Akash Patel Department of Computer Science

Akash3379@gmail.com University of California San Diego

Statement of purpose
Once St. Jerome said “Good, better, best. Never let it rest, til your good is better and your better
is best”. I did the same – made my knowledge and skills better from good during my school and
undergraduate studies and I intend to make it best by pursuing a Masters in Computer Science
at your university. Science and technology have always amazed me, from VCR player to DVD
player, from computer to smartphone. I have always been curious to know how things work,
how a computer processes this much information in milliseconds, how they communicate with
each other. When I was in 8th grade, my father bought a computer and he used to pay every bill
using that computer. Ever since I got so passionate about computers and the internet and their
working.
Through my primary schooling, I had devised a strategy for efficient learning. It consists of
finding out the basic principles which govern that subject and finding answers to the why-what-
how question. This way I consistently maintain the 1st position in class since 1st grade and
among top 10 in my undergraduate studies. I mainly chose Computer Engineering because I
was really passionate about the internet and how computers have changed our lives.
During my undergraduate studies, I have devoted myself on making my fundamentals strong in
every domain of Computer Science. I have equally focused and did equally well on both
hardware and software courses like Networks, System architecture, Database Management,
Algorithms, Data structure, Digital Circuits, and Operating Systems, scoring a very good grade
in each course. I strive to learn the best approach to solve any problem. For instance, I always
try to learn and apply the best data structure and algorithm to solve a coding problem and
generalize the knowledge I acquire so that I can efficiently apply it to new problems. I have
always tried to fill the gaps in my knowledge, and also learn more than what academic course
can offer by reading from the internet, blogs and from different relevant books. For instance, I
have learned the basic concept of the binary search tree in classes but I have learned many
types of trees like AVL tree, Red-Black tree etc. and their use cases and their pros/cons.
I gave equal importance to both the practical sessions as well as theory classes and did my
practical assignments sincerely. I quickly learned to apply design patterns and object-oriented
concepts to my code to make it more efficient, modular, easy to debug and extend. I pay
attention to security and reusability of my code too. For example, while developing a blogging
platform for our college website, I had divided it into different modules for modularity, reusability
and also took care of SQL injection.
Along with learning new things every day, I also focus on improving in the areas in which I am
weak. I make sure that I implement what I have learned. For example, I have learned different
types of recommendation concepts and their merits in my Cloud Computing Classes. Using this
knowledge, I have developed a Movie Recommendation System in Hadoop using Item-Item
Collaborative Filtering. In the third year of my UG, we have completed an android project named
"Sudoku Solver" under my leadership. Using this application one can just take a photo of
sudoku puzzle and our application will give solved sudoku puzzle. It helped to improve my
leadership and management skills. Under the guidance of Dr. Dhiren Patel, we have worked
with Surat City's Municipal Corporation to resolve a problem of handling very diverse data from
different sources as a part of our UG final year project. To resolve this problem, we have
created an application platform which is useful for collecting, managing and processing the
diverse data optimally. We have used Spiral Software Development Life Cycle model as the
Akash Patel Department of Computer Science
Akash3379@gmail.com University of California San Diego

requirement was changing constantly. From this project, I have improved my skill to carry out a
large industrial project and also learned much more about software engineering techniques.
Currently, I am working in Samsung Research and Development Institute India, Bengaluru since
July 2017 as a Software developer. Initially, I have worked on a project named DMA (Data
Management and Analysis) for 8 months whose customer is India's biggest telecom company
Reliance JIO. In this project, we handled large telecom data for Reliance JIO operator and
predict the surge of users at particular time and area so that we can increase antenna power at
that particular time and area to give customer best service. From this project, I had a good
exposure to Big data technologies like Apache-Spark and Hadoop. I also worked on Machine
learning concepts and learned how to build different models like Random Forest Gradient Boost
Regression and use different loss functions in accordance with our project requirement.
Currently, I am working on a project named SSM (Small-Cell System Management). In this
project, we have created software for Small-Cell Management for different telecom operators
like Verizon (USA), Charter Communications, Inc. (USA) and Reliance JIO (India). In this
project, I have worked on all steps of Agile Software Development Life Cycle, from gathering
requirements directly from Verizon, Charter customer to Basic testing. I traveled to South Korea
to represent my team for requirement gathering and knowledge sharing, where I got first-hand
exposure to different components in the telecom field. Currently, I am working on Research
Paper for efficient Virtual Memory Management which will be very helpful for my current project
as our project will move to a Virtualized environment.
The Computer Science department at your college is a place where many new ideas originated
and unprecedented discoveries are made. I am very inspired by Professor Kamalika
Chaudhuri's work and I really want to work under her to further my knowledge and research
abilities in these domains. The courses offered by this college undoubtedly provide me with the
platform to learn and demonstrate my skills and knowledge and I really want to make positive
contributions to ongoing research work.
I, therefore, look forward to joining the esteemed department of the University of California San
Diego as a graduate student.