Danil Safin
Statement of purpose: professional and academic goals
July 16, 2010
I enjoy studying and doing mathematics. At the same time, I want to be working on problems that have significance in the real world and have not been solved already. Thus, my academic goal is to advance the level of my mathematical knowledge from the broad, shallow base I got as undergraduate student to a specialized but deep and current expertise, by doing graduate work at Mathematics department at University of Houston. I am particularly interested in the computational science option of the MS degree. My previous academic work makes me confident that I have the necessary background, work ethics and motivation be a successful student in this program.
In my undergraduate years, I was not sure whether to focus on computer science or mathematics. I ended up doing a double major, taking classes and working on projects that combined both fields. These projects dealt with paralel computing and clusters, data mining with natural language, traffic simulation and optimization, ecological statistics. Later, during my internship, I worked on programming a geomechanical reservoir depletion model; my job was to re-work model differential equations derived by my supervisor, check them for possible errors and implement those equations numerically.
Thus, all of my previous work combined computer science and math to some degree, and when I joined Computational Biomedicine lab at UH, I thought I would be happy working on computer vision for the same reason. I spent two semesters taking graduate classes in computer science and working on computer vision projects, before realizing that I had made a mistake. As interesting as computer vision is, I experienced it more as a problem-specific collection of machine learning methods and mathematical techniques, rather than a structured field with theories and models. I did well in my classes, but realised I was plainly bored studying the material and working on projects, and looking several years ahead I did not see myself doing the work I like. I do not consider the year lost – I have learned a lot of useful material as well as research skills, but I do consider spending any more time studying in this field will lead me further away from what I truly wish to study and do research work in. As far as a specific topic in computational mathematics, I do not have a clear well-defined interest, as of right now. I hope to find an interesting project after I take the core classes in the department.
