Below is a personal statement written by an applicant who was accepted to Oxford university’s computer science program. He earned his undergrad in electrical engineering with a 2.2 GPA.

This example personal statement is also a great sample of how one can explain bad grades in a personal statement.

This essay demonstrates how, through failure, the applicant overcame his low GPA, despite suffering from multiple mental diseases and conditions. With sheer perseverance, he showed his sincerity in his passion for data analytics and computer science.

You might also be interested in reading this Sample Cambridge University Personal Statement.

Here is the personal statement of the Oxford Student in computer science explaining low GPA

People often only see the tip of the iceberg when measuring a person’s success. Based on that, they presume that the person came from a fortunate background or got lucky. My recent achievements are a perfect fit for the preceding statement. It’s easy to assume that being a Software Developer and a Data Scientist working with multi-million-dollar startups and companies, I got lucky or was fortunate. However, my skills and expertise span many software and hardware platforms, culminating in years of hard work and resilience through failure. Hence it demands a peek into my humble beginnings.

I was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) at age 15. OCD is the kind of disease that can be misinterpreted by people’s presumption about being overly concerned with details. In reality, it is a disease that consumes a person. I started my psychiatric medication a few weeks after my diagnosis. Unfortunately, my medication came with a range of side effects and, at one point, necessitated a dose that crippled my brain. As a result, I gained 80 pounds over two months and was at a point where my parents thought I would be lucky to get through high school.

Three months before my high school exams, I decided I didn’t want to live this life anymore. From that day, I studied 12 hours a day. I did nothing except study because only a tiny portion of my brain was in working condition. I cleared high school, after which my health improved, and my medication was reduced. I lost 90 pounds, aced the SAT with 2370/2400, and entered Electrical Engineering at a premier college.

For once, I saw hope in my life. But that didn’t last long. I believed my brain wasn’t working at its full potential due to my medication’s side effects. So, I stopped taking my medication, and instead of getting better, I went into a severe relapse. I was naive to think I would recover from my ailment with sheer willpower alone. As a result, I ruined four semesters at college. Not just that, but I returned to square one and had to start my medication all over again.

It took me a couple of more semesters before my condition stabilized. I was on the verge of relegating to a junior batch when I was awarded 3 Fs in the 5th semester. It would have been easy to give up then, and the idea of quitting crossed my mind several times. But unfortunately, people prey on the weak. I realized that when a teacher ridiculed me in front of the whole class. He said he was fortunate not to have a child like me and that I was a liability to my parents.

But not all people are the same. At the time, the Associate Head of the Department, Dr. Kaneu, inquired about my situation. After explaining, he understood and encouraged me to start my Final Year Project. I don’t know how to describe his contribution, but he was a beacon of light when I was surrounded by darkness. I was always passionate about programming and drones, so I started Control Design of a Tri-copter as my FYP. With a bit of technical background at the time, I knew I would have to work very hard if that drone was to take a flight.

So, I worked tirelessly, often working days at a time without sleep. When I felt low on motivation, Dr. Kaneu was always there to support and guide me. Finally, after months of grueling and painstaking flight simulations and hardware designs, I completed my maiden flight. That was one of the happiest moments of my life as I had secured not only a flight but also designed a radically new approach to Master-Master control system design contrary to the traditional Master-Slave architecture. I did several other projects with Dr. Kaneu in key research areas, including Microcontroller development and IoT integration with Mobile Apps. I also designed the digital instrument cluster for the Shell Eco-marathon team. This equipped me with the skills to seamlessly integrate several hardware and software platforms.

Upon graduation, I had to leave for my hometown, and that’s when the reality of my GPA dawned upon me. I applied to several companies for job placement but never heard back due to the GPA cut-off criteria. When I explored the option of pursuing a master’s, I again faced GPA requirements that I couldn’t remotely fulfill. I once again felt nothing ahead of me, but I knew I was passionate about programming. That’s when I started freelancing as a software developer. Programming came naturally to me, and although I wasn’t a computer scientist, I realized that my strong foundations in Object Oriented Programming in C++ and Data Structure/Algorithm design were enough to get me started.

I learned platforms like Android and iOS through multiple online courses and secured projects with clients on Upwork. In the beginning, the financial reward was minuscule, and often I would spend the whole amount on my equipment and taking paid courses. To increase my professional credibility and improve my GPA, I started a master’s in Data Science at a local university. By this point, I had become proficient in Mobile App development and gained experience in Web development and backend frameworks such as Node JS and Firebase.

