desire to understand the overall functionality of computing machines and its associated integration in processes and systems. In particular, I have an interest in research and development with the aspiration of developing an innovative and ingenious product that makes work easier for humanity. I believe through research and development, common life problems can be solved in simplified and integrated ways with the utility of computational skills and input. In that respect, the knowledge I gather both in school and practice comes in handy towards the achievement of my overall objective. I have learned, that every day in life, offers a chance at learning something new. Interestingly, I have taken the same in good taste and often challenge myself to learn something new on a daily basis. The same partially informs my pursuit of a MS Degree at Columbia University.
With the most humility attainable, my working experience remains modest. My best experience was at Beijing Landing Technology in Beijing where I interned as a Java Programmer. During that time, I was pushed to the very end with the results being more than fruitful. I humbly associate myself with the successful implementation of an error-searching program using the Map-Reduce technique. In the same setup, I was involved in a real estate website development that pursued integration of information on maps making use of Google API. Those are just but a few of the challenges I was presented with, and which impressed my mind during my internship program at Beijing Landing Technology. It was during the same that I would learn how to integrate logics, machine learning and computational theory. I remember my mother accusing me of addiction to work mainly because of my tendency to take some of the assignments home for further inquiry.
However, my interest has always been informed by the need to understand and decipher the workings of computers and related technology. Indeed, I remain faithful to my dream of innovation aimed at simplifying life for people around me. For that reason, incisive analysis remains an invaluable ingredient that I promise to carry along to Columbia if accepted.
I have had a hand at various researches related to machine learning and computational theory. The common thread in my areas of study has been the need to find solutions to common day problems. The same is attested by my participation in deception detection in speech research. I successfully identified, labeled and annotated a collection of videos which I had drawn from the internet. I was humbled by my ingenuity. During that particular research, I finally had a feel of the popular adage that the darkest hour is just before dawn. For me, the feeling was both literal and metaphoric. I say literal because of the sleepless nights I went through many a times experimenting on one approach after the other. It also remains metaphorical for I learnt that in research, patience and focus are the rare but invaluable virtues necessary in the mental toolbox of a researcher and more so for the area of machine learning and computational theory.
The other research item I wish to mention was my addition to the active learning platforms. I am in a positive way proud of my research on two particular fronts. The first limb relates to my successful building of an interface for the active learning system that integrated the Matlab GUIDE. It offered people higher flexibility in making adjustments and alterations on the configuration parameters. On the second limb, I built a functioning web interface for crowd sourcing with Amazon Mechanical Turk. My interface progressed from the base of the Turk but went further to provide additional user-friendly settings for the users’ personal conveniences.
Columbia University complete with its battery of professors offers an invaluable opportunity for growth to me. For instance, under Professor John P. Cunningham, I would be able to learn integration of data through the application of analytical methods of interrogation. The focus on such statistical and machine learning algorithms blends and adds value to my modest grasp of machine learning and computational theory. On the other hand, I would be glad working under Chris Wiggins whose concentration in applied mathematics contributes substantially to machine learning in ways that bridge the gap between theory and practice. For me, the overall objective is to increase my knowledge base.
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