The following statement of purpose was written by an applicant who was accepted into several top graduate programs in artificial intelligence. It effectively covers all of the important points that are typically included in a strong SOP. In fact, variations of this statement of purpose were accepted at SUNY, CUNY, and the University of Buffalo. Use this example as a guide to understanding the key elements of a successful statement of purpose in AI.

Example Statement of Purpose for Artificial Intelligence

With an undergrad in computer science and two years of full-time work experience, I aim to earn a master’s degree in computer science. Having a solid math background, I experienced the practical applications of math in my undergrad courses. This exposure has raised my interest in pursuing a graduate degree. After graduating from University at Buffalo, I envision myself as a highly competent computer scientist.

During my undergrad, I excelled at several courses that would lay a solid foundation for the future. For example, data structures and Algorithms taught me how to use appropriate data structures to efficiently process data-related operations with the help of amortized analysis. These courses also helped me adopt optimized and logical problem-solving methods. For example, I was tasked with compressing a file of at least 5 MB with a target compression ratio of at least 20% while ensuring that the content and size of the file remained unchanged upon decompression. To complete this task, I developed a program using the Huffman coding compression algorithm to compress and decompress text files, achieving a compression ratio of 27%.

Courses in Artificial Intelligence taught me how to build intelligent computer programs with the help of supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms. I used this knowledge to develop intelligent programs as course projects that could detect handwritten digits and predict the likelihood of criminal activity in a particular region. Information Retrieval taught me to create applications that would satisfy an information need of an unstructured nature from within extensive collections of data. This led me to develop a search engine that would search for documents according to a given query.

I also completed several group projects during my undergrad. These projects taught me the importance of teamwork and accepting constructive criticism. The goal of my final year project was to provide an online platform for individuals wishing to prepare themselves for an interview. It also offered an opportunity for companies to publish interviews. One of my teammates was working on an image-processing module to analyze an interviewee’s body language. He needed help increasing facial expressions recognition processing speed during the real-time video. So, I advised him that we do not need to analyze frames of every millisecond as humans cannot change their facial expressions at such speed. With this approach, we reduced the video lag time by 65%. At the same time, I was struggling to detect the confidence level in the interviewee’s speech. At first, my approach was to analyze the amount of stuttering in speech. Then, my teammate came up with an algorithm to compare the percentage of silent/pause stages in the interviewee’s speech with the percentage of silent/pauses stages in a sample confident speech. Initially, I was reluctant to go on with this suggestion as it would increase the processing time of speech. But after experimenting with the advice, the accuracy of our detection of confidence in speech improved. I was keen enough to prioritize an increase in the efficiency of our algorithm at the expense of a slight increase in processing time, due to which we achieved the desired purpose.

Several courses were crucial in helping me transition smoothly from being a student to becoming a professional. A course on Database management systems taught me how to organize data for persistent storage using relations. It also taught me how to write efficient queries for large datasets. Such skills enabled me to restructure relations in a database and implement optimized approaches to querying, which increased the performance speed by 30%. A course in Operating Systems taught me about the memory management of applications and how to use the underlying abilities to operate systems for cooperation among different threads and processes.

Finally, as an employee at Microsoft, I was assigned to migrate the old documents from the production database server to another to make space available for new documents. These documents needed to be migrated quickly because new documents were being rapidly stored on the production database. I utilized the skills learned in the Operating Systems course and created a parallel migration tool to process many old documents. As a result, the record of 60,000 documents was migrated in 70 minutes. Ordinarily, such migration would take approximately 120 minutes.

Considering the importance of my undergraduate courses in shaping my experiences in the industry, I would like to dive deeper into specific subjects. Hence, graduate school would be the perfect springboard. I look forward to delving deeper into Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Databases, and Information Retrieval. Specifically, the work of Professors Junsong Yuan and Jingjing Meng has captured my attention. In addition to deepening my knowledge, I look forward to the project-based coursework that will allow me to apply the learned skills to real-world problems. I also look forward to participating in student clubs through which I can engage in extracurricular activities. The clubs like ACM and UB Hacking will allow me to network with the student community and help me improve my programming skills by doing innovative projects within a given timeline. These clubs will also allow me to share my skills and organizational experience.

My undying optimism and grit will help me complete my master’s with excellent grades and become a well-rounded professional. In summary, my background in mathematics and computer science, the opportunity to delve deeper with faculty, and the confidence that I will survive tough times are the driving factors to pursue my MS degree at the University at Buffalo. I look forward to starting this journey and graduating as a proud student at the University of Buffalo.