SOP for UMN-Twin Cities

When I moved to Dhaka to attend undergraduate studies, I found out that I would not be given a seat in
the dormitory due to seat shortage. So, I had to live only 2.7 miles away from campus. Yet, it took hours
to commute due to heavy congestion. I remember one day in particular when it took four hours to get
back home from class. Spending a massive amount of time on the road daily and the frequent news
about traffic accidents made me wonder: what is so wrong with the traffic system in my country?
While researching for an assignment a TEDx talk caught my attention, where the speaker was
emphasizing how modern transportation and traffic engineers solve puzzle-like problems by integrating
different smart technologies. The speaker mentioned a subfield called the Intelligent Transportation
Systems (ITS) and discussed how coding, simulating and optimizing networks and implementation of
smart technologies are helping to solve the problem of traffic congestion and increasing road safety,
which piqued my interest in traffic engineering. To learn more, I took the course of Transportation
Planning and Traffic Engineering in the next semester. It turned out I enjoyed the subject thoroughly and
was in awe of how one of the professors taught the content. I decided to pursue transportation
engineering as my major after taking that course.
During my senior year, I got to work with the very same professor when I took research for credits. He
encouraged us to select topics that would push us out of our comfort zones. I had already taken a C++
programming course in my sophomore year, which I aced and enjoyed a lot. So, I was naturally inclined
toward choosing a topic that involved programming while also addressing traffic issues. Choosing to
create a vehicle detection model using deep learning did just that. Vehicle detection is significant for
transportation engineering because a good vehicle detector would allow gathering more data to analyze
traffic conditions with ease. I knew that I would have to learn new programming languages, algorithms,
and techniques, which made me excited about the project. I ended up learning Python, OpenCV, basics
of Machine Learning, TensorFlow, and Keras from scratch. I used more than 3000 images of vehicles that
I annotated myself to train two pre-trained models downloaded from google's Tensorflow detection
model zoo using transfer learning and employed confusion matrices to determine the accuracy of the
models under different lighting conditions. I remember spending most of my weekends and holidays
either annotating images or learning various techniques during my senior year, and all this work earned
me an A+ on the research credits. For most of the transportation engineering-related courses, I ended
up with a grade of either A or A+, which I believe shows the extent of my understanding of the subject.
Another project I worked on was on pedestrian crossing behavior, where I collected data about various
characteristics of pedestrians, vehicles, and some other parameters. I found the connection by using
multivariate analysis between the parameters and crossing-likelihood of pedestrians to be weak. Data of
a larger sample size would have helped study. However, it was difficult to pursue the project without
any funding. Seeing my interest in this sort of study, my thesis supervisor introduced me to one of his
colleagues helped me get access to traffic data collected from road traffic accident reports in the Dhaka
district. The traffic data contained reports of accidents: how severe the accidents were and various
other parameters. I used several machine learning algorithms and constructed various neural networks
to predict accident severity utilizing that data. This research is currently under the publication process.
For a session course, we collected traffic data and created two simulations for a 5-legged intersection
using PTV Vissim. Based on the results, we had to suggest whether a roundabout was warranted or not.
My job in the group was to do the modeling and executing the simulation. These experiences earned me
a Research Assistant position, where we are trying to establish a correlation between deflection and
California Bearing Ratio (CBR) for different pavement layers.
With the ultimate goal of being a good scholar studying the cutting edge research in my field, pursuing
an MS degree at this point would help hone my skills at research, which will help me while pursuing a
Ph.D. The reason I believe the prestigious University of Minnesota Twin Cities is an excellent fit for me is
that I found many professors with whom my research interests match. Currently, I am very interested in
connected and autonomous cars and smart technologies. Most of the faculties at UMN Twin Cities seem
to share this interest. I would be especially interested in working with Dr. Levin or Dr. Hourdos. I also
found the works of Dr. Khani and Dr. Michalopoulos intriguing. I believe I will be able to contribute to
original and exciting research with proper guidance, which I am confident I will get from the diverse and
talented group of people from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. In conclusion, I am thrilled to
apply here and hope I get the chance to attend graduate school at UMN twin cities.
The fact that you lived with your father doesn’t add anything to your storyline. Delete anything unnecessary or
redundant, that takes the attention away from your main story. The committee will be reviewing 100s if not 1000s
of application. You need to grab attention right away to stand out.