Statement_of_Purpose

Statement of Purpose All through my life, I had always been driven by one predominating cause-to compete with the best and try to be better than the best. This has led me into unknown charters previously not known or experienced by people whom I had been associated with closely. Along with the considerable amount of knowledge that I had assimilated by way of preparation for my undergraduate studies, I had also learnt invaluable lessons in life and most of all I had been taught that there is always someone better and someone on the top, but what is important is to know that and still do your work to the best of your standards and to your fullest satisfaction and live life with deepest intent, pursue what interests you the most and spend quality time on things that make you happy rather than try to do what other “successful” people say or do. This attitude towards life might have made me take up a lot of different things since my higher secondary days till now. I had taken up Biotechnology in my senior secondary school as I reasoned out that I would be learning computer science sometime definitely in the future but this is a new field that I would have to explore so as to add to my knowledge base. Though I did repent for having taken it up and having lost out two valuable years of computer science while at school after I started learning computer science courses at college which were the subjects that interested me the most due to its emphasis on the power of logic which makes it possible to even mimic nature and sheer beauty of the subject in terms of its various algorithms, how they can make possible even seemingly impossible tasks-using only mathematics and logic-the subjects that I have the greatest command over, I somehow do feel that this sense of having lost out has strengthened my determination to master this beautiful subject and also I do know that the best knowledge comes when you do something with interest and intent rather than with ambition in the form of getting the top rank or the best grades though the former does result in the latter automatically. And so here I stand with such an interest that I cannot probably elucidate best in words, but I can promise you based on my past experiences that I had performed exceedingly well when I had done things out of the mundane academic studies where through the unfailing competitive spirit of mine and a little hardwork, I did achieve a significant success but when I had done things out of this on my own interest, the results achieved were far more superior. To illustrate this, I cite an example where I had shifted from one streams of education which was rote oriented in India to the more logic and application oriented stream of CBSE in my ninth grade through my own initiative and had done exceeding well in the board exams in Standard X and XII with a CBSE merit certificate in French in X and in Mathematics in XII(secured 100%) which is awarded to the top 0.1% of the students in the whole of the country. I still was ignorant of the beauty of computer science after my XII when I took up engineering in Instrumentation and Control Engineering for my undergraduate studies again based on my reasoning that I should explore a lot of different things rather than take up what everyone does just for the sake of monetary benefits. But soon enough, I realized that engineering was slightly different from the sciences for which I had an innate aptitude for as it involved more of logical reasoning and that was where my heart really lied in. When this, coupled with my two projects in computer vision and image processing which elicited the practical aspects of my area of interest where the human responses were imitated using algorithms, I grew more impassioned by this field and decided to pursue my higher studies in this field especially after my second project on computer vision where I had got amazing results on tracking humans after implementing an online feature selection process coupled with mean shift based tracking algorithm. Though initially I had faced problems with the implementation of the algorithm, I had persevered and had experienced ineffable joy on seeing the outcome of my work when there was near perfect tracking for as long as the object had an overlap between the two consecutive frames. I am working on improving this algorithm during this vacation and am planning to implement it in my final year project too which is the regulation of the duration of traffic signal lights based on the density of traffic in a particular lane and also detecting if a vehicle is exceeding speed limits by incorporating a modified version of this tracking algorithm. Vision is, without argument, the most important of the five basic senses of life. It is through vision that most of the more highly evolved organisms assimilate information from their environment. The premise that vision can be reproduced in exactly the same way artificially in machines through the use of confounding yet interesting and logically coherent algorithms is what excites me the most about computer vision This interest led me to take up pattern recognition as an elective in my present semester as a senior undergraduate student at NIT,Trichy . It is a very interesting though exhausting course as we had learnt to code as well as understand the essence of all the various pattern recognition algorithms like biologically inspired ones(ant colony, genetic algos,particle swarm optimization),simulated annealing and artificial neural networks.We are also taught support vector machines,etc. Throughout school,I had been an academically outstanding student who was very competitive in every field that I had involved myself in. I had realized the importance of resolution, determination, hard work and resolve when I secured a gpa of 9.77 in my second semester with an institute rank of 7 amongst 700 very bright and highly competitive students from all departments and fields of study and again in my 4th semester when I secured an Institute Rank of 2 with a GPA of 9.55. But my essential conviction in life which is to do a lot of different things has remained strong throughout my undergraduate studies and I still pursue other interests too though I had now gained the wisdom to concentrate on this one field of interest and make it my first priority and try to excel in it. I am actively involved in the techno-management fest of my college called Pragyan where I had organized an event on how things work and am organizing one management based event this year on stock-pitching, case studies and marketing. I believe one must have a well rounded personality and should involve in a couple of things outside of his or her primary interests while still keeping his focus on the first priorities strong in order to have an exposure that would help later in life. I had also organized quizzes in my college as part of my position as the President of SEDS, (Students for Exploration and Development of Space) in order to develop awareness amongst students on the interesting field of space sciences, astronomy and aerospace. I had also taken an active part in the department symposium during all the three years in my department. I love experimenting by participating in various extracurricular activities. During one such activity, I realized my creative bent as regards to writing and coming up with captivating captions, etc. Though I had always known that I had a penchant for languages, it was during my experience as report manager of newsletter that I had realized this dormant talent This exposure of dabbling in many different fields has taught me the importance of time management, organization and planning in order to handle many things simultaneously in addition to doing well in the course work Apart from this, I have designed an automated electronic blood pressure monitor which results in more accurate results, has a smaller size and better cost as compared to the conventional blood pressure monitor and it has been selected by Ideas Challenge organized by TRECSTEP of NIT,Trichy as one of the few product design ideas that was envisaged as a tool for development of the society and they were ready to support us in the form of monetary aid to pursue the product. Also I had been selected for the final personal interview round of the prestigious OPJEMS scholarship for excellence in engineering and management of about Rs.65000.Only two amongst the whole batch of 600 students were selected for this after three intensive rounds of elimination. Though I had missed out on the final scholarship in the personal interview round, I had returned a wiser person from the experience as I was satisfied with myself as I was honest to the interviewers and had been true to myself which had reinforced one attribute of life that I cherish the most-integrity.