Kindly review my SOP. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Naman Kumar MS in ROBOTICS
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As a child, toys like Remote Controlled Car always fascinated me and watching high-tech movies instills me with a great desire and passion of working in the direction of developing such technology in reality. I believe that there is a great scope in the field of Robotics and I want to devote my life to Robotics and Artificial Intelligence because of my love and interest in it. The future belongs to Robots working like human beings and as ever powerful sensors and algorithms increase the scope of robotics, I am very excited to be a part of this revolution and this determination has motivated me to apply for a Master’s in Robotics in Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
When I first attended a conference on Robotics in my High School, I was very fascinated by the research and work going on in this field. It was out of this interest that I decided to pursue Electronics Engineering as my field of study for my undergraduate. During my initial semesters, subjects like Mechatronics and C programming was my first flavor of my dream field. After my college started, I was selected in the Robotics Club of my University which provided me a great platform to work on different projects and participate in prestigious national Robotics Competitions. I secured second position in a prestigious national level Image Processing competition at IIT Madras and a third position in an autonomous robotics competition at IIT Kanpur. I achieved positions in top three in many other National level Robotics competitions also. My passion for Robotics helped me in coming up with a paper in a conference in India. To further pursue my interest in the field of Robotics and related fields, I underwent training at Embex Technologies, India for 2 months in Embedded Systems, Arm Processors (LPC 214x series), PCB Designing and Basic Labview.
It was because of my devotion, knowledge and interest that I got a chance to go for a 6 months research internship at LEMS, Brown University, USA under Prof. Benjamin Kimia in the field of Computer Vision and Machine Learning during my 6th semester. I worked on Contour Extraction and then integrated it with Supervised Learning using different features like Length, Contrast and Histogram Distances to come up with great results which also helped me in submitting a paper for CVPR IEEE Conference 2013. I strongly believe that fields like Computer vision, Artificial Intelligence can have great applications in Robotics. This internship also gave me a chance to attend CVPR 2012 conference at Providence, Rhode Island which was a life time experience. I also did an internship in a startup “dsyn.com” for 2 months to get a feel of the corporate world.
Apart from working in my dream field of Robotics, I also actively participate in Social Work and I am an active member of 2 NGO’s. I teach poor children and create awareness about diseases like AIDS and Malaria. I also help in making them aware of their rights and duties. I am also a member of PEC Cricket Team and have also captained my school cricket team and the academy team which helped me in gaining the quality of Leadership. I also participate in many athletic events like 50m, 100m race and marathon to keep myself physically fit. During 4th, 5th and 7th semesters, I have organized many workshops in our college related to Robotics and Image Processing in which 60 students participated on average.
The various projects that I’ve been involved with and the challenges that I have faced on the way have reinforced my belief that it is only in the continued pursuit of the answer, that we unveil the real questions of the problem. I am also able to appreciate the amount of work going in the field of Robotics and the positive effect it can have on our future. I really want to be a part of it and that is why, I want to specialize and apply for Master’s program in the field of Robotics.
As my first choice, I want to enroll as a Master student in the Robotics Institute- Carnegie Mellon University because of the gamut of research being done here and quality of courses taught here are also exceptional. In this program, I plan to study further about Robotics and related fields. I am confident that my sound technical background and enthusiasm for Robotics coupled with the stimulating environment and the state-of-the-art-infrastructure at CMU will catalyze my learning process and provide me with the right impetus to fulfill my dreams.
