Kindly review my SOP

[Naman]

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 6^th 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 4^th, 5^th and 7^th 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.

[thenerdypengwin]

Hey, hope you don't mind if I really tear it apart. They're all suggestions anyway, but here's what I think:

"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."

Your sentence is hard to understand, run-on, too wordy and contrived, and it has some grammar agreement issues. TWO SEPARATE IDEAS: the remote controlled car fascinates you. you would like to make high-tech movie ideas a reality. "instills me with desire and passion for working toward developing such technology" OR "desire for working toward making the dreams of movies a reality".

I can't really spend a lot of time correcting grammar, so my advice is to find the subject and verbs and 1) make them agree. 2) keep separate subjects and verbs as separate sentences. Separate thoughts, separate sentences. Get more consise and to the point. Maybe try outlining your ideas to keep the segregated.

It's great that you talk about your interest as it influenced your choice in major. But instead of filling the paper with words (that are great! to set the tone), explain in more unique detail what about it inspired your choice.

Your accomplishes speak for themselves. Don't brag. All of your work follows the progression of chronologically leading to doing things, not discovering or learning things. What I can tell from your writing is that you value accomplishment and you are driven by attaining higher educational and career statuses. Is that what you're trying to say? (If it is, keep it.) But, I would suggest that as you progress into the paper, instead of saying you did this because of that, start adding what you gained from it and how it led you into the next thing. And remember to keep them as separate sentences!

"I strongly believe that fields like Computer vision, Artificial Intelligence can have great applications in Robotics." WHY do you believe this? HOW can it be applied?

I would say that the description of your social work could go on a personal statement or your CV. It doesn't flow with the rest of your SOP.

Overall, I find your SOP with great content. Refine and focus it. Expand the whys and hows. Demonstrate what YOU would bring to the program in a way that ADDS to your accomplishments. And get someone you know to review and fix your run on sentences if you have to.

Happy editing. gl!

[dcare]

I agree with the previous poster about you emphasizing accomplishments. I think all those are great, but I don't think you need to write every single accomplishment, especially when some are listed on your CV. I would highlight those past experiences that led you directly to your intended area of interest, and I think you need to be more specific about your intended goals. You are heavily focused on the past, but it is unclear about what your research and career goals are in the field. You reiterate that its your "dream field", but what exactly do you want to accomplish is this field? What research interests do you plan to focus on during your graduate studies? and what is it about this particular program besides its exceptional faculty (because they all have exceptional faculty) makes you the right candidate for this program? I think you should revise a bit on content and rather than focusing so much on all of your accomplishments, focus more on the present, and how this school is going to help you reach your goals, and also what you offer the program.

Good Luck!

[antanon82]

I also need mine to be reviewed - BUT I do not want to post it here. Can I email it to someone else here? That would be greatly appreciated...