SOP Sample

Statement of Purpose for Vinay Vashishtha  Applying for M.S. in Electrical Engineering (VLSI Design)  Fall 2011

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

I regard the research experience gained during my internship at the Institut Supérieur  d'Electronique de Paris (ISEP) as one of the most important events of my academic life. It is after taking into account this experience and much pondering over my future career  objectives that I have decided to continue my studies in the field of engineering by enrolling for a Master’s degree program. At ISEP, France, I worked on a project involving the design and study of a Concurrent Error Detection (CED) scheme based on residue codes for modules performing arithmetic operations operations in FPGA under the guidance of Prof. Prof. Frederic Amiel and Prof. Prof. Thomas Ea. I designed different components of the scheme, among these, a module to calculate residue codes that provided hardware redundancy for error detection and used only a fraction of  the design area. I then proceeded to implement the scheme on a FPGA and to study its   performance by fault injection. We were successful in achieving high error detection rates while keeping area overhead and power dissipation to a minimum. My work did not come to a halt after the internship internship however and I am currently currently involved with my project advisors in writing a conference paper based on our work. During my undergraduate studies at Vellore Institute of Technology University (VITU), I  became keenly involved in robotics and began learning by self-study. I later successfully  built a vision-based ball follower robot, a task that taught me the use of MATLAB for  image processing. This knowledge proved to be exceedingly useful when I, and a team of  three other students, successfully implemented a face detection algorithm for a class   proje project. ct. I develo developed ped an intere interest st in resear research ch after after being being expose exposed d to the cutting cutting edge techniques introduced in the IEEE papers that we referred to while working on the  project. My first interface interface with the professio professional nal world came during my industrial industrial training training at the factory of Ericsson India Limited, Jaipur, India. Here, I learned about Ericsson’s Mobile Switching Center (MSC) server and different models of its GSM radio base stations. This training helped me gain practical knowledge of the field of mobile communication that would have been difficult to come by in a classroom. Apart from academics, I was also involved, as an executive committee member, with the IEEE Student Branch at my University and organized several successful events. One of  the most significant among these was ‘Micromouse’ – a robotic competition where an autonomous robot has to find its way to the center of a maze. Working at the Student Branch honed my leadership skills and shaped me as team player.

Statement of Purpose for Vinay Vashishtha  Applying for M.S. in Electrical Engineering (VLSI Design)  Fall 2011

When working at ISEP, I particularly enjoyed the nature of problems associated with my work which was related to Fault Tolerance as it was not only interesting but also required me to stretch myself to the extent of my abilities to come up with a working solution. I am also fascinated with the field of Fault Tolerance because of the challenges that the  professionals working in this area face in order to develop techniques that would provide reliable performance as more systems are now prone to faults than ever due to increasing operation speeds and densities that continue to rise with rapid device scaling down. I aspire to enhance my knowledge of this domain during my Masters program and would like to work on the development of potent and resource efficient fault tolerant techniques that will deliver high performance under various environments. Having researched the website of University of Southern California’s Electrical Engineering department, I understand the key constituents of its MS degree program in Electrical Engineering (VLSI Design). The well-designed course will help me augment my technical acumen and will provide the expertise I desire in order to pursue a research career. The current research projects at the Information Sciences Institute, especially investigations in Disruptive Electronics, match my own interests and I hope that I will get a chance to participate in these studies in the near future. I eagerly look forward to the   privilege of working with the highly erudite faculty at the University such as Prof. Melvin A. Breuer and Prof. Cauligi S. Raghavendra, from whom I stand to gain immensely. I therefore believe that University of Southern California, with its long tradition of  excellence, will give me the ideal opportunity to attain my career goal. I would regard my admission as an obligation to contribute further to the field of science.