Personal statement - would you mind to check it?

This is my personal statement that will be used to apply Master degree. I hope that other members can check it. Thank you

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I first became interested in evolutionary computing when I attended “Evolutionary Algorithm” class during my undergraduate study at Brawijaya University. The reason why I’m interested in evolutionary computing because we can use ideas and gain inspiration from natural systems especially evolutionary process and solve real world problem such as timetabling, scheduling, and vehicle routing. Since then, I have studied evolutionary computing intensively from various nature-inspired algorithm such as particle swarm optimization (PSO) to the implementation such as machine learning and software engineering optimization. Because of that, I chose to do a final year research topic on support vector regression optimization using PSO in applied to software effort estimation. After I finished with that, I elaborate my research for investigating swarm topology effect and global searching capacity enhancement. All of my researches are submitted in three Scopus-indexed international journals. I hope to participate in more conferences or journals while doing my postgraduate studies.

I was a teaching assistant for Software Engineering course. Beside it can improve my communication and teaching skills, it also gives me chance to discover software engineering deeper. So that’s why I decide to take software engineering as my domain problem for my final year research topic. In addition, during my undergraduate study, I joined English club to improve English and organization skill. My club often organized events in various scopes and it exercised my problem solving skill. Although I was busy with those activities, I still able to manage my education and succeed to earn my bachelor degree with honours.

I am fortunate to have exciting opportunity to represent my country in Youth Engineers and Scientists Summit 2015 ASEAN. Through my discussion with fellow young engineers and scientists around South East Asia, I discovered much about ASEAN problem. Through my participation, I propose framework that helped to secure communication among ASEAN countries. It opened my eyes that being scientist, we still able to give contribution to our country.

I want to study at University of Birmingham because your MRes covers natural computation, led and run primarily by the world-leading Natural Computation Group and CERCIA in the School of Computer Science. With many distinguishes scientists as professor and outstanding laboratories, I know that I will gain expert at the forefront of discovery. Moreover by combining taught and research degree, I will gain research skill and discover more evolutionary computation topic at once. During my research, I sourced documents relating to optimization methods in software engineering and my interest was further aroused when reading a paper about search-based software engineering. I know that one of CERCIA projects is investigating dynamic adaptive search-based software engineering and I hope I can join it.

After finishing my master study, I plan to further my study to PhD level. My journey for knowledge searching will never cease. I want to solve hard challenges in specific aspects in the evolutionary computing. Moreover, I plan to share my knowledge with other people, work together with researchers around the world, and probably return to Indonesia, where I can develop, teach, and implement what I have learnt. In the next five years, I view myself becoming a world class researcher or university lecturer.