NYANYA

Where are you applying and why?

Currently my goal is to apply for Data Science Department and Statistic Department in IU because IU has good resources in aspects of teaching and career.

I’m still doing some research to see if there are any other good options.

What degree are you applying for?

I’m applying for master’s degree.

Are you going to try to go further than that?

I’m planning to look for a job that’s related to my major after the graduation of master’s degree.

Why are you attracted to this field?

As massive data is produced everyday through web sources and company records, a great prospect of a related career can be easily identified. I felt that data and statistics could be utilized in plenty of fields. Moreover, I believe I can utilize my computer science background to further enhance my career opportunities.

Are you applying for financial aid?

Not necessary but if some school are willing to provide financial aid, such as teaching assistance positions, I’m willing to apply for it.

What kind?

As of right now, I’m not sure what kind of financial aids there is. But I heard there are some teaching assistance position available for some universities.

What are your plans/goals for the future?

· Building a solid background in the field of data science.

· Accumulating my knowledge and experience of the field to prepare me well for further real-world challenges.

· Looking for more career opportunities.

Where do you see 5 years from now? 10 years from now?

5 years - Getting a job as a data analyst. I am looking for a company that I can grow with and continue to take on new challenges in the next five years. I am not too hung up on titles, but I definitely want to get promoted and take on more management responsibility. Ultimately, I wish I can take on some leadership roles as well.

10 years - Making some impacts in the field of my own expertise. E.g. designing my own analytical pipeline, publishing my own research paper, and hopefully making some contribution to our society.

How is this degree going to help you achieve that goal?

To achieve master’s degree, I will need to do multiple projects which are similar to what are required to do in real life work. I believe the experience of achieving master’s degrees will help me have a better transition from school to real life work.

What is your most significant accomplishment to date?

Currently my most significant accomplishment that’s related to data is the group project we did in the data mining course. We built a model to predict the drivers’ probability of initiating an insurance claim for next year. We solved this problem by addressing an idea that use a stack attention mechanism which consists of two CNN (Convolution neural network) to predict the car insurance claim. We processed the problem with three classifiers in this car insurance claim prediction: Naive Bayes, K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), and GBDT (Gradient Boosting Decision Tree).

What are your strengths?

I can learn quickly, and I feel like I am really easy going and easy to work with. I am not afraid to ask if I run into difficulties.

Self-motivation, willing to work long hours. I identify myself as a diligent person who’s willing to work long hours.

What are your weaknesses (if any)?

One weakness would be, lacking the background in statistics since I only took 1 statistic course and 3 mathematic courses when data science involves bunch of statistics concepts, however, this will motivate me to work harder to eliminate my weakness when I’m accepted to the program of data science.

Why should they admit you?

· My computer science background is closely related to data science.

· I’m not applying for graduate school for evading cruel real life. I have a clear purpose and strong motivation on building my career development path through graduate school.

Why should they offer you financial aid?

You are the best candidate. Please explain briefly why.

As I stated earlier, I’m a self-motivated and passionate person who is willing to beyond on my course work, and to learn more skills by doing some exercises that are related to my hobbies on spare time. In addition to learning programming languages such as Java, R, SQL in the classroom, I also learned C# through designing and programming my own games and improved my programming skill of R by solving some statistical problems that are related to basketball. I spent my undergraduate years on improving computer science background here at IU. Since coding takes a large portion in data science, I believe my skill sets will perfectly match the requirements of the field of data science.