Statement of Purpose

George Ignatius XXXXXX, 2012

Program: MS(Electrical Engineering)

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

When I was in my 9th grade, I watched the film “Minority Report” by Steven Spielberg. In a particular scene in the movie, Tom Cruise interacts with a computer in a radical way (well, at least for that time). I still vividly remember my hair standing on end and thinking to myself, “That’s what I want to do when I grow up”. There has been no looking back since then. As Google’s Sergey Brin put it eloquently quite recently, I “want to make science fiction real”.

I decided to pursue my under graduation in engineering because I needed an engineering degree to make science fiction come alive. My disposition towards circuits helped me zero in on choosing Electronics and Communication Engineering as the area of focus for my Bachelors. However, my interests underwent a slight change when, in my second year of under graduation, I was introduced to the ideas of Fourier though courses like ‘Signals and Systems’ and DSP. After consulting my Professors, I decided to shift my areas of interest to communication and signal processing and took courses in ‘Analog Communication’, ‘Digital Communication’ and ‘Image Processing’. My senior year project focused on 4G systems and I took electives such as ‘Wireless Communication’, ‘MIMO and Multicarrier Systems’ and ‘Convex Optimisation for Wireless Communication’. Besides these, I have also taken courses in Electromagnetics, Microwave Engineering, Probability Theory and Linear Algebra. All these courses have given me the background and fundamental understanding required to pursue a Masters in Electrical Engineering with an emphasis on Wireless Communication and Signal Processing.

My senior year project focused on channel estimation in MIMO-OFDM systems. The project also resulted in the publication of a paper titled “Extended Kalman Filter based Estimation for Fast Fading MIMO channels” archived in IEEEXplore. The paper was presented in the...