I was a curious child and electronic engineering came to occupy the center of my world incredibly early on, taking old electronic devices apart and putting them back together again, exploring. Electronics was also my central passion in early adulthood, earning my BS Degree in this area. Even though I majored in Electronic Engineering as an undergraduate student, I have excelled in Math and Physics and long cultivated a particular passion for these areas of study. Gradually and for some time now, despite earning my degree in Engineering, I have come to believe that my professional calling lies in Statistics.
The bridge between electronic engineering and statistics was my close relationship with my computers, which gradually assumed a leading role in my life, becoming integral to my professional mindset and spheres of interest. A good student highly motivated to achieve excellence in education, the MS in Statistics Program at XXXX University is my first choice for graduate school for several reasons, most of all the sheer excellence of your program and its location.
I keenly look forward to giving my all to Statistical Learning and Optimization. I very much admire the thoroughly interdisciplinary nature of the program at XXXX, with the flexibility of choosing electives from a wide range of domains, including engineering and I am also keenly excited about the prospect of learning from and contributing to the consulting services offered by the Statistics Department. Statistics for Good is also an initiative by Stanford that I admire since volunteer work has been close to my heart since my days as a volunteer teacher in Varanasi, here in India, where I was born and raised. I deeply respect and would love to participate in Statistics for Good in any way possible. If accepted to Statistics at XXXX, I will most definitely attend the program.
I see myself in the future as a member of an industrial research and development team working on developing statistical learning and optimization algorithms to solve problems in engineering. As I see it, earning an MS degree in Statistics is the logical culmination of my passion for statistics and optimization. I hope to be accepted to Stanford because of its world-class reputation and research atmosphere, the best faculty, exceptional peers, excellent infrastructure, and the optimal location for exploring my potential. A high achiever since my high school days, in 2012, I was awarded the Best Student in the City of Mumbai Award for high academic achievement and distinguished extracurricular activities. Similarly, I was awarded the most coveted Director's Gold Medal for outstanding all-around achievement and leadership among some nine hundred B. Tech graduates of the 2018 batch.
Along with my Engineering courses, as an undergraduate student, I also studied Math, Probability, and Statistics, with the latter stealing my heart. In my sophomore year, I served as an undergraduate researcher in the Sensors and Systems Lab at IIT BHU. I worked as an undergraduate researcher on the classification of gases using the response data generated by the gas sensor array. This represented my first significant exposure to data preprocessing, machine learning, and swarm intelligence. I took the much-vaunted online course Machine Learning by Dr. Andrew Ng to quickly get familiar with the basic concepts. In the end, I developed a CNN model from scratch. I trained it with PSO to get a faster convergence, reducing the data dimension using PCA to tackle the highly correlated sensor responses. Learning a great deal about statistical learning and optimization, I was also given a glimpse of how core engineering problems might be solved due to the discovery of hidden patterns in data.
I now have a solid academic foundation for further optimization and statistics studies, especially digital signal processing, forecasting, and Time Series Analysis. My courses in quantitative methods, information and distribution theory, and wireless communications have been balanced with studies involving a lot of programming, mathematical modeling, and simulation. I also have a solid grasp of artificial intelligence and parallel algorithms. Linear programming, solving PDEs, Bayesian learning, Riemann Integrals, queuing theory, MDPs, game theory, neural networks, fuzzy logic, and pdf, to name several, are all integral parts of my professional toolkit.
Having Dr. XXXX, an Assistant Professor at BHU, as my advisor was a special honor. He was perfect for helping me develop my focus on learning and optimization and the Beam Selection problem in massive MIMO systems for 5G communications. We explored traditional techniques like Markov Decision Processes and maximum weight matching. We found Matching Theory, a concept used in Economics, uniquely suited for the research. We modeled the problem into an externalities game and devised a novel heuristic algorithm to get a stable result. Then we created a novel linear precoder based on QR decomposition of the channel matrix, further improving the outcomes significantly better than the state-of-the-art algorithms, resulting in publication in IEEE Access.
It was also a special honor to serve as a Teaching Assistant for the course Probabilistic Graphical Models', which involved tutoring students after class, answering their questions, helping them formulate solutions to assignments and grading papers. Dr. XXXX, currently working at Ericsson Canada, has played a significant role in my decision to pursue a career as a statistician. I still work with him on finding DNN-based approaches to solve problems in 5G communications. I have been affiliated with NVIDIA as a summer intern in my senior year and as a full-time engineer after graduation. I form part of a team that develops a tool that projects upcoming chips' power and performance numbers using statistical techniques. In the past year, I have also worked on product binning analysis, a convex optimization program that allows significant variances in the performance of the finished chips to be optimally condensed into a smaller number of marketed designations. I also develop non-linear regression models to project next-generation GPUs' leakage power and clock numbers. The remarkable thing is that the tool assists higher management in making crucial business decisions. I have seen instances at NVIDIA where decisions with millions of dollars hanging in the balance have been primarily made based on the data generated by this tool. For me, this underscores the incredible potential impact of statistics.
Thank you for considering my application to Statistics at XXXX.
MS Statistics Personal Purpose Statement Examples