Review Statement of Purpose

Dear Friends,
This is the first draft of Statement of Purpose. Please help me improve it

It is my passion for Wireless Communication that motivates me to apply for masters in Electrical Engineering in Illinois Institute of Technology. While browsing the department website I gathered vital information about the course plan, research and papers published by your faculty. This made me choose your college.
I have always been a person who wanted to know about the things that I see every day. It could be a hill, star or a wireless device. You can call this curiousness but I believe it is more than that. I probably know more about geography, astronomy than it is required to satisfy a curiosity. These were the things that inspired me when I was in my early teens. In high school the subject that caught my imagination was physics. Unlike most subjects physics provides detailed workings of things we see and experience every day. During my final year in high school one of the chapters in my course was Semiconductors and Communication. But this chapter was not detailed. It just illustrated basic block diagrams of transmitter and receiver systems with little explanations. It was around that time mobile phones were becoming more popular and my family could afford one. I naturally wanted to know more about them. I finished my high school scoring over ninety percentage in my final exams.
I cleared a competitive examination and chose Electronics and Communication Engineering in Amrita University which is a top 50 university in India. Within a couple of months of college I realized that ECE is a wide field and the answers I wanted were more complex than I expected them to be. So I followed the university course plan while gathering additional knowledge from libraries. Initially it was all about electronics. I understood the workings of basic electronic devices during my early years. But my appetite to learn about wireless devices never diminished. My friend and I presented a class paper on Wireless protocols and security as part of Technical English course. I also did a micro-controller mini-project on Automatic temperature control for a room and Infra-red music transmitter and receiver. And as the classes progressed I learnt all about the ‘blocks’ I saw in high school. But I wanted to learn directly about the practical applications of my theoretical knowledge.
So during my semester holidays, I went to a Radio Astronomy Center to learn about a large and highly sensitive Antenna that is used to study celestial events. I attended an in-plant training in BSNL which is a telecommunications company and learnt about Digital Transmission systems and signaling concepts. I also completed an in-plant training in Reliance Communications which is a private telecommunications company where I learnt about STAs, Multiplexers, routers, Base Station Trans-receivers and other networking hardware devices.
These experiences prompted me to choose Communications elective like MIMO systems and Software Defined Radios. As I delved deeper into the communications world I recognized the challenges that face the communication industry. And one of the chief problems is spectral congestion. So I started working with a couple of interested friends to analyze the spectrum allocation in my country and found that many studies indicate inefficient spectrum allocation. So in our final year we chose to work on Cognitive Radio as this is a technology that can solve the spectral congestion problem. We worked under the guidance of prof.Sundararajan who is the former Head of Department of Electronics and Communication in our university. We optimized the Cognitive radio in time and frequency for a mesh network model and established a network model that allowed dynamic spectrum access with no interference using optimization theory and scheduling algorithm. We also managed to improve the throughput of the channel without additional use of resources.
When I entered my final semester in college I understood that there were few opportunities for an Engineer in India and a majority of the recruiters were from IT industry. Also, most of the universities lacked in research initiatives. As I learnt more about the trends in the Indian corporate and academic world, I decided that I needed to go to The U.S.A to improve my already existing knowledge of Communication systems and attempt to arrive at solutions for challenges facing the industry.
I come from a family in South India which can be classified as upper middle class. But we made huge sacrifices to get here. I believe the sacrifices my parents made to make my life better instilled a sense of responsibility in me. This responsibility and my thirst for engineering knowledge have always helped me achieve the goals I had set myself before. My Cumulative GPA suffered a bit because of my below average grades in non-elective courses like VLSI and Microcontrollers but I’ve always been strong in Mathematics and Communications. So I am confident that I will do well in my graduate studies as Communications is a field I am passionate about.

I have looked through the official website for information on faculty. I’m quite looking forward to attend classes and work under the guidance of Dr.Guillermo Atkin and Dr.Chi Zhou because of their research in various wireless communication sub-fields.