Please Read My Letter Of Motivation

Dear sir/madam,

First of all, let me introduce myself, I am [] and I am a fourth year undergraduate student at St.Petersburg Electrotechnical University “LETI” in Applied Math and Computer Science. While studying at school, I became interested in Informatics but having entered university, I got involved with mathematics due to variety of great math disciplines attended such as Calculus, Algebra and Geometry, Discrete Math, Multivariate Calculus, Computational Mathematics, Probability, Statistics and others.

Since my first year at “LETI” I have become interested in Machine Learning, especially deep learning at that time. What really intrigued me was the fact that Machine Learning is a combination of math and programming and I realized that it is what I want to study. Therefore I decided to complete Deep Learning Specialization by Coursera and finished it by the end of my first year at university.

At the beginning of my second year, I joined seminar called “Neural Networks and Tropical Math” organized by one of the undergraduate students. As it is known, tropical functions are used widely in deep learning nowdays (the most obvious example is RELU function) and the idea of the seminar was to find relevant information about both of these disciplines and present it to the rest of the participants. Over time this seminar evolved and became more related to Machine Learning.

At the same time I participated in a research project offered by IDR&D company. The goal of this project was to create a system for non-speech acoustic event detection to help deaf people. It was a challenging task because at that time not many SOTA methods related to this problem have been provided. But I really enjoyed working on this project and getting relevant experience. At the end of this project our publication was accepted to the international conference where I presented it.

After finishing my second year I decided to participate in the mathematical workshop organized by Novosibirsk State University. Having attended probability class, I enjoyed this subject therefore I chose to enroll in a project named “Predicting delivery time in Nairobi”, hoping to receive relevant experience in terms of applied probability and statistics because the emphasize of this project was on pure statistical methods. I spent my time working with brilliant people and I would definitely say that this project convinced me about my future as a data scientist. Thus I decided to enroll in online Micromasters program in Statistics and Data Science offered by MIT university. Unfortunately, during my third year of education I had long-term health issues related to the increased temperature and headache that lasted for about 6 months and had an impact on my university grades but anyway I continued doing Micromasters program and obtained excellent grades for all four courses – Probability,Statistics, Machine Learning and Statistical Modeling. Also I participated in a couple of hackatons and during the last one called “MIT POLICY HACKATON” our team made to top3 finalists in the Covid&Healthcare session. Being part of the team, I was responsible for statistical analysis.

I am really interested in studying Machine Learning at Aalto University due to the fact that it provides a wide range of research groups such as Probabilistic Machine Learning Group, Machine Learning for Big Data and others and I would be glad to join one of them. The curriculum is very anticipating too, with elective courses even related to Machine Learning in biology. Therefore, it would be an honor to continue pursuing my journey at Aalto University.