STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

I am in the thirst of expanding my horizon in the quest to attain an advanced education in the field of computer
science. Hailing from the Manchester of South India, I have been brought up with a sense of community and
values that have made me excel in all my endeavours so far. During my high school, I performed well both
academically and athletically. I scored an aggregate of 86.8% in my 12th grade and I was honoured as the best
athlete of my batch at the inter-school level.

I knew computers would be a huge part of my life right from my high school days when I used to look forward to
the computer lab sessions to work on C/C++ programs and marvel at their prowess. This led me to pursue a 5-
year Integrated Software Systems course at PSG College of Arts & Science which is for the sole purpose of
exploring various fields in computer science and also to get hands-on experience working in the industry for 1
year of the course duration.

In the past few years, I have been a mere spectator in the creation of numerous gadgets and implementation of
technologies that I have only seen in sci-fi movies. The concept of machines that can speak, think and feel like
humans are what I am most fascinated by among rest. This part of computers science industry is what I want to be
a part of and to create technologies that will enhance the way people live. I strongly believe specializing in it in
Master of Applied Computer Science program at Concordia University will help me achieve what I want in life.

My college journey has been an exploration of the world of computer science and software development. Each
paper that I took up in college only increased my appetite to learn more. My nature of wanting to be at the top of
my game led me to excel in academics constantly for all semesters by topping my college with an aggregate of
90% . In my freshman year, I was introduced to MOOC. I had abundant world-class learning resources at my
disposal and I quickly enrolled myself into “Programming, Data Structures and Algorithms” and “Introduction to
Programming in C” course by NPTEL, IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur. I was proud of myself when I received the
course completion certificates with great grades.

I have built on my distinctive background in software development by taking up individual projects for a tech
start-up where I configured a squid proxy for a Linux server to block certain websites from being accessed. My
mini project in college was on creating a desktop chatting application under the guidance of Professor P Nithya.
The project was well received for the efficient way I implemented networking concepts and designed the user
interface. In my sixth semester, the paper “Soft Computing” was one of the subjects that I enjoyed most as it is
the field that develops intelligent machines that make human-like decisions. It kick-started my journey towards
machine learning by introducing me to Neural Networks, Fuzzy Logic and Genetic Algorithms.

To satisfy my interest in competitive coding I participated in various tech fests around my city. I won 1st place in
a series of coding competitions conducted at various colleges (SKCET, KCT and PSG CAS). I was offered an
internship with the sponsor company- Flycart Technologies LLP at SKCET tech fest. Flycart Technologies is an
e-commerce product development start-up. During my 5 month (May 2016 to September 2016) internship there, I
worked on creating Wordpress plugins and an API for a Joomla e-commerce plugin using Lumen framework. I
was later assigned to create a SAAS newsletter prototype that was quite challenging to implement. I successfully
created and presented it to the team and was well appreciated for it. During the last month, I worked on the testing
team to help them migrate to use Codeception tool.

I understood how technology and business go hand in hand during my summer internship as an analyst at
Goldman Sachs for 2 months (15th May 2017 to 15th July 2017). I saw how the industry was in dire need of more
data scientists and engineers to build tools to handle the exponentially growing amount of information. This led
me to focus on programming in Python and I loved it’s simplicity and productivity. I worked on the project “SEO
Tool to Analyse Live Web Pages” which is a simple web scraping tool to analyse the data in a given webpage. I
learnt a lot about machine learning algorithms and natural language processing in the course of developing the
project. I enrolled in the “Python with Data Science” certification course at NIIT institute and received the
outstanding grade in October 2017.

During my final semester, I received an offer to intern at Cartrabbit Technologies Private Limited from November
2017 to March 2018 where I further enhanced my skills. I worked on developing various Wordpress extensions
and contributed to the company’s SAAS products. After all these experiences I realized that I needed a program
to help me to acquire a higher level of knowledge, leadership skills and problem-solving ability to tackle the most
diverse and complex problems. I realize that a Master’s degree in Applied Computer Science at Concordia
University will enrich me by transforming me into a complete professional and providing me with the raw
materials necessary to get a winning edge over others.

Home to one of the largest student population, Montreal in Canada is the ideal place for me to pursue my higher
education amongst the rest. Multiculturalism is a key aspect of the greatness of the city and it is a relatively
affordable city for students. Canada’s high academic standards and rigorous quality controls guarantee a high-
quality education. I believe that a blend of all these will aid me in self-improvement and in my career growth. The
area of Artificial Intelligence is a new scientific infrastructure for research and learning in India and there are
abundant untapped job opportunities in this field. I will have a promising career with the skillset that I will
acquire during my Master's program.

In addition to the offer from Concordia University, I also received an offer to study at Dalhousie University to
pursue Master’s Program in Computer Science. The reason why I chose Concordia over Dalhousie is the structure
of the program. At Concordia, there are modules such as Artificial Intelligence, Human-Machine Communication
and Developments in Software Engineering which will rigorously train me to be a specialist in this field.
To hone my skills in the field of Machine Learning and to become a specialist in it, I made the decision to study
MApCompSc at the Concordia University. The exceptional facilities and distinguished faculty at the university
make it ideal for me to study and achieve my professional goals. Concordia University provides me with a
dynamic atmosphere, which will shape me to be a thinker and a learner. The diversity of the student’s body will
open my mind to new influences, new ideas and new ways of doing things. I look forward to being an active
contributing member of the student community at Concordia University.

Prashanthi Ramesh