joshux

Sorry, I was referring to surfire. Apology to both of you.

Hello, thanks for your replies, especially fuzzylogician's. It's very helpful. btw, here are my SOP draft. Hope you can give me any feedback. Thanks in advance. ==SOP for CS (Interactive Entertainment Technology Master)== When entering college, somehow I didn't adapt to the social life. I started being nervous talking to people and became depressed because of lacking connection with people. At times I was devoid of motivation to do anything. But deep in my heart, I was sure I can recover. I am an optimistic person. I believe that with knowledge and our own strengths, we can conquer many things. In facing my problems, I started seeking professional help and read self-help books written by professional psychologists. After my junior year, I decided to take an year leave to serve the social service in advance as an assistant in the fire department. After learning life saving skills and getting some real world experience, I realized my self worth in helping others. I became more confident toward people. I went back to school refreshed with renewed energy toward my studies. When I was first introduced to programming, I was curious of how computers can follow logical command to solve problems. This guides me to study computer science at college. After serving social service and returning to school, I took a course in digital visual effects taught by professor YXZ. I became interested in using computer vision and computer graphics techniques to create stunning effects in videos an photographs. This interest leads to my senior project: special relativity in augmented reality. The project extracts foreground object from live video and then apply Lorentz transformation on the object to simulate length contraction phenomenon in special relativity. My interest in the technical field and the experience of overcoming my problems drives me to thinking of this problem: can technology assist human to motivate themselves? In my last semester, I did a course project designing a computer system training brain concentration. While it is not hard to teach the usage of the software, I realized the intricacies in motivating users to keep practicing. Interactive entertainment technology holds a good example of creating engagement in users. Millions of enthusiastic gamers in the world spend significant amount of time and energy playing games. If we can take the elements from games and apply it to the real world, we may motivate people toward what they want to achieve. My goal of pursuing this degree is to try learn technical aspects of games as much as possible. Ultimately, to create a great game to shape the world, or to do research in this area. XYZ's group has abundant research results in computer graphics and visualization. In addition, the ABC physics engine demonstrates that XYZ has emphasis on practical applications. I believe XYZ is my school of choice.

Hello , I'm a computer science undergrad going to apply to grad school (Masters in CS) and I'm preparing my SOP. I really liked my field and have interest in doing research. Though In my first few years of college, I suffered from social anxiety which crippled my grades. However I tried to overcome it with determination. At present, my social anxiety is almost solved. I've read the great book Graduate Admission Essays by Donald Asher. By his advice of explaining low grades is: (i) It has to be in the past (ii) It has to be resolved (iii) It has to be sympathetic (iv) It should unlikely be recur in grad school. Though I think I meet most of the criteria. I'm not sure is this (social anxiety) sympathetic enough. My question is at what length should I mention it in the essay? Should make it my major thesis or just a paragraph in the middle or not even mention it ? One of my concern is that if it's a psychology or some humanity programs it may seem ok to mention this, since they are about people. But this is a CS program. Thanks. Josh