Earning a PHD in Computer Science will enable me to become a highly capable university professor and contribute to important research in my field. I have very much enjoyed my own college experience and look forward to mastering and staying abreast of the most important developments in our dynamic field, sharing our challenges and triumphs with new generations of students. I have tutored students in math and very much enjoy teaching. Currently, I am a successful web developer bringing the advanced screening industry onto electronic ticketing. I have long planned to return to school, however, so that I could become a more accomplished expert in my field qualified to teach others and I am at the optimal point in my career to do so. Working in the industry has been most exciting and now I want to pursue a new chapter in my life, preparing for a career teaching at a college level. Thus, I am applying for your highly esteemed PHD Program.
My senior project at XXX College was a web-based summer camp software program for registering campers and tracked their classes while at camp. The software was used during the summer after graduation. The experience of supporting software development and interacting directly with users was especially fulfilling as far as users were able to assert full control over the project. This principle of providing users with full control also guided my endeavors since that time as well.
After college, I took a job as a PC technician at Adventist Health working at XXXX Medical Center in Los Angeles where I worked in the development of their electronic ticketing system for advanced screenings. The job was a great introduction for me to a broad range of issues in the development and maintenance of information systems. When a position opened on the web team, they promoted me. For the next three years I worked on building intranet web-based applications in PHP and MySQL. I also maintained many legacy systems based on Java and ASP. During this time, I also assisted a college with the development of their website. I spent a year working out the workflow and building a very customer friendly site. In April of 2007, my colleagues and I reached a deal with a nationwide advertising agency that very much liked our work and hired us to do web development on their behalf. For three years now, I have been expanding sites and refining the user experience in line with business requirements.
The principal web site has been reworked several times and now runs on top of Drupal with several custom modules for electronic ticketing. As a part of the Drupal community, I create issues for bugs, review patches, and submit patches for issues our team has fixed. We have come to appreciate the effectiveness of school Linux very much and open-source software along with Drupal.
A few years ago, I volunteered as a coach in the First Robotics League. This elementary school league competes using Lego Mindstorm kits to create autonomous robots in a Lego playing field. While the application is extremely basic, it has enormous possibilities. Artificial intelligence and machine learning fascinated me to no end, and I am looking forward to continuing to do research in these areas. The University of XXXX is my first choice for graduate study because of my deep admiration for the work of XXXX in Artificial Intelligence as well as the lab run by XXXX.
I thank you for considering my application to your program.
PHD CS Robotics AI Artificial Intelligence Personal Statement