The turning point came when a client (Tom Martin) hired me for a Geolocation Proof of concept project. The project was for a university that required an end-to-end software solution. The solution mandated an iOS mobile app synced with a backend system like Firebase and a front-end Admin Panel made with Angular. In parallel, I also worked with Hauni GmbH, the leader in the German Tobacco industry. I brought their Digital Vape to life by resolving background data sync issues using Google cloud. In addition, my efforts turned their vape into an iBeacon transmitter that iOS devices could monitor in the background.

Once I completed the Geolocation proof-of-concept, Tom revealed that he had a background in Corporate IT with 20 years of experience in Big Data architecture. He also offered me to join his Big Data and Software solutions startup, IX Tech Global. I happily accepted the offer as the job description demanded a wide range of technologies like AWS, which I always wanted to learn but didn’t have the resources to incur Infrastructure costs.

At IX Tech Global, I asserted my position by learning AWS and developing decoupled Big Data Pipelines using Apache Kafka and Lambda functions. The pipeline ingested data from multiple sources such as Shopify, Google Ads/Analytics, Mintsoft, and Facebook Ads and stored them in the S3 data lake. After data preprocessing, I ran a wide range of Analytics, including revenue prediction using Random Cut Forest and other regression algorithms like Random Forest Regressor, Support Vector Machines, and Multivariate regression.

In addition, I co-founded the Jurassic Apps product, in which I developed Shopify Apps. In my work, I used React as the front end and AWS as the backend with apps like Geosaur, Stockosaurus, and Syncosaurus. My work on these apps has buzzed the Shopify App Store market. I also contributed to the Snagtights business, Tom’s leading venture, and boosted the revenue by engaging repeat customers using recommendation systems and integrated anomaly detection using ElasticSearch and Kibana Dashboards.

As part of my Masters’s Thesis, I developed the Control System Design of a UAV using Deep Reinforcement learning to bridge Data Science with Electrical Engineering and used a DDPG Agent to complete a successful flight of the Parrot Rolling Spider Minidrone.

For my Master’s, I graduated at the top of my class in Data Science. I became 2x AWS Certified and am currently working at IX Tech Global as a Full-stack Software Developer and Data Scientist. I am also developing products as an Independent Contractor for startups such as Seadog Fishing Solutions, where we are rolling out a Geolocation based App. This app tracks fishing activity, sends data to backend services, and provides real-time analytics to increase fishing output. This is achieved by learning correlations between Geospatial references and fisher-man activity such as catches, gear deployment, sales, etc.

I believe that I am at a point of starting a new chapter in my life and want to expand my skill set into innovation rather than mere application. For this reason, I believe a degree in Advanced Computer Science at Oxford will help me achieve my goals. Till now, I have been developing my academic projects on a shoestring budget and had to often self-finance these projects. I want access to world-class facilities and resources, such as dedicated GPUs at Advanced Research Computing at Oxford, so I can focus more on developing new algorithms rather than be constrained by computational power.

I believe that Reinforcement Learning can be applied to any system. Combined with the pre-training of models, the same algorithm can be used for multiple UAVs. I wanted to experiment with this idea, but due to the limited computational power at my disposal, I could barely run enough simulations to complete a successful flight of one system, i.e., a Quadcopter.

A Quadcopter has four rotors, and a Tricopter has 3 with a servo motor that equates to the same number of control surfaces. This means that a model trained for a Quadcopter and a Tricopter will contain the same number of Observations and actions, and a model pre-trained on one system can be fine-tuned on another. A graduate degree in Advanced Computer Science will also give me the ability to understand computational complexity in-depth, and I will be able to design Neural Networks that can exponentially reduce CPU utilization in microcontrollers or iOTs.

These systems are constrained in CPU power due to their size. In Data Science, I learned the applications of different kinds of Machine Learning models but didn’t get the opportunity to design new models. I don’t consider techniques like bagging and boosting to improve accuracy as something novel. Still, things like Random Forest Regressor or Google’s Bert that change these domains forever are the ones that matter. I would also like to understand Artificial Intelligence and its enhancement through Quantum Computing. Given the extensive research at Oxford in this domain, I will be able to not only enhance my knowledge of this subject but also contribute to this field upon graduation.

My clients and professors have told me several times that I am an extraordinary individual who has learned several technology stacks that can take years to master. I would like to disagree with them respectfully. What separates me from others is that no matter how often I get knocked down, I keep getting back up and never give in. This attitude has helped me in turning my life around. It holds for everything I have and will experience. From my first 10-mile run to graduating at the top of my class in my Master’s when I graduated at the bottom in my undergrad, I want to be remembered for my innovation.