Statement of Purpose - Dharmik Joshi

Rochester Institute of Technology, New York, USA.

Computers in general have always piqued my curiosity which led to me taking up Computer
Science in my pre-university education. My score of 196/200 in CS, academic performance,
and interests greatly influenced my decision to pursue Bachelors degree in Computer Science &
Engineering from Mumbai University. I took up various additional courses in my first year on
JAVA, Web Development and Android Development and created many projects like a music
streaming website, an android messenger app, an account credential system (Java) and many
other projects.

My decision point for pursuing Data Science came in the form of a machine learning workshop
conducted by Dr. Mariofanna Milanova, Professor of Computer Science, University of Arkansas,
Little Rock, USA. During this workshop, I realized the weight that data holds in the successful
implementation of any Machine Learning problem statement. Consequently, along with two
teammates, I successfully developed a shortest path finder program on a 3D environment made
in Unity Engine using my city’s location data to train the machine learning model. Through
efficient teamwork and an optimistic attitude, we achieved the runner up position out of over 30
teams in the annual project exhibition held by .

In the following year my passion for data science began to prevail greatly in my career
aspirations. To bolster my knowledge in it, I decided to enroll in the Professional Data Science
Certificate Program offered by IBM which introduced me to data science methodology, python
proficiency,data analysis, visualization, modelling, deployment and a capstone project that
familiarized me with the different stages of data science. This project named Speech Emotion
Recognition incorporated a recognition of emotions (angry, sad, happy, calm, etc) in the live
audio using a multi layer perceptron for the classification.

An internship with Dezignolics as a data science intern embodied the next chapter towards my
aspiration. I piloted the EDA and the development of a Regression Model on a customer dataset
determining the attributes with the highest impact on sales. I also lead the team to develop a ML
Model to predict the price of real estate in accordance with the different factors contributing to it.
I joined Elite Techno Groups right after as a Data Science Research Associate. I Collaborated
with industry experts and devised project plans alongside the CEO in successfully implementing
knowledge from domains like ML, AI and Data Science into a concise Nanodegree Programme.
I also managed students, projects and doubt solving sessions for students and provided guidance
towards their project implementation.

According to IBM we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data everyday, of which a large portion is
medical data. All this medical data is ever expanding whether from medical imaging and
diagnosis to billions of transactions. There is an exponential growth in the utilization of it by data
science. In graduate school I plan to work towards developing computational methods towards
efficient imaging and radiology, eliminating mis-diagnosis. I plan to develop domain fluency in
 Statement of Purpose - Dharmik Joshi
Rochester Institute of Technology, New York, USA.

the areas most conducive to this task including data management, machine learning and deep
learning techniques like neural networks during my graduate studies. Nonetheless, I also look
forward to gaining practical knowledge of various ways to churn data to extract insights from
problem statements from various interdisciplinary applications, such as data segmentation,
prediction model development or Artificial Intelligence.

In 2021 i.e. my third year, I bagged an amazing opportunity to work in the above mentioned
topic as a Research Assistant for a professor in my university. We worked towards developing a
novel algorithm for mammographic breast density classification by extracting features from
different views of the mammogram and classifying it using CNN into four density classes
according to risk for developing breast cancer. A research paper encompassing this project is set
to be published later this year. Looking at my rigorous academic and research endeavours I got
selected for a two month internship programme in the USA by University of Arkansas at Little
Rock to further work towards my research interests as well as other domains. Unfortunately due
to the pandemic, the internship got postponed to Dec 2021.

Apart from the academic perspective, on a more personal note, I have pursued many eclectic
experiences. I represented my School in boxing and table tennis, as well as elocution and public
speaking competitions. My interest in football led me to participating in inter college football
tournaments. An obsession with learning languages entailed in me being fluent in English, Hindi,
three regional languages and more recently, Spanish. This helped me to diminish the
communication gap between individuals from different countries and dialects. Being a head of
many projects has given me confidence, practice in public speaking and ease in connecting with
new individuals. Looking at these reasons, I feel confident that I will continue to achieve
academic success as a graduate student in Rochester Institute of Technology.

Rochester Institute of Technology is my preferred choice for my graduate studies because it

focuses on providing a practical approach towards Data Science. My pre-university education in
Computer Science will help me in the classes of Software Construction (SWEN-601). My
undergraduate coursework includes statistical mathematics, big data analytics and machine
learning which are required for excelling in Applied Statistics (STAT-614), Foundation in Data
Science (DSCI-633) and other courses.Truly unlimited opportunities in the co-op programme,
resources for research, great faculty, atc are some of the reasons for RIT being my first
preference. Apart from RIT, the city of Rochester has always had my preference due to me being
a winter person. The large 1300 acres campus has many athletic fields for me to join.

During my academic journey, Data Science has always fascinated me, and so has Rochester
Institute of Technology. On graduating from RIT, I am confident that I will put my gained
knowledge to good use and strive to always improve myself.