Statement of Purpose

The urge for learning and passion for technology defines me the best. My Under
graduation gave me exposure and incited various interests in me. Taking these interests to the
next level, I believe a Masters from University of Houston, Main Campus would provide me
enough opportunities to add to my intellectual knowledge and hone my technical and
management skills.

I have always been one among the top 5% of the students, throughout my school days.
One of my memorable moments in life is when I ranked 608 rank out of 200,000 students, in
an Engineering Entrance (EAMCET) exam conducted state wide. Apart from this, a high rank of
2,039 out of about 500,000 students from all over the country, in All Indian Engineering
Entrance Examination, ensured me a seat in International Institute of Information Technology
(IIIT)- Hyderabad, an institute ranked as one of the top 10 among south Asian universities, for
my under graduation. I received a gold medal, as a token of prestigious Prathibha Award, from
the honorable State Govt. of Andhra Pradesh, for excellence in High School education.

As a computer science student, I always enjoyed programming. The way in which

sequential ordering of simple logical statements leads to desired results, fascinates me. A
good grade in Computer programming in first semester strengthened my confidence. Most of
the projects which I have later done in my under-graduation are based primarily on
programming. I have also performed very well in IT-workshop course in the first semester,
which included Shell programming and basics of Unix.

Technology fascinates me, to say the least. Just like the west, India too is going
through a major revolution in Telecom industry. Cell phones became easily accessible and also
popular in less than a five year span. When my Building Science professor (Vishal Garg) asked
us to come up with new applications to be developed for cell phones that are using Symbian
Operating System, I was excited at having a chance to develop something that would be tried
out in real world. Our software helps people to recover their lost mobiles. The main idea
behind the program is to sends an SMS to the predefined cell number once it finds that the
International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number has been changed. We used Nokia E62
for testing the application that we developed. The success of this project whetted my appetite
to work on more of such novel project ideas.

I always used to wonder whether number theory has any real applications. Though I
have been doing a project in public key cryptography, I was not completely aware of the scope
of the technology I was using. I was rather fascinated at how a pre-defined algorithm, even
with one of the two keys known to someone who wants to decrypt it illegally, can still keep his
attempts at bay, by taking advantage of the time constraint. I was in conversation with my
friend who attended a talk on prime numbers, given by a guest lecturer in our campus. It is
while answering to his question on the uses of prime numbers that I had blurted out ‘Public
key cryptography’. Discussion really brings the best out of me. Not just prime numbers, the
Public Key Cryptography algorithm uses various principles involved in number theory. Until
then, number theory to me was just an example of pure mathematics, with no real
applications outside of my self-interest of studying the topic. In this way, I realized the
peculiarities of the algorithm, in a continual process. Due to Tuberculosis, which affected my
whole academic year, spring ’06 to spring ’07, I could not delve too much in to the topic. I was
under medication for about a year, taking antibiotics which again had side effects. Instead of
suspending the semester, I chose to complete the projects and courses in time.

I came back strongly, taking another project called “Mailer Domain” under the same
professor (Kannan Srinathan), in my final semester. This project enables one to create or
delete mail accounts, send or receive mails through intranet. The software ensures security of
messages with the help of public key cryptography. Hence, even if an intruder hacks our
password successfully, he can not read the messages. I did one more project in the final
semester, called “The E-photo Album” under the professor Garimella Ramamurthy, also
fetched me great exposure and confidence in implementing various technologies. In fact, my
last semester grade point average shows a marked improvement.

After my under-graduation, I was working with Accel Frontline Ltd. since January 2009,
as a Solaris System Administrator. Here, I got an opportunity to learn more closely about
computers, both in hardware and software fields. Starting my professional career with an ‘A+’
in Solaris Certification, I have been placed as an on-field employee where I visited various
server sites, giving me hands on experience in configuring and installing different levels of
virtualizations, such as Logical Domains and Zones/Containers, also DHCP, DNS, Auto-FS,
about different architectures of the SUN processors. This period of learning opened me up to
the sea of knowledge in this field, including even its economic aspects. My quest to explore
and excel in this domain led to my determination to go for higher studies which can really
quench my thirst.

I would like to pursue an MS in Computer Science because I want to acquire an

almost perfect grasp on the subjects so as to be able to explore the possibilities in this field
and to apply my learning to various domains. An admission in your department would be a
great opportunity for me to enhance my horizon of learning.