I truly believe that the human brain is the most amazing computer that we have at the

moment. It may be limited in some aspects, such as numeric computation, but it

compensates with attributes such as emotion, intuition, instinct, visual understanding,
learning capability - the things that combined form what we call 'intelligence'.

The reason why I am applying for a Computer Science degree is that I am fascinated by
computers, and I have been so for almost as long I can remember - received my first PC
at around the age of 3. I admire how powerful they are, but also how dumb they can be
when compared to our brain. How they are only a piece of useless silicon if there isn't
someone to program them.
In the 7th grade I grew really excited about programming, I started making small games
such as Pong in DarkBasic, and I just fell in love with writing code.
In the 9th grade, I started Informatics as a course in my school. I loved the puzzles you
had to solve in order to get the correct solution, the edge-cases you had to take into
consideration, the optimizations - all of these kept me engaged. I started studying
algorithms, and by the end of the ninth grade I had almost finished the high-school
Informatics programme.
I started participating in a lot of contests, starting from the classic Olympiad, where I got
second prize in the local phases, up to national contests in Algorithmics and Software
Development, such as iTec, where I scored 4th place nationwide.

The thing that I am most proud of is the participation in "Company of the Year", a
business competition organized by Junior Achievement in which I had to create a
student company with a team. Joined by 3 friends, we created SmartRead, an
application designed to help teachers understand the way their students learn. Teachers
could digitally attach questions to their PDF courses and then send them through the
app to their students - which would then read the materials and answer the questions.
Teachers were able to see the student's progress with the course, how much of it did
they complete, where are difficulties, who is performing well, and more.
In the competition we managed to advance to the national stage, which we won, and
went on to Berlin for the international phase. There we didn't manage to win a prize as a
team, but I was awarded a Leadership Award, for great team leading and strong product
vision.
We continued with SmartRead after the contest, getting 2nd place at a national start-up
competitions organized by an American corporation, Imprezzio Inc. The app was used
by our economics teacher in her class, and she was thrilled about it, as many other
were. Sadly, in Romania, almost every school and university, including ours, has very
limited resources, so going forward we didn't manage to sell the app, no school being
able to buy it so ultimately we had to cancel the project.
It was a great experience, and we all learned a lot - about businesses, about computers,
and this is the moment where my passion for data, statistics and machine learning
started to manifest.
After SmartRead I started multiple personal projects (digit recognition, pattern
recognition, handwriting recognition) and the one I am working now is called Popular
Word. I was curious what is the most used word that is not a negation, affirmation, or
preposition in different languages, so I started this project in Python. Using a Trie data
structure I can extract and process data from corpuses that are more than 10 million
words large, while keeping everything in RAM.

Outside of school I like playing basketball on weekends, and sometimes video games. I
like volunteering and spending time with my friends.

In the future, I see myself going into AI research, my dream being that someday I can
create true general purpose artificial intelligence. Creating something that is as amazing
as the human brain has something special about it, for me it's much more