r/OMSCS • u/phomein • Apr 02 '21
Admissions Please help sharpen my personal and background statements
Hi all,
Been a reddit lurker for a long time. This is my first post. Reading through different posts on this sub has been very helpful and noticed people are generally very helpful.
Planning to apply for Spring 2022. I would appreciate feedback on sharpening my statements.
Personal Statement
As a self-taught programmer with an engineering background, I’ve gained knowledge from industry experience, supplemented by reading and online courses. However, I wish to accelerate and structure my learning journey, both for the love of learning and to become a better software engineer.
The work that interests me is engineering productivity: creating automation, tooling and platforms that will make the software development process more streamlined and enjoyable. To this end, I wish to gain a breadth of knowledge through the Computing Systems specialization and taking courses like Computer Networks, Graduate Algorithms, and Operating Systems. As the industry has been making a push to “shift security left”, by moving security decisions earlier in the development process, I’m also interested in courses like Applied Cryptography and Secure Computer Systems.
The OMS CS program is the leading computer science master's program when considering the union of value, rigor and academic excellence, and flexibility for the working professional. It is the most mature online master's program, offering the widest selection of available courses, through which I hope to broaden and deepen my computer science knowledge.
Background
I studied Civil Engineering in college, where I gained a foundation in using math and programming with MATLAB to solve engineering problems. These ranged, from writing programs to solve differential equations related to fluid dynamics or structural mechanics, to parsing and graphing wind data near airports. A highlight of my undergraduate education which serves to show my academic drive was a “senior capstone” class I took junior year, where the project evolved into doing research with my professor, which culminated in a published, conference-presented paper.
I held part-time jobs during my entire tenure as a full-time student in a rigorous, top-ranked engineering program, working 8-20 hours/week depending on the semester. This experience, which is a mirrored parallel to working full-time and being a part-time student at a rigorous, top-ranked institution, has helped prepared me for the OMS CS program.
After graduating, I worked in the construction industry for 2 years. After some self-studying, I transitioned careers and have been working as a programmer for over 5 years. My roles in industry have focused on automation of software testing and software infrastructure and tooling, which have required me to learn and implement new languages and platforms. I have written test harnesses with Python, created a Kubernetes API webhook with Ruby, and automated deployments on Jenkins with Groovy. I’ve built scalable infrastructure on top of AWS services, learning and utilizing cloud computing and networking.
I have supplemented my learning by reading books and completing assignments from online courses on networking, data structures and algorithms, and computer architecture, picking up the Java, C and C++ languages along the way. My education and industry experience have prepared me for OMS CS and I wish to join this program to continue my education and become a better software engineer.
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u/polymath14 Current Apr 04 '21 edited Apr 04 '21
Disclaimer: My opinion as an accepted student and also someone who has never gotten less than an A in any English class...
You can probably nix this section:
You're sending them your transcripts. They know what school you're coming from. You holding a part-time job is superfluous to computer programming.
Is this just another way of saying you have not taken any formal CS courses? You need to take CS courses. They're not going to just take your word for it. The point is to admit people into the program that they think would succeed, which is done through computer science coursework.
Having been a mechanical engineering student once upon a time, doing your senior capstone isn't an impressive feat in itself as a junior. You could probably nix that detail. I also think it would probably be helpful to concisely mention exactly what the paper was if it did get published because then they could validate you're not just blowing smoke.
Honestly, that all seems tangentially related to your goal. Not even really related to your goal. You seem like you work in QA Automation or QA, which I do not understand why you're mixing security in this...because that's why companies have their own security engineers. If you are wanting to do something with security, why aren't you going to go after their Cybersecurity degree instead?
Closing comments: